Stop Stealing Movies!
Ruth Vitale, CEO of CreativeFuture, on the costs of piracy.
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On this week’s episode of The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, Sonny talks to the CEO of CreativeFuture, Ruth Vitale, about the costs of piracy. A longtime producer in Hwood, Ruth has seen firsthand the costs of theft on productions big and large, but in an age where stealing a movie or a book or a song is just as easy as popping onto Google and punching in some search terms, how do you convince folks that stealing is, in fact, wrong? And what can the government do to help stop the scourge of Internet-based IP theft? All that and more on this episode of BGTH. If you’ve got any ideas, feel free to leave them in the comments.
If you enjoyed the show—or know someone who needs a little nudge to feel great shame for all the stealing they’ve been doing—share it with a friend!
I never pirate because I am unwilling to buy. I often will own something and then it won't play on this device, or from this location, or there are commercials even with the commercial free plan (wtf hulu??) or there are previews, or the audio won't play right, or the login server is down to check my password.
Call me a boomer or whatever, but I just want the file so I can play it how I need to and want to.
If tv & movies had been done like iTunes was for music everyone would be happy, but you guys blew it and it's even worse than 300 cable channels now. It's 300 apps I have to log in separately practically every time I want to watch something. And even if someone does it right (Apple isn't bad) it's still 299 shit apps you have to deal with.
Live game? Sorry! Log in and then force a minute of commercials, even if I lost a connection and am not logging in on a new device.
If you want people to pay for things, make it easy.
What Jochanan said.
I don't pirate. I can afford not to.
But I understand the temptation when rights holders develop byzantine methods you have to navigate in order to consume their content.
One area in particular is the Twitch streamer, or the like, who would be happy to buy a license to play music on their stream. I looked into this once and it is impossible. The rights holders, which is usually not the creative artist, has made it impossible for someone who wants to do the right thing to do it.
I look at piracy as the market signaling that the current system is broken and needs to be fixed.
Can we also stop comparing the theft of digital goods to physical goods? When a physical good is stolen there is less for the seller to sell. This isn't true for digital goods.
One other pet peeve is video game anti-cheat software whose only function seems to be to make the video game experience worse for people who purchased the game legally.