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Originally Posted by peanut
If they did wipe out all piracy then there won't be much need for super fast broadband. So the ISPs would lose out. I'm sure we can now all cite legal reasons for having speeds of up to 350mb which does help matters.
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Not necessarily.. I'm a PC gamer, and it's actually quite hard to get new games without using a download service such as Steam, or GOG. Even where a game does come on disk, what is released on the disk is often effectively a stub that downloads the rest of the game from Steam (or some other service).
Companies are increasingly doing this on console as well. I've had xbox one games that have to download >20 gig of data even though they come on a disc.
Then there are the video/audio streaming services (Netflix/Prime Video/Spotify etc), and the fact that even re-installing your existing devices (computers, tablets, phones etc) can involve downloading gigs of updates now. There are also services such as iCloud that encourage us to put all of our photos and home videos online.
I would argue Piracy is a major contributor to broadband use, but it's far from the only one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by heero_yuy
No, no and no. All the time content providers make their content too expensive/restrictive/time limited etc the pirates will thrive. First we had cassettes of albums traded in the play ground. Then rips of CD's on line, then DVD's and bluerays on torrents. Piracy evolves faster than the content providers can counter.
Now if they lowered their sights...
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I don't entirely agree. There will always be people who don't want to pay for stuff. Hell, when I worked for Blockbuster, we gave away some old films for free. We had to ask people to bring them to the counter, as the easiest way to ensure the inventory was up to date was for the manager to reduce the price on the computer to 0, then "sell" the film to the customer for nothing. People still nicked the films. I have a friend who watches a lot of films, but considers Netflix a rip off, so watches at least one film a day on dodgy streaming sites, despite the fact that most of the films he watches are probably on Netflix or Prime Video (he rarely watches anything newer than about 5 years old)
Services such as Netflix that offer a good selection of media for a monthly subscription have undoubtedly had a massive impact on piracy, but there are those who object to paying anything as they see the media as some evil thing that just exploits it's audience.
There are also those that see Piracy as a victimless crime as the big media companies can afford to lose their couple of quid. They can. But it's not them that loses out. It's the people on the projects they cancel or don't start in the first place, to make up the loss that lose out. They lose on on work that they may need to feed their families, and even on a small production, that can mean dozens of people are affected. That's bad enough, but on a large production, the number of people can run into the thousands, and add in the third party companies that supply services and goods to the production, and that can be tens of thousands..
Don't get me wrong. You or Me not paying £10 or £20 to see or buy a film and pirating it instead isn't going to make a difference. If we pirate it, then release a torrent and it ends up being downloaded thousands or millions of times, that *will* make a difference.