Bu then again petrol is a physical thing, movies are not and they can be shared rather easily which is human nature.

Sadly over the years i have purchased many dvd’s to watch a movie just to find it is not as described on the cover, for damns sake i once had a movie where there was a helicopter on the front cover and there was no helicopter in the movie at all.

They managed to steal my money by refusing to give refunds for the crap i was misled to purchase so i don’t feel they deserve to get anything from me when i watch something and believe it was not worth my time.

I believe that if cinemas had to make all shows contribution based they could make a huge profit, much more than they are right now as some people would be prepared to pay more for the movies they really enjoyed, but the time where they can sell a movie on dvd and rip people of by making something a high school kid could do better i will not pay them a penny.I am so glad that we have torrent access now as we can preview movies that we want to watch and buy if we feel the need to, but even then i am boycotting the industry so i don’t pay until they stop what they are doing and create a fair environment for everyone. And i will still enjoy my entertainment, just because i am boycotting them does not mean i have to suffer from not watching the movies i want to watch.

First off, people will pay for Steam because they like the services they provide that are integrated into the games.

Steam is a free service. You only pay for the games.
Yet people buy them from steam because they are available on a timely and cheap manner and with added value from steam.
Like I said, if you provide a good service people will pay for it.
Why are you disagreeing with this while stating that they provide a desirable service??

Nobody cares about BD-Live features.

So find another way to add value to your product?
You seem to have completely missed the point. I didn’t say copying steam would work for a different market that that which steam applies to.
What I did say is that it’s possible to compete with free and with piracy and that it has been done before, and I even gave you several examples.

Each business will have to find a way to do it themselves, obviously.

People like having access to friends while playing games and have Steam do it for them and have updates and patches available.

You’re having an incredibly limited view on this.
All this is useless if there is no content to share with people. The key success point for steam is availability.
They have games available worldwide the instant they are released and offer good support for them. That’s why it’s a good service.
If steam was bound by regional locks and delayed releases no amount of social networking would save it.

people who pirate games are often left waiting for patches and play games offline.

Misleading to say the least.
You can find a patch on any good pirate site almost simultaneously as when it’s released on steam.
Yet steam offloads piracy of all kind of games, regardless of the fact that they have offline mode or both offline and online.

As for online-only it really depends of the case. If you have to connect to a central server there’s no work around most of the times, no argument there.
However for user-hosted online games, you can find your fair deal of pirate versions.

These are not the reasons people pirate, however. The biggest reason comes from limited availability (which steam handles pretty well) and bad services or intrusive DRM.
Take a look at the recent sim-city flop due to the always-on DRM for example.

Even then piracy is still an issue and the same excuses ensue. No demo, the game is terrible, I want to see how well it works on my system first.

If piracy is offloaded to neglible levels I don’t find it an issue at all. If you do, you’re over dramaticizing things.
A small minority will always pirate. Some won’t find the game worth the asking price or whatever other reason. But when you can turn a piracy riddled market into one with much lower piracy levels than most businesses you have to consider if piracy is still an issue or not.

Having said that, I still do pirate some games before I buy them for that exact same reason: There’s no way to check them out so I still can’t make an informed decision despite they being readily available.

What you keep ignoring is those who do enjoy movies, music and games that they pirate yet still never pay for it.

I don’t ignore those.
It just that they are a minority.
Like I’ve said there are several studies showing that pirates are also the biggest paying consumers.
I just don’t consider a minority to be an issue, when the bigger issue is that on most cases the majority cannot pay for their products even when they want to, because it’s not readily available. Which results in piracy eventually.

Why should we focus on the lesser issue (if you can even call it that) when there’s more pressing issues to be taken care of?

How do you tell? You can’t because so and so may just say I pay for the content I like and only pirate stuff and not pay for stuff I don’t like. You don’t know if that’s true.

There’s strong evidence suggesting it however.
And there you go generalizing the whole spectrum of causes for piracy into “I pay what I like and don’t for what I don’t” despite being shown several examples of them.

There is no goodwill on torrents. Sure some may do that. Some may want to just support the smaller guys and so on.

The filesharing movement is an excellent example of goodwill.
People dedicating bandwidth for others to have access to content?
People dedicating their time to ensure copies are readily available online?
You know cracking, ripping, encoding, subtitling etc takes time and effort. File-sharers get nothing off of it (and that’s the way it should be, before you dive into that).

People could just keep the content for themselves but instead not only do they decide to share it but they also put an effort in doing so.
How many torrent releases end with “If you like what you get, support the creators and buy it”? I’ve seen those a lot.

Facts and studies show exactly the opposite of what you claim.

What I will agree with is they should make content more easily accessible. Yes some movies are region locked or no longer available anywhere.

Glad we’re on the same track on something.
This reason alone is why I fully support the reform to 7-14 years duration of copyright.
So that content can remain available in the public domain instead of protected by copyright but lost forever because it’s not profitable to distribute it any more but they won’t allow anyone else to distribute it for free either.

Disney puts there stuff out there every 7 years I believe and then back in the vault. That’s their choice though.

This however happens only with a select few profitable creations, and then we enter in the other dreadful policy of paying twice (or more) for the same content because of format shift.
Why do you think less people buy Blu-Rays compared to what bought DVD’s or VHS?

And yes it’s indeed their choice, but then we come back to the same key issue: Piracy is a service problem.
If their choices are the cause of piracy surges, then they only have themselves to blame for their old customers taking a different alternative.

Anonymous people downloading files gives no feedback.

Do you really think so?
If more people are downloading your product than buying it, you can draw a lot of information from it.
That’s exactly what happened with game of thrones, the most pirated TV show so far.
From “Anonymous people downloading files” they were able to see they had a distribution issue and made its availability in some countries a bit better (although still fairly limited).

You just have to properly analyse the data that’s readily available.

For one thing they get immediate feedback. The other is you had intentions on paying.

Immediate feedback might be the only difference, but there’s still some feedback. Something you denied there was, just a sentence ago.
Your second sentence is just a blatant lie.
You can stop repeating it since you were already told that it is not the case.
Trying before buying shows an intention of paying. Studies showing the higher consumption habits of pirates shows there’s a clear intention of paying in the majority of the pirate population.

You could have used that argument before, but after you’ve been told the opposite, you’re just being wilfully ignorant of what’s being told.

So unless you’re some hobo who tries his luck going from one restaurant to the other constantly complaining about the food hoping to get a free meal it’s not going to happen very often is it?

I would appreciate if you didn’t use strawmen.
There’s a much more limited number of restaurants in your surroundings than the sheer amount of cultural works being published yearly or even monthly.
Which is why it’s much more likely for this to happen to a movie than to a restaurant that probably exists in the same place for half a decade or more already.

Yet this in no way invalidates the fact that if you’re provided a bad service you’re in your right to complain and even get a refund.

This has nothing to do with quality and all to do with ease of access and it being free.

Why can’t there be several issues like I’ve pointed out?
Can you only consider something an issue if it has a single cause?

If someone knows that something is bad to begin with then he won’t pirate it at all.
On the other hand if he doesn’t know he might as well find out before.

I can’t see how you can disregard quality as a factor.

Louis C.K. offered his stand up for whatever people were willing to pay or really cheap.

Which is a growing business tactic online that’s proven to work before.
Do you have a problem with this?

he still made a bunch of money. That was a great idea but it also doesn’t guarantee everyone will pay.

So more people bought the product, because it was affordable by anyone, he turned a profit and the decision paid off and still you have a problem with the minority that doesn’t pay regardless?
Please understand what the concept of non-sales is.
If people wouldn’t buy your product regardless, then they aren’t an issue to begin with because they aren’t even considered potential sales.

On the other hand you completely focus on this non-issue while disregarding the most important aspect: More people have his product and are now talking about it, which is a very positive thing as he gained new customers and, most importantly, profited greatly from it.

It still appears that you’re painting piracy as a bigger issue that what it actually is.

Sure, nobody pirates good content just bad stuff right?

Minecraft, for example, has no DRM and has incredibly low piracy levels and is an excellent quality product according to the reviews.
Game of thrones is heavily pirated and also of extremely good quality but the cause here is low availability.
There’s more than one single aspect that brings forth piracy.

You constantly fail to miss the main issue however. Piracy can be reduced to negligible levels if you provide an accessible, good quality, valuable service.
If your objective is to completely eradicate piracy, then I’ve got bad news for you.
That’s no less of an utopic ideal than completely eradicating violence, murder, theft and whatnot.
However if you can turn it into a non-issue (if it isn’t already) then I don’t see what the point of further fighting against it is.

But like I said, it’s hard to compete on a global market when there are no boundaries for torrents. There are many issues they have to deal with but again your response will be that’s their problem.

Because it is?
It’s not a customer’s concern that a business should be profitable. And being difficult to globalize is no justification for the inversion of the market values.
Fact of the matter is that it’s a lot easier to distribute globally now, with the internet, than before. If the process is too bureaucratic for companies, maybe it’s a good time to reformulate archaic laws instead of blaming your customers.
Just because availability was less of an issue 10-20 years ago is no excuse to ignore it now that it is.

If people can download from anywhere, anytime and do it for free what service could they actually offer that’s better than that? You can’t.

Didn’t I already tell you it’s possible to compete with free?
I even provided a series of examples.

If you’re going to repeat the same thing and ignore what’s told then there’s no point in arguing.

You might have a few success stories like Louis C.K. but for most artists that’s simply not possible.

Indie humble bundle uses the same business model.
Steam and spotify don’t use that business model and compete with piracy regardless.
There’s more than one approach to this. Be innovative. There’s more businesses model than can work.

Music and movies people don’t give a shit about. They watch them or listen to them and they are exact replicas of the originals.

If movies were available at the time of release worldwide instead of a few weeks/months later and only in a few regions this wouldn’t be an issue.
As for songs, spotify, iTunes and bandcamp have done a great deal against piracy.

I’ve already told you this.
Why do you repeat the same old argument despite of me showing you otherwise?

If the law makes it legal in a certain country then it’s legal. The fallacy to that argument is that laws are different around the world and torrent sites can be accessed anywhere.

If you’re going to argue against my points like that, at least take the time to quote the part of my reply which it refers to.
It makes your text much more understandable.

However there is no fallacy at all. The concept applies just as well on a specific country where it’s illegal like in the US. (Which was actually what I was referring to)
If the law isn’t enforceable on American citizens using the internet, then the whole point I described is equally valid.

If you buy marijuana in the Netherlands and bring it to the US you’ll be committing a crime.
Similarly if you’re in the US and access a torrent site on Spain for example, where torrents are legal, you’re still committing a crime
The difference is the first one is enforceable and the second isn’t.
Nevertheless, both crimes are not fully condemned by society, seeing that more people in the US are starting to rally for a law change regarding marijuana and also seeing the amount of pirates in the US.

That was my point when it comes to law enforcement of copyright.

I think it’s ridiculous to think they can sue someone for $1,000,000 but it’s not unreasonable to sue each person for $5.

Completely agree with you there, if the person is proven to be the downloader beyond any shadow of doubt.

There is no way everyone here would agree to give up their personal credentials and credit card information and have a goodwill gesture service.

Ah I see this argument a lot.
However what you’re doing is confusing piracy with privacy.

Publishing private, personal information is in no way comparable with sharing your property so it can be copied.

I shouldn’t really have to state the obvious should I?

Where if you like the movie you donate, if you don’t you won’t have to pay. That way they can keep track of who is just a freeloader and who actually invests in good products

This already exists, sort of.
Go check flattr.
It works exactly that way while keeping your anonymity (you have an account instead of your actual credentials).

However your example wouldn’t change the fact that people still wouldn’t pay if they didn’t like the product, so it’s essentially a pointless justification for an invasion of privacy.

People don’t want to be accountable for something they don’t view as problem.
If they had any morality issues with what they were doing, they’d stop.
Obviously if the law criminalizes something that people don’t view as wrong, they’ll try to change the law while keeping their habits concealed.