Is the Pirate Bay down?

[TheRealMafoo]

Killergran said:

twesterm said:

Yes, fuck the people that are trying to earn a living providing you with this entertainedment!  Who cares if they want to eat, have a place to live, buy groceries, and feed their families?  You need your entertainment and you need it for free.

This isn't really how it works, and you know it. It's an emotional argument that is true in the short run, but not in the long run. It's true that piracy shifts money away from the entertainment industries, but the ones who suffers in the long run is the end users that no longer get as highquality software/media as before. Not the gamemaker that went on to build houses instead. Society as a whole, I argue (and you probably don't) most likely comes out of it richer than it would without piracy.

And now I'm going to really go out on a limb here... I haven't thought this through yet, but it has been troubling me.
Why, really, do we need an entertainment industry?
All the entertainment we could possibly consume in a lifetime is already at our fingertips. It might be old, but is it still old even if we've never seen it? All the games you could ever play are available on emulators of old and dead machines. We don't really NEED new games. Why is it we always feel the need for new entertainment?

 

 

Wow, and your an economics major? :)

We don't NEED entertainment, we want it. It's why it's called entertainment. It's things that make us happy. We want new entertainment because we like new things.

As for the "Society as a whole, I argue (and you probably don't) most likely comes out of it richer than it would without piracy."

This is the same argument against a socialist economy vs a capitalist one...

The best video game ever made, has yet to be made. The best movie ever made, has yet to be made. The best song ever written, has yet to be written. If you remove the ability to make a profit, the people who make these games/movies/music, will stop making them.

Music is debatable, but definitely the other two aren't.

Because there is less money in it, less entertainment exists in the world, and due to that, I say Society as a whole, I argue (and you probably don't) most likely comes out of it poorer than it would without piracy.