Why do you pirate movies/TV shows?

Which part? The exact amount is debatable, to be sure. As is whether or not there are "tier" effects, and whether the correlation might be swamped by other factors. But the general effect of expanding profits in a given industry isn't, I don't think.

That's not actually mutually exclusive with what I'm saying, because the question isn't whether budgets have gotten smaller (they haven't, as you point out): the question is whether they're smaller than they would have been.

I'd be kinda shocked if there wasn't even a correlation, but I agree with the rest. The only things I'd say with any confidence is that it probably isn't massive, and it probably isn't insignificant.

The problem is that if the exact amount is debatable then so is the correlation. A huge deal of the anti-piracy arguments are based around the premise "one illegal copy = one copy we lose", which is ludicrous to say the least because many other things are not being factored in here. Why people choose to get illegal copies, what would they do if they were not able to get these, what kind of interest moves them to either buy or download for free. Piracy grows in Spain, yet box office grows as well.

But isn't that an assumption? I mean, I'd like to debate this, but it's a hypothetical case scenario we can't track in reality.

I'd say that there may be a correlation, but one that isn't particularly linear, and one that has many variables that are not being considered. But I'm just making assumptions here.

For your own safety you shouldn't sit in a cold environment either. Dunno how theater rooms are where you live, but here the AC is always on "ice cube making":

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Here they're either siberia or singapore. I always wear layers when going to the movies just incase.

Agreed. Obviously they have a vested interest in exaggerating the effect, and they do.

The only real assumption it's based in is that people like money. There's a great book by Henry Hazlett called Economics in One Lesson that's freely available online and has a chapter on this very topic called "The Function of Profits." I promise it's an easy, non-academic read (just 1,400 words).

The short version is that any industry with high profits inevitably attracts more investors. It's just basic market equilibrium stuff, but applied to films it means that any dollar taken out of the industry really does effect the number, type, and quality of films we get in a tangible way, and doesn't just stop Nicholas Cage from buying a gold-dipped falcon head, or whatever. Investors flock to industries where profits are high, until they're not high any more, the same way consumers flock to underpriced goods until they sell out.

Really good discussion of this was posted on Birth Movies Death this morning.

I keep hearing about the Amazon Fire Stick lately, with a lot telling me you can "watch movies that are still in theaters ... for free," for which I tell them, that's illegal to do. Their rebuttal is: "No, it's a product of Amazon!" (which, to be fair, the product itself isn't illegal)

I have had five different individuals in casual conversation mention how they use the Fire Stick to watch all these films, and all of them seem unaware that they are streaming those films through an illegal means. They could be acting the fool, but I legitimately believe a lot of folk legitimately don't think anything of what they're doing.

I haven't read through the entire thread but I'll post up a few quick thoughts then go back through it all...

There have been a few series that I downloaded to binge watch. I always ended up buying the DVD/BR season boxed sets as Christmas gifts for family or friends as a result. That's no justification, but I probably never would have spent the money without having seen it bootleg to begin with.

When I was younger (college days back when Napster was the thing), I was a hard case for some weird principle that if the music was good, people would buy it. I believed that 1 bootleg download could never equal one lost purchase. The kids that I knew at the time would not have bought anything to begin with. That says nothing to the legality of the act; I'm only noting that to negate (somewhat) the argument of lost revenue by the music industry at the time. Sure, there were people who would have bought an album but instead opted for a free bootleg, but I never believed it was a one-to-one relationship.

As to the psychology of it, I do remember looking at it as some type of internet baseball card collection. Again, this is way before torrents existed! Back then it was 56k dial-ups combing through v/mIRC channels and newsgroups. You couldn't just download a 400Mb+ file in 10 minutes and be done. Instead, you would download 160 individual compressed packets @2.5mb each until you had all of the parts to then compile and extract to whatever it was you were trying to get. Most times, these sets were only available for a few days at a time before admins became aware of them and wiped the files. You could go weeks (or longer, if ever) before seeing the same set posted again, or the file naming convention changed by one hyphen because some jackass just had to make sure we all knew his set was special. A lot of us at the time became more interested in completing a set rather than ever dealing with whatever the set contained. So there was a strange collectible type of frenzy playing out. Gotta catch'em all!

That's not my game anymore. Now, I just stream everything from NF/AMZ which oddly enough feels more like cheating than what I was doing as a kid because I never have a physical case to place onto my shelf for the movies I buy now.

There's nothing new here though. Ever since kids could dub their albums onto cassettes, or run a strip of tape over the back of a VHS case, or lay a book spread over the b/w copier at the library, we've found a way to copy something or another.

There are editors that offer all the books they sell in free PDF copies. That's kinda like "authorized piracy" and they do that to sell more books: people discover the books and decide to buy them.

I started reading pirated manga but after a while I started buying then in large scale and now I have spent several thousands of dollars on manga. Without piracy I would never have done that.

Industry executives are stupid in trying to attack piracy, they should learn to integrate it into the industry: making it legal in some ways. Netflix can be understood as legal piracy since it's extremely cheap (cheaper than piracy if you consider the cost in terms of time of downloading the stuff and the trouble in making it run on the TV screen through cables and stuff).

In a few years I predict the total collapse of Hollywood in the hands of streaming. Netflix is already the world's largest video entertainment company by some measures and will continue to grow exponentially.

I'll be honest, I've never pirated a movie before. I guess I just prefer the packaging, quality and reliability of a purchase. I have done some blind buys with a decent success rate, thankfully. No offense to anyone but I suspect the quality of studio films has dropped and less chances being taken for the fact that pirating became a thing. Now it's just "bottom line" mentality. Rare we see a good drama hitting number 1 these days. Well, unless it's filled with shock value and hyper realistic performances and camera work, documentary style.

I hope I'm just being cynical and am wrong.

EDIT: Also streaming became a thing so I think what I just said was off base by a lot. Lots of dramas out. Not box office killers but when were they, anyone know? I'm drawing a blank. Anyway..maybe another thread for that. I'll be on my way now.

As far as piracy goes, do you ever feel that for some movies, they only way to see it, is illegally cause the movie is not available anywhere else, unless you are willing to pay a lot of money to import it from the other side of the world, which is kind of unfair, since you don't even know if you will like the movie, yet you have to pay a higher price to import it?

It's as if some movie distributors are saying the only way to see our movie is the illegal route, cause they cannot make it available on streaming services, or video in other countries, etc?

If you like it, you buy it, if you don't just don't.

Hi Gang,

Lately for whatever reason whenever I try to watch a show TV show or movie from my Showbox app, I get redirected to the Kodi home screen, and no video opens up.

The TV shows & movies used to just open right up, and play within the Showbox app through "internal player"

I have Showbox set up to use "internal player" and its worked great ever since I got the box months ago.

Lately, once you click on "watch now" - I get sent over to the Kodi screen, even though I have not changed where to play videos from.

I should also point out that Ive never updated Showbox because everyone says not to. I always click on "remind me later" when the update prompt comes up.

I do get the updated movies & shows but Ive never updated Showbox.

How do I fix this problem so that TV shows & movies within Showbox go back to just opening up automatically - the way they used to?

Thanks in advance...

I don't pirate films.

The prices for films are more often than not affordable, plus I love blu-rays, and it's stealing.

Because
1. Most of the films that deserve my money, indies mostly, are not displayed in a theater near me
2. Almost all the films I watch are not from the year I'm watching them, and when I see a good one, I really wanna watch, it doesn't come out my mind until I do, download is quick and easy
3. Is difficult for me to find DVDs without buying them online, and they normally take time to arrive, also, I don't like the DVD reader noise, it's annoying, I use a pen drive in the television, doesn't make a single noise.
4. A movie file goes from 650 megabytes to 1.8 gigabytes, you can fill lots of them in a 10$ pen drive. That pen drive is easy to storage, you can practically put it anywhere, the amount of movies I've saw, I'd need lots of storage capability in my house to keep DVDs. Also, I'm that kind of guy that often watch the movies again, so it would be difficult to trow a DVD out.

You're not getting any kind of good quality movies, if they are 1.8GB in size!!

One of my favourite movies of all time is 'Come and See'. It should be taught at film school and shown as an example of complete and utter maverick film-making as well as the horrors of war. However - there is, as far as I can see no legal way to watch this film with English subtitles (in anything other than crappy DVD quality). There are 3 Blu Ray disc releases - they all look superb, but none of them have English language subtitles.

It takes 10 minutes to download a copy of 'Come and see' with some English subtitles.

Asking any film fan NOT to do that and instead buy a crappy DVD for $20 is just not going to happen.

No. My quality is average, is 1080p or something. I don't really care much. I downloaded last night Happy People - A Year in Tanga by Werner Herzog and it was 4GB, but overall commercial movies, that's not the case of Come and See, usually are small size files.

Is my favorite war film by a long, very long shot.

This reminds me when a college asked me why I printed books like, Marcus Aurelius Meditations, instead of simply buying they for a small fee. Well, he wouldn't really mind.

Also, as an example - 'Edward Scissorhands' is now available in 4K. However it's currently only available to stream on iTunes, Vudu and FandangoNOW.

I don't have iTunes, I have never owned single Apple device, and Vudu and FandangoNOW are unavailable in my country. So how do I watch Edward Scissorhands in 4K on my TV - without spending a few hundred dollars on an Apple TV?

I am willing to buy a 4K Disc of this title, but no such thing exists. The studios don't really help themselves sometimes.

I had filled several external hard drives during the days before streaming. I think an issue with streaming is that it is not very easy to know wheter a movie is really available in my country or not. Sometimes I am too lazy to do the research.

People have lots of rationalizations for this, but the bottom line is they do it because they can get away with it and like keeping their money, and not because there's a serious moral/ethical justification for it. Fringe cases ("it's out of print! I couldn't buy it if I wanted to!") are often used to justify other cases where the same conditions don't apply.