Saturday, January 7, 2012

My thoughts on Piracy!

Today I want to give my opinion on Piracy.  I'm not going to talk about the SOPA act just yet because I'm not familiar enough with it to talk about it much, but it is certainly something I want to talk about in the future.  But it does deal with Piracy and hearing so much about Piracy lately made me want to talk about it. However there are many types of things that are being pirated out there, I really only want to focus on 2, movies and music.


The movie industry complains all the time about how much money they are losing due to piracy.  However every year we see more and more millions of dollars spent on making movies and we see many of these movies making a lot more.  Each year we see ticket prices at the movies go higher and higher.  There is absolutely no reason for some of these actors to make some of the money they make.  Some of these guys make in a movie a lot more than the average american makes their whole life working a normal job.  So how can they sit there and cry to me about how much money they are losing?

Is there ways to stop the piracy?  No.  Is there ways to slow it down?  Yes.  It's simple, you make getting the real thing easier than getting the pirated version.  Companies like Netflix have the right idea, but the studios are still too hard headed and want to squeeze as much money as possible from the movie.  This is why you hardly find any good movies on Netflix.  Imagine if all the new releases were on netflix right away.  You'd never download a movie illegally again if you could get them that easily.  You'd probably be more than happy to pay $15 a month for such a service.  But no, they don't want to do that.

When a movie is created all the real money is supposed to come from its time at the theater.  And the experience of going to a theater with some friends or on a date or with your family is something that Piracy is never going to be able to replace.  Once they can no longer squeeze money out of the movie theaters they spend a couple of bucks and copy this material to Blue-ray and DVD and try to charge us $15-$25 for it.  I'm sorry but unless the movie is super good, that's just not worth it.

In my opinion whatever you can get from the Blue-ray and DVD sales should just be a nice extra. You want to sell more during the Movie Theater time?  Work on lowering the price of those tickets!


Oh the Music industry.  I dislike them even more than the movie industry.  But both are very similar.  Just like the movie industry you have too many musicians making WAY too much money.  You can NOT show me a video one day of how much money X singer wastes and then tell me how Piracy is hurting them.  There are so many REAL artists out there struggling to make a buck and then you have all these no talent jerks making so much and abusing every bit of it.  It's sad and it's sick.

Just like with movies the solution to slow down piracy here is to make the real thing easier to get than the pirated.  Services like Spotify and Rhapsody certainly are trying but they still get too much resistance from the labels.

Before you could record a disc the way it worked was people would go to concerts and they would listen to people sing.  That's how these artists would make a living.  That is still where most of the money is supposed to come from.  And no pirate is ever going to be able to pirate that experience of going to see your favorite artist perform.

Just like with Blue-ray and DVD, I feel that any sales that come from CDs or iTunes or any other music store should just be considered a nice bonus.

Final Thoughts: 

Both of these industries are very much alike and that's probably because of the fact that most of them are the same people running them.  They are greedy and power hungry.  I applaud Google for their new Google Music service that allows people to upload their own music and sell it themselves through the music store. I do hope this catches on and we see more independent artists out there becoming more popular.


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