"I'm not going to deny myself the enjoyment of your creation just because you haven't figured out how to collect."
I once felt this way myself, but I kinda grew up. This is extremely immature, but it's also the attitude of someone (again I was like this myself) who probably wasn't going to part with a buck to support your work anyway.
-doctorfrog
AMEN! Whether we AGREE or DISAGREE, content CREATORS have a RIGHT to charge whatever they want and to CONTROL the distribution of THEIR creations. -db90h
There's a very fine line there. Creators? Maybe. But Franz Kafka told his best friend to burn all his writings after his death - instead the guy published them and for a good reason, too. This happens all the time to many authors, both celebrated and entirely unknown while alive.
But then, the whole debate is more about music and film. In music and film, first of all there is almost never a single creator. Second, and more important, the actual creators don't really have a say in any of this, do they? It's not the creators, it's the publishers. Whoever owns the rights, usually bought for a pittance, a sliver of the actual worth.
Remember when Michael Jackson bought rights to all (or most of) the Beatles catalog? It's hard to imagine how this is even possible and legal, but hey, it is. So - theoretically - Michael Jackson could decide (back when he was still with us) that he wasn't going to permit any distribution or public performance of music by the Beatles. Does the "right to control" still apply here? I can't see why not, but I also can't see why anyone should respect that and be denied Beatle music, just because a random person now owns the rights and does with them as they see fit (again, theoretically).
There is no one right that trumps all other rights, not the free speech, not the freedom of assembly, not even the right to life. So why would property and copyright be the only rights to which there are no exceptions? When put like this, the position is untenable.
On edit: Finally, we should be talking about what is, not what we would like to be. What
is is that as long as it's so much easier to download then to acquire and play legally, downloading will happen. As the OP/article says, it's not about the price, as long as the price is reasonable. It's about availability. When Amazon sells a printed book or a Kindle book only to US addresses, this is bloody ridiculous, and nobody should respect that limitation.
There was a book, pretty expensive as books go, that I could not order to Poland. Amazon would only ship it to the US. So I bought the book when I was in the US, how about that? I then brought it home with me. If the publisher has the final say, then what I did should somehow be illegal, however ridiculous that sounds. If it's a Kindle book, I can either buy it via a VPN or proxy (misrepresenting myself to Amazon), or I can maybe find a "liberated" copy on the net. I don't care which. The book has been published, hasn't it, and I really couldn't care less if an American publisher can't work out their differences with a European publisher.
This goes triple for movies and especially serial TV shows. In some countries seasons of the most popular shows are broadcast two or more years behind their US premiere. Then sometimes the local broadcaster will only by the rights to season 1 and 2, say, and forget about seasons 3 and 4. This is exactly what motivates people to download the whole thing from bittorrent, and why not? Seriously, the rights owners behave as if they did NOT want to make any money from publishing the stuff that they have. But it's their problem. Maybe they need counseling. No-one of their potential customers should lose any sleep over it.
