Why non-Americans pirate stuff
It’s an availability problem.
Lets say I want to rewatch O Brother Where Art Thou with some friends. It’s one of my favourite movies, so I’m OK with buying it, but I’m also quite cheap, so I might settle for renting it.
I want to watch it in HD and I don’t have a BluRay player. No one I know actually owns one.
My first stop is Google Play Movies, because I have a Chromecast and I’d rather not fumble around with HDMI cables.
Cool, they have it for a cool €3. But wait, why is the poster in Italian? I want to watch it in English (because I’m a fucking hipster).
This sucks. Multiple languages should be available, this is Europe. What if I were a French guy living in Italy, and I wanted to watch it in French?
Maybe the English track is available, and it’s simply not listed, but I’m unwilling to risk my money.
Let’s try Amazon, they have some kind of web video service, right?
Apparently not. They have a bunch of disks which I cannot read, coming all the way from France or Germany.
Let’s try iTunes. They’re the biggest store for a reason, I hope.
The first time I mistyped the title. Apparently it’s “O Brother…” and not “Oh Brother…” and iTunes cannot figure it out.
However, as soon as I fixed my own mistake, iTunes delivered.
That’s more like it.
My hypothetical Frenchman is still screwed, but maybe the film was never dubbed in French.
€3.99 for an HD rental and €9.99 for buying it outright. This is quite decent.
However, how can I get this on my TV? Will the file be DRM encumbered?
I could just use an HDMI cable, but my Mac has an older DisplayPort, which carries no audio. I would have to download iTunes on my Windows laptop and use that. It’s definitely feasible, but it’s still much less convenient than piracy. Let’s compare.
- Go to your favourite torrent site. Any decent one will do.
- Type the title of the film.
- Press download.
- Enjoy
Or even better, using PopCorn Time:
- Open PopCorn Time
- Search title
- Press Play
For finding what I wanted legally I had to go to three different websites, and the figure out DRM. If paid content wants to compete, distribution needs to be uniformed (particularly on the European level), and video casting formats need to be standardized.
Hardware vendors are attempting to force consumers into platform lock-in, but they’re really locking them out of the media market.
