Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeD
...on the face of it, it's a victimless crime. Which I think is true, up until you hit a tipping point where there's insufficient people still buying and at that point, companies close/change their line of business and we end up with fewer and fewer choices of entertainment.
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Good point. As one who spends a lot of free time enjoying books, films, tv shows, music, and apps/games, this is the scariest negative consequence from my standpoint when it comes to unauthorized downloading. If creators aren't compensated to their satisfaction, it stands to reason they will reduce or eliminate their output.
However, I just don't see that happening. Quite the opposite - we have abundance. There is more high quality entertainment of all kinds on offer than
ever before. An absolute feast of it. Big budget/high profile, indie and in between. And that is after a good decade plus of downloading being relatively mainstream.The doomsday scenarios that have been put out there time and time again just don't match up with reality.
I won't go so far as to claim downloading has actually helped, but it sure doesn't seem to be hurting anything as far as the big picture is concerned. Any detriment of internet downloading seems to be more than offset by increased opportunites for gaining exposure, and thus paying customers, that has been opened up by the internet.
So while I sincerely do respect the rights of copyright holders and their ability to distribute their work as they see fit, and can imagine the frustration, in some respects I don't see what all the fuss is about with regard to downloading. Use the internet to your advantage and you will likely offset the freeloaders and prosper more. Not saying it's right but that appears to be the reality. Piper seems to have a healthy outlook in that regard.