To the People of the Free World
I found a 9gag post today about piracy. Here it is:
I read some comments left and right and it just struck me as weird that so many people indeed agree: downloading wares illegaly is theft. I’ll explain to you why I thought this was weird:
I’m from the age where buying albums was the only thing you -could- do. A long, long time ago. And back then, there was no intarwebz. Can you imagine? We’d hang out in record-stores for hours and hours after school, trying to find the best tunes. We used the headphones at the store, stood for hours behind a counter, asking people to play you a certain record. And if the album was good enough, we’d spend our pocketmoney on it.
There are alternatives to piracy. Like Spotify, for instance. But when entertainers don’t provide alternatives or revoke rights for services like Spotify, there are no alternatives imho to the old fashioned record-store headphones and services, but piracy.
So if you really don’t like it; come up with a solution instead of beating down those who want to get to know you but don’t have money growing from trees. You don’t buy a car without a testdrive, you can’t judge on the quality of a movie based on a brilliantly marketed teaser or trailer, you can’t judge a game on 5 minutes of gameplay and you can’t judge how good an album is on listening to 3 songs.
Yes, I do know stores like Amazon.com offer free listening services. And I know there are trials to games and programs. But again; in times when money doesn’t even seem to be growing from bushes anymore, how can you expect people to pay for stuff they don’t know?
Assuming anything different, acting upon those assumptions and expecting people to pay the full load -before- knowing the entire deal, is theft too.
I think someone needs to be the first one to say; “Hey guys. This going back and forth obviously isn’t working and we’re just accusing one another of theft, being greedy, being assholes, being bitches, whatnot. How about, we find a solution to this issue that works for both parties?”
The man who’s going to come up with the answers, is going to be rich.
SortaConvenient 