It drives movie and concert ticket sales. It could do more and we should fix that.
Do you also fail to see how investment in technology that prevents certain groups from getting certain information harms everyone tomorrow? It's not like they'd have retool completely if they pivoted from censoring Finding Nemo because you're the wrong kind of customer to censoring political dissent because you're the wrong kind of citizen. The tech from the former can be reused in the latter and there's more money in the latter.
That pivot hasn't happened yet because the DRM hooks aren't in deeply enough. People would work around it. Piracy helps because it creates a space for us to fight back against that sort of thing. It keeps the set of people who can circumvent censorship large and it keeps them in practice.
At the end of the day, protecting an artist paycheck is just not as important as protecting user freedom. We can have both, but paying the streaming platforms and hoping they spend that money wisely is not the way to get there.
If it were just about entertainment I'd agree with you. What I'm trying to protect is dissent.
I don't want to live in a world where there are no channels not controlled by a third party, and that's the world the content industry is building. Entertainment is just a stepping stone for them.
Do you also fail to see how investment in technology that prevents certain groups from getting certain information harms everyone tomorrow? It's not like they'd have retool completely if they pivoted from censoring Finding Nemo because you're the wrong kind of customer to censoring political dissent because you're the wrong kind of citizen. The tech from the former can be reused in the latter and there's more money in the latter.
That pivot hasn't happened yet because the DRM hooks aren't in deeply enough. People would work around it. Piracy helps because it creates a space for us to fight back against that sort of thing. It keeps the set of people who can circumvent censorship large and it keeps them in practice.
At the end of the day, protecting an artist paycheck is just not as important as protecting user freedom. We can have both, but paying the streaming platforms and hoping they spend that money wisely is not the way to get there.