Piracy?

[BrokenQuill92]

Hey I pay for it when I have the money. Your thoughts?

Not that it matters to a blind chick, but if we have to wait for lower quality broadcasts I often download. An example is Doctor Who - I rarely watch the SD 576i, I hate SD resolution on my TV, I usually download the 720p which I get before the lower quality broadcast. If they'd up their game, and actually give us proper quality and undelayed broadcasts then I wouldn't need/want to.

A second reason why piracy is so high, is the R5 DVD releases. Not all studio's are dumb enough to release these, but so many do - and on Blyray's too now. They've effectively created an easy avenue for good quality piracy while movies are still screening in cinemas.

What they should do, but won't, is release movies on PPV at the same time as cinema.

Here's what they do, in Australia. First it's released in cinemas. Then "rental" discs are produced by most studios (this is really, really stupid IMHO). Rental discs cost at least $50 wholesale and are designed specifically not to be purchased by retail customers due to the obscenely high cost. I'm against it because it's two-tier profiteering and it's already been ruled illegal (ie it's illegal if a studio tries to release "rental" and "retail" discs at the same time - more specifically it's illegal for them to put anything on a disc that says it can't be leant/rented/borrowed/resold, etc). Then PPV and retail DVD/BD releases happen co-currently.

PPV should completely replace the "rental disc". This would mean studios would put all the video retailers that rely on new-release rentals out of business swiftly, and they can then have complete control through PPV which will yield them much more than the $50-70/disc (more like $3-4/view profit for the studio and $2-3 profit for the PPV distributor).

They should stop releasing DVD/BD's at high prices - I haven't brought Australian releases on DVD/BD or Australian-release games for years since they're about 1/2 the price on amazon.com/amazon.co.uk. This is another reason why piracy is high - it's much faster for me to get the same movie in either the same or similar quality from a torrent then to order it in from Amazon.

I'm not much for pirating movies. But I do have a tendency to snag books. Usually when I can afford to get a book or when I can't find the book I'm looking for I have a habit of grabbing it where I can find it. Unfortunately accessible books are so expensive. Usually I do feel guilty and try to buy the book when I have to money, if I can't find the book on iTunes I will look for it on other sources.