[rwallace]

Or they could correctly argue that the existence of big media is a massive net negative for the welfare of humanity, and anything that diverts money away from the industry is good for the world. Not that piracy seems to put much of a dent in the revenues of Hollywood, unfortunately, but if it did, that would be more than adequate moral justification for supporting Popcorn Time.

[hnnewguy]

>Not that piracy seems to put much of a dent in the revenues of Hollywood

What do the revenues of Hollywood have to do with anything "moral"?

"Hollywood" (or the movie industry) is a risk taking enterprise. They put money up front to create art that they believe will offer a positive reutrn for their investment. Sometimes it produces good things, sometimes it produces dreck.

The question is, why does Hollywood need to fail for a moral victory? There are a variety of routes to produce and distribute your own film, go ahead and do it. Hollywood doesn't preclude you from making a successful independent film anymore than Microsoft precludes you from making a successful software application. Adam Carolla just crowd-sourced his latest film based on a script.

Of course, in the case of independent anything, you get/have to take all the financial risk up front. That's a downer (or impossibility) for most people, and partially why Hollywood exists.

[grabeh]

Could you elaborate on how big media is a 'massive net negative for the welfare of humanity'?

[rwallace]

Two reasons.

First, the destructive effects of having the media cartels lobbying for restriction of freedom in the name of protection of 'intellectual property'; those are sufficiently well known that I probably don't have to elaborate on them here.

Second, modern media are junk food for the mind, exploits for security vulnerabilities in our motivation systems. It's not easy to pick up on this, because e.g. watching a movie seems to make you happier for the couple of hours while you're watching it; what you don't notice is that it rewires your brain so that the entire rest of your life is that little bit less happy. Studies have shown that, taking both prevalence and magnitude of the effect into account, watching television is the single strongest determining factor in quality of life, with the effect being monotonic: the less television you watch, the happier you are. At least one study corrected for confounding influences by comparing otherwise similar neighborhoods in Third World cities where television had become available versus where it had not, and the effect was striking: where television goes, quality of life takes a nosedive.

For discussion of these and related phenomena, see http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html and http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/why_we_havent_met_an...

[abustamam]

Couldn't book-reading also be similar? Both book-reading and TV-watching take the participant out of the facets of reality and immerses them into another world.

Granted, some could argue that book-reading is an intellectual activity because our brain is processing language, but I'm not so sure reading Nora Roberts could be considered an intellectual activity (nothing against Roberts, but the type of people who seem to read her book don't seem the intellectual type).

[andreis1]

I, too, live under a rock and would like some more info on that.