There's a 'concentration' (of people / power) effect by the creation of a business or company or corporation that makes said entity more appealing to cater to by government than individuals; centralisation is more efficient than decentralisation.

There's also the fact that, historically at least, business entities were created to serve a public need, and therefore these business entities should be encouraged to grow their service to greater satisfy the need.

Government still acts as if this is the case despite that many business entities are the grotesque offspring of that old idea, having evolved through perverse incentives into todays unrecognisable mutants of 'responsibility to shareholders' that are hideous to look upon.

I live in Asia. Passengers are treated with respect, I've never seen a 'surely' employee, nor do I remember seeing a misbehaving passenger, other than a drunk Russian guy who had shit himself by 9am while checking in. His wife didn't look happy.

> bad food and more

What's more? Have in mind that an airplane is not a restaurant. It should not even serve food. Although the food industry wants people to believe we need to eat every 3 hours, that's very far from being true.

Besides that, most delays in flights happen because of bad weather. I agree with what you are saying but you really got a bad example to highlight the problem.

I believe if businesses want to stop piracy, they need to start making superior products and platforms. If we put away cost completely for a service, allowing it to be any exorbitant amount, the final question is: Is this a better experience than I could have gotten for free?

It makes zero economical sense why you would pay for an inferior experience, such as being geo-locked. Netflix apparently throttles your bitrate/resolution if you're not watching from a smart TV. Sony can revoke at will media that you "bought".

Steam is a great example of what to do. Could I have pirated all my games? Absolutely, but having them on Steam--crucially--makes life easier. I get automatic updates, social integration, achievements, steam cloud saves, remote play, centralized screenshots, easy linux support via proton, etc.

I have no interest in having to buying something that might want me to pay extra premium on top just for a 4K version, or a streaming service that cycles films in and out that leaves me unable to watch a great title I saw 2 years ago. The biggest sin of all is not letting you download titles. F** me I guess if I want to download & watch a movie offline while sitting in transit. F** me if I want to download a title on WiFi to watch later when I'm out and about as to not use cellular data.

I really enjoy Graphic Audio's audiobooks (full voice cast, music, SFX, high quality production). Their titles can all be bought outright, which is great as I spend a lot of time on a plane or away from a cell signal or internet capable of streaming even audio. It's a great approach, but I'm sure there are not a ton of folks who end up buying episodes, it's an expensive way to approach media, certainly.

The fact that geolocking also affects "downloads" really sucks. On our last holiday I prepared a tablet with downloaded content from Netflix and Disney for my 5 year old. But when we got there we couldn't play it, as it was geolocked. Next time I'll just use torrents.

"If I could actually buy movies and TV shows for download I would"

I wouldn't for one simple reason: the canon of classic cinema that one needs to watch and rewatch in order to have a solid knowledge of the art form, consists of many hundreds of films. Multiply that by the cost of purchasing individual films, and you arrive at a total cost that even most people in highly paid countries would find unbearable, let alone less fortunate regions of the world. And while some very lucky people might have access to public libraries that can supply rips, you can't expect the rest of the planet to go without culture, so torrenting it is, just like how Anna's Archive and LibGen have opened literature still under copyright to all.

When someone tells me that downloading a song or a movie is like stealing, I usually encourage them to download a new car.

For creative works, there's always a license behind it post the invention of copyright. It wasn't as obvious in the past now that DRM and digital/streaming only has given studios/publishers/etc the ability to cancel your access at their discretion. Though complicating matters is that there's increasingly nothing worth spending money on in the first place anymore.

> If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing, so...

This is a bad argument for piracy. (There are good ones.) Plenty of things that can't be bought and sold without restriction can be stolen.

Know what supports organized crime? The copyright-supported media titans that closed ranks to cover up the career-spanning crimes of all the Weinsteins, Cosbys, Diddys, and Saviles of the world.

well, the bleeding heart "you make indies unable to operate" didn't work. So you gotta move to fear, no matter how bad the argument. Everyone responds to fear when done right.

Private trackers might he considered organized crime.

I'm surprised it's not higher. Are the results unusual for an Western country?

other just think pirating is an acceptable way to stick it to the Man.

illegally acquiring? Yes, technically. Otherwise it wouldn't be illegal.

corporation, no. the small people, yes. You can take a lot of losses when you have a billion dollars in the bank. Not so much when you got maybe 1000 (on a good day).

Torrents UX isn't uTorrent anymore, there are Netflix like UX solutions to piracy 2024. Feel free to pay, I'm happy to freeload off faceless megacorps profit margins.

I pay for YouTube Premium and Spotify premium, I'd probably pay for Netflix if I didn't need D+, Showtime, Viaplay etc... To access all I want to watch.

No one you're complaining about would care if people were training LLMs on pirated material for their own private use.

Copyright has always allowed for educational usage.

Writers read other author's books. Artists study other painters and sculptors. Actors and directors watch other movies. Musicians learn to play other artists songs before they ever start composing their own.

The big media copyright cartel has tried to steal that right from the public good by pretending that they're entitled to even more payments for training usage, but thankfully it's clear that no regular people agree with them.

Why would it be hard to square the mentality of "pirating art to watch is acceptable" with the mentality of "pirating art to train LLMs on is acceptable"?

GenAI content isn’t afforded copyright protection so that feels like a coincidental good tradeoff

I’ve made money from genAI content but i don’t care if someone copied it, it’s a risk I took, they don’t have the network and community I do which is the value.

Friends, in this economy? Surely you jest.

There was a brief post COVID period where we hung out. It got a lot harder to contact them when almost all of us got laid off in different companies. I still do reach out (I was laid off too. I think I was the first in my circle), but it quickly became COVID hard again.

> Do the multi-millionaire soccer players really need that much?

I think that's how they got their millions.

Imagine if someone built a huge, impressive thing, and a whole load of people tried to avoid paying to see it and claim they had some moral right to do so.