My problem with this whole thing is the following. I am not pro-piracy and IP theft, it's just that it is far, far easier to acquire many items by piracy than not. It's the same problem with DRM over in PC gaming, where in their efforts to guarantee that the game is bought legitimately, they make it harder for legitimate purchasers
Think of this: MegaVideo had a good business model. If you like to watch a lot (more than 72 minutes a day) you could get a subscription and do so, similarly for download volume. Everything was ad-supported. All you have to do is reach out with these companies. Get this music, this software, these TV shows and movies, up there legitimately, and then you have something.
The problem with the "War on Piracy" is that it's really just about the big media companies who refuse to adapt. Some of the manga scanlations i read online would take months to arrive in print format in the USA. Why can't the legitimate companies just do what the pirates are doing and make it legitimate? If scanlators can turn over a cleaned-up, translated chapter of One Piece in under 24 hours, why can't Viz Media? The demand is clearly there, so do it, and make some money off of these customers instead of zero money
You can see a good deal of this out there already. Crunchyroll does legit and very fast fansubs for multiple series, sites like Hulu, or Netflix streaming, even Toei and Funimation work together to get One Piece episodes out within an hour of the Japanese air time
This is why i fear the anti-piracy laws, not because i'll have to pay for things, but because these businesses will never learn if they just bitch to government and continue making it such that the only way to watch X on your own time is to wait 5 months for an overpriced DVD box set. If piracy endures, eventually everyone will prosper, because the solutions i have proposed will only increase revenue and not decrease it (the people who want full-series on DVD are still going to buy it, the people who want to go to the movie theatres, or want print collections of manga, will still buy them, but a whole new market of revenue, either ad-supported or at low costs, will be opened up)
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
