Re: The challenge of serving *EVERYONE* (was RE: Mozilla blog: DRM and the Challenge of Serving Users)

On 2014-05-16 08:17 John Foliot wrote:
> Once again, that depends on your perspective. I've had more than one person
> tell me directly to my face that their justification for pirating Game of
> Thrones was because they didn't want to have to wait until HBO released it
> in their country. So clearly that person wanted non-domestic content -
> RIGHT AWAY!!!! - and was quite prepared to steal it, as if it was their
> god-given right to have access to that content, and to heck with the
> content owners rights. The sense of self-entitlement is beyond imagination.

first:

Copying is NOT theft, if you steal something the other person doesn't have it 
anymore, if you copy it you now both have one. 
That's a fundamentally and totally different dynamic. 
 
We've covered that several times on this list, the fact that you're still keep 
repeating that particular obvious falsehood does not increase your credibility 
(go watch Nina Paley's most excellent visual and musical explanation comparing 
the two concepts at [1] if you really still don't get it, it only takes a 
minute)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw-MFeR8Frw



second, there's no need for imagination to explain that 'sense of entitlement' 
as you call it, let me walk you through it:

everyone with basic computer and internet knowledge *knows* that the delayed 
release by region is pure idiocy from a technical perspective (that's the vast 
majority of people on the planet at this point)

when you make some people jump to arbitrary hoops for no good reason -making 
them wait for a digital good in this case- then you are treating them as a 
member of a lower class 

People seriously resent being treated as second class (nothing remarkable or 
new about that emotional response)

That resentment goes double for people in social groups that cross release 
zones. Because they now run into the social difficulty of not just being able to 
discuss last nights episode with their friends/colleagues/acquaintances , they 
first have to embargo their knowledge to avoid spoiling their friends' 
experience, and it turns out people are generally bad at that.
(That group of people who regularly interact with people socially across 
release zones includes pretty much everyone who uses the internet as intended, 
i.e. as a world-wide-web, that's kind of the point of the whole thing)

When you put the above together with the easy option of pirating which:
* gets the end-user what they want
* gives them get the additional satisfaction of pulling one over on the power-
that-be that tried to treat them as a member of a lower class (from their 
emotional perspective)
* is likely more convenient then jumping through the hoops anyway
* is just an act of sharing, something people rightly see as positive to begin 
with

Guess what most people will do? The answer should not be a surprise, and is 
definately not 'beyond imagination', it is just basic human psychology.
--   
Cheers

Received on Friday, 16 May 2014 17:52:55 UTC