At one end of the spectrum, everyone pays to see every movie they want to see. The movie makers make bank and keep making movies.

At the other end of the spectrum, everyone pirates the movies they want to see. The movie makers stop making movies because they won't make money on them.

In between the two ends is a large grey area. Pretending that it's always acceptable to pirate any movie you want to see is akin to saying that you don't want the movie studios to make movies anymore. But pretending that every movie pirated costs the studios a ROI equal to the cost of buying the movie is disingenuous, too.

> The movie makers stop making movies because they won't make money on them.

Counterexample:

fanfiction.net 13'293'677 works

archiveofourown.org 4'825'000 works

fimfiction.net 125'797 works

[assorted forums and individual websites that make up the other half of my bookmarks] ? works

It looks like people will in fact make things even when they know - due to copyright law even - that they cannot make money on them.

Any creative work that will only get made if the authors think they can extort money from the people who benfit from it is a work that society is better off without.

> Pretending that it's always acceptable to pirate any movie you want to see is akin to saying that you don't want the movie studios to make movies anymore.

It is always acceptable not to watch a movie. Does that mean one doesn't want studios to make movies? No, they can still keep making movies if others care enough to keep them going.

This is just saying that movies will be produced in proportion to the amount of people who want to watch movies bad enough to actually subsidise their production.

The same exact mechanism is in play in music (fans who go to gigs & buy swag etc. subsidise music for the masses who hardly put a penny in it), and many other parts of the economy. Enthusiasts, companies with deep pockets, everyone who pours big money into research & bleeding edge tech subsidise the things that will ripple down to the rest of us with lower and lower margins, often in such a way that the original inventor/researcher/producer gets cut out of the loop in that market.

The market will correct itself so it's kinda pointless to hypothesize about a world where nobody wants to pay for a movie yet somehow everyone wants movies real bad.

I think fireworks are a good analogy. On New Year's eve, many people buy them and fire them, but others just go for a walk or watch the show from their window or roof.

The act of pirating the movie itself signals that there is some notional value to the downloaded content. Otherwise, you would just pipe 1GB of bits from /dev/random in to a file and play that.

And yet the pirate chose to pirate, so it did not have enough monetary value for them.

>The same exact mechanism is in play in music (fans who go to gigs & buy swag etc. subsidise music for the masses who hardly put a penny in it), and many other parts of the economy.

This is correct; income from services like Spotify are pitifully low. However, it highlights an important distinction between two types of movie piracy: cam-rips of movies currently playing in the theatre, and "normal" piracy, which is of stuff available through retail. The thing with music is that you can't pirate a live band performance: there's very rarely anything comparable to a cam. For one thing, too much of the value of a live performance comes from the experience. Second, it's usually too difficult to capture such a performance as an ordinary audience member. (Official recordings released after the tour are different, of course.)

While I, like some others here, don't believe in intellectual property at all, I do think that artists should be rewarded for their work. Until we can get a better system, I question the ethics of taking something for free when you are in a position to easily pay for something of equal or better quality. So I personally have never torrented anything that was playing in theaters, and I think that's a principle one could reasonably stick to.

However, I think there's a striking difference between what you might call "performance rights", and right to copy. In the latter case, while I think it still makes sense to give the artist some recompense for their success, the situation is in fact much different. Other people regularly make these points, so I'll only mention the top few most relevant for me:

* It's usually impossible to rent / purchase a movie at home at watch it instantly without DRM. Many movies aren't available for streaming at all.

* Quality is usually quite bad when streaming. Even if you get lucky and can get 1080p or above (which means you're not a Firefox or Chrome user watching Netflix), the encoding quality of the film is usually quite bad.

* Even if you have a video rental service nearby, and they have the movie you want to watch in Bluray, you then need to have a Bluray player to watch it (more DRM), as well as hope you have the latest AACS keys, or that your player can download them in a reasonable amount of time if you do not. (Even then there are quite often encoding problems on Blurays, which pirates take the time to fix more often than not.)

In other words, the value proposition of pirating retail products is pretty good. You can instantly (or nearly so) watch a larger selection of films in higher quality than you can get through any other means, with no technological limitations. I think in this case, the value of compensating artists is outweighed by the competing value of the incredible increase in convenience and quality that piracy represents to the public.

None of this is to say that compensating artists isn't important; the problem is that the current system for compensating them sets up a whole bunch of competing values. While your "fireworks" analogy probably works for films in theaters, it doesn't exactly capture the realities of the retail market for films. That reality is that we need a better system for distributing movies that makes it possible to compensate artists without neglecting other values.

On the third end of the spectrum, there's the crowdfunding model. Alternatively, we could only have "free non-commercial use" - so that if you make money from the movie (e.g. a movie theatre) you'd need to pay royalties... so people could either pay to see it in the cinema, or download free and watch at home... i.e. same as the de facto status quo. (Personally, I don't understand why people go to the cinema - I prefer to watch movies at home even if cinema was free - but some people still seem to like going...)

Yes because “crowd funding” is going to raise the $5 million it took to make “Get Out” let alone the $356 million it took to make “Avengers Endgame”.

I specifically called out “Get Out” for that reason. It definitely wasn’t “gold plated”. It was made on a budget of $5 million and grossed $285 million and got great reviews.

Look at Star Citizen, it has raised over 200 million now.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of crowd funding from the consumers perspective. It’s already 5 years late.