Ah this old argument.
All I say is this. If tomorrow I invent a device to copy a physical entity (not just digital) and I go find the closest Ferrari, copy it, then drive it off home I am committing a crime?
Yes.
Did you design the Ferrari? Could you? No. Someone else (well lots of people) with expertise, flair and the necessary engineering skills designed and built it, and you just made a copy of it and therefore deemed the creators effort as being worthless, despite the fact your cloned Ferrari was important enough to you to warrant copying in the first place. The fact you could copy it so easily doesn't alter the fact that it wouldn't exist in the first place without someone elses considerable effort, and they deserve to be paid their dues for that.
It is a victimless "crime". If it was such a huge issue the film and music industry would be on its knees and unable to support itself and this is clearly not the case. People still buy music, people still go to the cinema, buy DVDs, BluRays.
It is nothing but greed that makes piracy out to be the biggest and horrendous crime that MUST STOP. As has been mentioned many many times - Streamable and downloaded content delivery for fair pricing is the solution.
If everyone had your attitude and no one paid for content who would pay for it? How would it get made? Where would the money come from?
Whether you're prepared to accept it or not the people that
do buy legitimate copies of stuff are ultimately subsidising those that don't. The more the balance tips toward those that don't pay for it the harder it becomes to make it in the first place.
Let's make this argument real simple for you - a lone musician spends a week painstakingly writing and recording a song, publishing it himself on his own pressed CDs. He offers it up for sale only to find that 10 people buy it and everyone else copies it off whichever one of those 10 people seeded it on torrents. Lone musician gets a fraction of what he would expect to get from the same audience if copying his material wasn't so effortless. Lone musician realises he can't afford to pay his bills with what he makes from writing music and gets a different job.
Now you'll probably say something retarded like "be a better musician LOL" or "music should be free" or some crap like that, but ultimately writ large when something cannot sustain itself financially it ceases to be made anymore, and
everyone suffers. Unless you can write music yourself it might be worth bearing in mind that downloading their stuff does have an effect, and whilst each individual downloading a film, album, game or whatever is a drop in the ocean in the grand scheme of things (and another convenient excuse), all those drops add up....
Looking forward whilst I don't imagine Hollywood is going to stop making movies overnight I can quite easily imagine them ending up not willing to finance unknown quantities, instead churning out the same old mainstream crap over and over again that they know will at least sell enough tickets to cover the budget and hopefully turn a profit. Same goes with music - how many real indie bands are there that might not get a break because a record label can't afford to take a punt on them?
Helen Mirren
