The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you’ve already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you’ve already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
There is a third party that cares: those of us who pay subscriptions that finance the content that pirates steal. Due in part to rising rates of piracy, our subscription fees go up and/or production budgets go down. In turn, pirates should care, too, because then there’s less in quantity and quality to steal.
At least for piracy of streaming content, I believe what should become apparent to everyone is that convenience drove down piracy and greatly increased gains for everyone, and once corporations got greedy and started rolling out new platforms and fragmenting content between them, everything started going down the drain. Even without accounting for piracy, convenience was lost, multiple platforms mean more fees to get the same content that was originally in one platform, so less people willing to pay. Less income per platform drives down investment in content and drives up cancelations of ongoing projects. Less income than was originally observed when a single platform had condensed content means there’s greater incentive to drive ads and increases prices on all platforms, thus also potentially driving down users subscribing to said platforms.
None of that factors in piracy. If we do factor in piracy, it’s a fact that before fragmentation, subscription rates were high, and after fragmentation, there’s a lot more incentive to pirate content. In some instances, platforms shoot themselves in the foot even further by further charging rental fees or purchases of individual content, as well as region blocks and ads.
Piracy surely is a problem all throughout the history of streaming services (something that could still be argued as not actually something to worry about because those pirates were never going to be customers in the first place, and Netflix was still booming enough to incentivize other companies to roll out their own platforms), but it becomes a symptom of another problem later down the line due to lack of convenience. Even so, the current state of streaming platforms wouldn’t be much different if piracy wasn’t happening. People would simply consume less content due to budget constraints or due to being annoyed at lack of conveniences.
I personally hate depending on a platform that on a whim may decide to remove content I watch. There’s specific songs that have disappeared from my Spotify playlists for no good reason (a lot for geoblocking reasons), there’s shows that just get removed from Netflix, there’s all of game of thrones on prime which I couldn’t watch due to geoblocking and ended up having to pirate it even though I was paying for a platform which had the show. It’s a lot easier, a lot more convenient, to pirate. The content is yours, instantly, until you decide to delete it from your computer. I didn’t mind paying for Netflix for years, and since they incentivized account sharing, I shared the account with 2 other friends and we split the cost. It was super convenient. Now, I have a plex library nearing the 50tb mark with about 40 people watching content on it, everything automated and everyone can request whatever they want, and I simply ask for donations to buy more drives. It’s still more expensive than subscription services due to energy costs, donations not being enough for the equipment needed to store content and run services, and costs of internet, static ips, and domain names, but I’m not planning to stop as it’s overall more convenient, not just for me, but for 40 other people.
Do you give those 40 people back their donation money if you ever close your service? Since in the end, they never got any of the hardware or media they watched over your Plex for their money.
Your frustrations with streaming services are very relatable and I completely agree that the space has become increasingly fragmented. I, too, have cut down on some subscriptions where I feel that I don’t get my money’s worth.
I believe your case is a perfect example of intellectual property theft: your 40 customers are paying you instead of paying the copyright holders. If you hadn’t offered them with this solution, it’s not unreasonable to think that they would be more willing to spend that money on purchasing it directly from the legitimate owner. Consequently, it can be argued that your shared library is incurring damages through missed revenue. By extension, even by an iota of a percentage, the service provider or the production studio will need to recoup that in the ways I’ve mentioned.
So while I completely understand your rationale for pirating, surely we can agree that in cases like these, there is some—no matter how little—degree of legitimacy to the assertion that piracy is detrimental to those of us who pay for our subscriptions.
We can agree about piracy being detrimental for sure! We just disagree on how detrimental it is vs corpo’s own actions.
Regarding the donations, it’s “give whatever you want, even 0, and inly when I say we need new gear”, so I wouldn’t say it’s lost revenue since barely anyone donates and it all goes directly to covering part of the cost of new hard drives. I’ve asked for donations twice so far, and none of the times have seen enough donations to cover for 100% of equipment expenses. Just thought I’d clarify on the “donations” thing :)
Piracy isn’t costing these companies any money if people never intended on giving them money in the first place. This argument almost implies that these companies have an inherent right to our money whether we want to spend it with them or not.
There will be a portion of pirates that never intended to spend money, but surely there will also be at least some pirates who deliberately stopped paying a subscription in favor of consuming content for free.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that corporations have some unalienable right to take our money; what I’m saying is that with the recent increase in digital piracy, it’s not unthinkable that it has had some, however small, financial impact on their bottom line.
I feel this is a very nuanced take and genuinely don’t understand how this community has taken offense to it.