[sbroome]

Originally Posted by azazel1024

However, you must acknowledge (or should) that PART of piracy is driven because a lot of rights holders are inflexible in how they are allowing their IP to be used as much if not more than it is by cost associated with using that IP.

I agree completely. In the early 2000s I needed to have my usual set up (movie playing from my computer while I work on comic book production) and was really confused on why the movie studio I bought the DVD from wouldn't help me figure out a way to rip the movie to the hard drive. My reason was completely legitimate, I needed to free my DVD rom up so that I could use it to open work files from clients. Back then most of them still weren't using FTP, so they'd Fed-Ex us the files to work on, and I was responsible for organizing them and putting them on our servers, etc. I couldn't keep swapping discs in and out. But when I asked about it on forums everyone said it was considered copyright violation, which was idiotic because I owned the disc.

Lots of people who spend a significant amount of money on forms of entertainment are also massive pirates. The limited studies you can find on such matters find that the largest pirates are also the largest spenders (typically) in those areas that they are pirating.

Too many of those studies have been conducted (a) in very small samples by (b) pirating sites themselves.

So does it make it right that any of them are pirating anime? Absolutely not. However, they have INCENTIVE to pirate. First because they cannot in some cases obtain the materials OTHER than by pirating it, or the preceive the lag in their ability to purchase it being unacceptable. In other cases what they do have available for purchase has dramatically reduced value due to poor subtitling, again leading them to want to pirate material due to the much high quality subtitling.

Look at the top pirated music list from 2011. Most of the titles are widely available for legal download, I just don't see how scarcity is blamed so widely when the reality seems to be that a lot of people just want shit for free, and consider their 40-50 dollar internet costs to be their paid access to whatever they can find on the internet. I think a large part of what's being missed is the ability to access entertainment all day everywhere (Netflix streaming, etc.) which has led to such greater consumption that people need stimulus more often than the days of just having walkmen at most. That desire for more consumption still doesn't equate to being owed more stuff to consume, and people's refusal to demonstrate anything resembling accountability has to be addressed at some point before the government starts making decisions for them.

Part of reducing how much people pirate, just like using drugs, smuggling, etc is the stick AND the carrot approach.

While there are many improvements these old people at companies need to make, the reality is entertainment has never been easier to access, and people are still whining. I just don't buy this argument.