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Showing Original Post only (View all)Your view on media piracy. How strongly are you against it? [View all]
I'm not talking large scale for profit piracy. I'm talking downloading the latest Miley Cyrus song to put on your iPod, torrenting the Hobbit, making a copy of a rented film etc...
When I was in my teens I pirated a lot of crap. I'm 31 now. Back then it was just cool to have CDs and DVDs full of the latest software I loved to look up to. I got a kick out of trying out 3D studio and photoshop etc etc.. Truth is I used very little of it, it was just a "cool" hobby collecting it. But after a few years I quickly outgrew that phase and now I mainly use freeware for everything. The only software I buy are operating systems and games. I still do download the occasional movie, piece of music and the like. And sometimes I'll rent a movie and realize I can't watch it in time, so I'll make a copy and watch it later.
I really have very little against most forms of small scale personal piracy that goes on day to day. From my person experience those who do the most pirating aren't potential customers of said software to begin with. An 18 year old teen who downloads 3D Studio would never have been a prospective customer in the first place. And ironically he may become a customer in the future if using it engenders an interest in 3D modelling. The same argument can't really be made for movies and music because many of these people might be potential lost customers. Even here though I know a lot of people resort to downloading a movie or song because they actually already have bought it for one device or another but don't wish to buy it again for another. The movie and music industry has made it very clear they don't want you to be able to easily move your purchased content around much. If you bought song X for you iPod they would like to force you to have to buy it again for your android. Another reason people pirate stuff is just lack of availability. Netflix, and iTunes have a lot of stuff but not everything.
Another example are TV shows. There are a lot of sites out there dedicated to torrenting whole seasons of TV shows. Some of these sites have thousands of series going back decades.
What's your view of the types of piracy described above?