I wonder if we’re wrong to group entertainment and physical goods into the same category though. They’re wildly different things.
If I make you a pair of shoes, I need to charge you money to account for my time, my effort, and the materials it took to make them. If I make a thousand shoes, it doesn’t scale; the price per shoe has to stay the same.
If I write an ebook, I would charge for the time and effort it took to write it, but there’s no material charge. It scales entirely differently because I can make a billion ebooks for the same cost as one.
Considering that, the old way of thinking that I should be able to resell an ebook like some shoes I bought doesn’t seem to apply logically. We’re buying entertainment, not physical goods. I don’t bitch that I can’t resell the experience of going to a concert, so why do I bitch (and I do) that I can’t resell digital media?
I just wish the publishers would price media accordingly. If they all worked out a deal with stremio to get ten cents whenever I streamed a movie, I wouldn’t think twice. But instead I need to sign up with multiple services and pay $20 to stream one, and I just realized I’m bitching to the choir so I’ll end there.
Yea, thats essentially the problem. Companies getting greedy and trying to squeeze out more money by all means they can get away with. If they priced things fairly (and split the profits fairly with the content creators) a lot less people would have an incentive to look to the high seas. And just maybe (pipe dream, I know) worked out deals with each other so people wouldn’t need a freakin website just to find out where the hell they have to subscribe to watch something…
And sure, customers trying to avoid paying for anything is also a problem, but I feel the “cure” a) isn’t one and b) hurts the people who pay much more than those who pirate.
Essentially the grass isn’t green on either side of the fence and that’s why we can’t have nice things 🤷
