Comment by transcriptase
4 hours ago
>due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win
Much like how the entirety of Hollywood, book publishers, academic publishers, and game developers have won against piracy despite being some of the largest corps on earth and dedicating untold billions to the issue over the past 30 years?
They won the long game. Everything is rented and DRM now. Very little of what most people buy digitally is truly owned.
They didn’t win because of DRM. They won because of the regulations that grant a monopoly for a specific term in the form of a copyright. Society has recognized that incentivizing creative acts requires a temporary grant of monopoly to ensure the necessary scarcity to make money and recover the costs of creation. The real problem is Disney keeps expanding that time period so things never enter the public domain
they didn't win by attacking piracy head-on though, they made capitulation easy & nice enough for us to happily go along.
They have a finite # of employees, a finite budget, and a finite amount of time.
Hobbyists do not. ROI is not a factor.
As yes, the hobbyist built nuclear weapons program.....
Legalize recreational plutonium.
To be fair the state works pretty hard to crush "hobbyist" nuclear weapons programs so you don't really know how far it could get.
3 replies →
You don’t happen to know a certain Doc Brown?
What? Some nerds on private trackers and kids on 123movies or whatever is not piracy winning by any material stretch.
Yes. Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy. It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.
Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.
> It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.
By which definition they utterly failed.
> Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.
Not at all. Netflix and Spotify do well because they are a good value proposition for the average customer. Piracy is free at point of "purchase" but is (and always has been) expensive in terms of various sorts of overhead.