[citation][nom]damianrobertjones[/nom]If you can afford it.. then buy it. If you cannot afford it then WAIT for it to appear on ebay or amazon at a reduced price.There is NO EXCUSE for downloading illegal material.After saying that I, along with, probably, everyone posting here today, has sampled the world of 'free' material. If it all suddenly vanished overnight then I would buy all of the stuff that i wanted. On the other hand it takes months for certain television shows to appear, if they even ever do, over here in the UK. Same for films.If you want to stop all of this pirating stuff then target the newsgroups and THEN the web pages. After newsgroups go for the big players that have the crazy silly pipes out there in the world. ANY law enforcement department should be able to eventually stop all of this at the larger sources and I'm confused as to why they haven't yet done so? Oh yeah, there's more important stuff to do like stopping armed robbery, domestic violence, drugs etc.If YOU made the material... would you like someone to steal it from you? No... yet we all download.P.s. If the price of a Blu-ray is too much for you then wait for the price to fall. It is not as if your LIFE depends on it! We're so stupidly self entitled at times[/citation]
One has to wonder why media companies stick to a clearly broken buisness model. There's no sense in releasing any sort of content before it's been paid for, and that's exactly what they do. They produce a movie, CD, game, etc., and THEN try to get funding for it. Which makes no sense, because once production is done, there is nearly zero cost to distribute it to everyone in the world.
It should be obvious that people are going to undercut them. The thing is, they've made it impossible to do so legally, so the only options are ones that don't charge customers. Kicker is, charging NOTHING for a CD/game/movie/etc. is still a profitable business model because of advertising revenue.
Media companies need to adjust their business ideas. Either they need to charge people for products BEFORE they release them, and only release them once they have funding, or they need to simply create a centralized product (similar to steam or netflix) where everything is available to everyone, at either low or no cost, depending on the product, and generate profits from advertising.
You can't fight piracy for the same reason home cotton spinners couldn't fight factories in the 1800s. You have to adapt to technology rather than try to block it out.