I am an odd ball on the web, I pay for my music and videos.
I had no urge or desire to download music illegally. I do realize that a lot of hard work goes into producing music and sorry to break the news tech bloggers, but free isn’t a viable business model for most companies out there; not everyone can be Google. Plus, it is stealing whether you like it or not, and my conscience can’t handle that I am stealing something. What can I say, I am a pansy ass.
With that aside, that doesn’t mean I am frustrated as hell at the movie/music industry. It is now quite clear to me instead of providing incentives for people to pay for their goods, they will continue to simply punish the current people paying legally.
The latest example of this type of treatment is the movie labels latest tizzy with Netflix over their movie streaming service. If any of you are familiar with Netflix’s streaming service, you will know that many popular movies are served through a streaming deal with movie network, Starz. While the movies aren’t always the best, the content provided is usually good enough to keep me and obviously many others entertained. Supposedly this deal was only made possible due to a loophole in the Starz contract with the labels, a loop hole the labels now want closed.
Great, so now I pay for Netflix, basically to stream, and I can’t get what I want? I mean, I was already getting sub par content through Starz, but I was living with it. Now next to no good content? Even better. I have now discovered three things about torrenting.
- It’s faster than obtaining my content legally.
- It’s better quality.
- The more I torrent fast and quality content for free, the less guilty I feel.
I have invested too much money, too much time and put up with too much crap to be punished for paying any longer. For now on, I will no longer go the legal route until the labels start understanding that limiting content for paying users is unbelievably insulting. I won’t be taken for a ride and its time the execs get that through their head.
I am not asking for free, I am asking for quality content and service that is worth the money I am paying.
Is that really so much to ask? Wait, I’ll answer that for you readers. Yes, it is.
Speaking of punishment, how about all those nostalgic retro video games? Many of these aftermarket releases are well over a decade old, come with none of the player guides, and are unsupported by the game devs by whom they were originally produced, yet they still carry ridiculous layers of anti-piracy protections which must be *ahem* tweaked in order to even be playable. Mind you, the better titles had already reaped their creators a sweet profit way back when the games were bleeding edge. So now Mom and Dad are forced to go rogue simply to share some affordable entertainment with their kids. It's bloody stupid how greedy these corporate gluttons continue to be.
Agreed on ALL notes.
It is frustrating as hell.
An on going issue. At least the DRM is more open then what it was few years back. iTunes tracks can play on any MP3 player now not just ipods. Not knowing about Amazons or any other online music stores, but here in Aussie I only just recently bought tracks from bigpond.com as mp3 formats, they don't seem to be locked, they are not tagged with my info on them, so I'm guessing I can pass the tracks around without them coming back on me.
Good blog, retweeted via my original poster