> A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a manufacturing and distribution company used by major movie studios and sharing them online before the movies' scheduled release dates.
Except those weren't prospective buyers--they were downloads, which don't have a direct 1-1 mapping. On top of that, you can only infer they were people who thought the movie was worth downloading if it was free, not that they would have purchased it at the retail price. Who's to say it wasn't downloading for convenience, i.e. to use on a plane or something, and the person hadn't already bought a license another way? The total loss was probably 10s of thousands at the most.
There's not a 1-1 relationship between DVD buyers and pirates but some people just want to watch the movie or save it for posterity, and don't care what format it's in. There is definitely a cost to piracy. But nobody knows exactly what that cost is.
Wanna know what's really stupid? Some people pay $20 or more to rent or buy a digital copy of a movie through a service that can pull the content any time. Compared to that, the hard copy is a fantastic value.
What about games? Do you mean the people buying games on gog.com are insane? I already spent over a $1000 there although I technically could easily pirate almost any of their games. At the same time I don't buy anything from Steam because I hate DRM. And the only place where I often buy digital books is HumbleBudndle - also because DRM-free. If something is both cheap (or not so cheap but still possible to afford and visibly great value) and DRM-free I see no incentive to pirate it for anyone who is not extremely poor (so they wouldn't buy even if there was no option to pirate).
That statement is obviously wrong
probably no: (successfully) prevents (all) unauthorized copying
probably yes: (exists to) prevent (at least one instance of) unauthorized copying
Look up the definition of "property". You'll find that it says nothing about it needing to be tangible. It literally just means "something that can be owned".
It is for the same reason you do not own the story in a book you buy. You have a physical stack of paper that's yours to do whatever you want with: read it for your pleasure, prop open the door with it, burn it if you like. However the concept of the story that the book conveys – the particular ordering of the words – is not yours, it (by default) belongs to the person who created it, as they put effort into the creation of that art.
Imagine the world you are fantasizing. You spend a year writing a book, you go to a publisher to have it published. You give them a copy for consideration. You don't hear anything back and then, later, find they have taken your story and published it themselves. It becomes a top selling book. Intellectual property rights are originally envisaged to protect artistic creators from this exploitation, otherwise why would they bother to create in the first place?
(Unfortunately, there is still a lot of large organisations exploiting artists, as they largely control the media that exposes people to art in the first place. This means artists have to sign away their rights in order to get an advance and the promise of exposure.)
Interesting claim considering that private property predates corporations by centuries.
If I copy your content you still have it.
It's not an exigent issue that requires officers with guns to solve.
https://www.pennlive.com/news/erry-2018/05/5e56fa19a94444/ch...
If you go this way of thinking, you can just as easily come out on the opposite end. Maybe the Catholic Church is in fact hiding less than these other orgs, and that's why we associate them with abuse. If the known rate of abuse is mostly correlated to an org's skill at hiding, then who knows how much abuse happens anywhere.
Sure there could be some kind of vuln in the media player you’re using to open it and it could contain a payload but there’s so many media player and OS combinations that this becomes extremely unlikely. I have never heard of this happening.
"Virtually safe" is nowhere near accurate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...