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I'm not going to set my own behaviour up as an example here, which is something that I think invalidates the OP's point, at least partially, and certainly obscures it, but I have a couple of points: - It is unreasonable on the whole to expect people to refrain from piracy when it's just so easy. It's kind of like putting candy in front of a child and not expecting him to eat it, compounded by the fact that there is at least the illusion of anonymity on the internet.
- It is unreasonable to expect artists to use the internet by themselves to distribute their content, although some do. Most of them are probably not that technically inclined. There needs to be someone there to take that pain away from them.
- It is just that people who create content get paid for doing so. So it's really a market problem. We need a system that allows people to just download as easily as pirating, but allows the content creators to live off their creation. If the traditional content distributors (who are not the creators) cannot supply a service which does this, then I cannot see why they should be pitied. I think something along the lines of Deezer et al is ok : a service that would allow you to consume music, no questions asked. The problem is that deezer is getting all its content from the distributors, so in effect there is a double middle man. But a subscription-based "deezer" which paid artists directly according to how much their tracks were listened to would work, IMHO. I believe such services already exist, in fact. Also, you'd only need the big distributors to realize this, and build their own versions, and suddenly there's a proper market for tunes, films, etc. These new distributors would each have a catalogue of films and music on download, but they could also open the catalogue to cinemas, tv channels and so on. The only thing they couldn't do is restrict access, under pain of piracy. I'm just hypothesising here, but as far as I can see the content distributors are being the artisans of their own downfall by not doing this themselves. |