Yorick shouldn't have tried to torrent the Incredible Hulk. You wouldn't like the MPAA when they're mad.
They're starting to crack down on us hosers now - cease-and-desist letters are being sent, lawyers and fines and punishment are being threatened. The free ride Canadians seem to have gotten is coming to an end. And that's mostly fine by me.
Here's why I torrented in the past: because I wanted to watch what I wanted to watch when I wanted to watch it on the devices I wanted to watch it on.
In the early days, I wanted to see, say the South Park movie on my Dell Axim PDA... I own the bloody VHS copy, but there was no convenient way to do it. So I went into the grey area and format-shifted.
And I shall tell my child I had to convert media to WMF format...uphill... both ways... in the snow.
Later, I might want to watch something else - but we had no Netflix streaming in Canada - so frankly, no easy alternative, although the technology we had allowed us to do this. And Pirate Bay was ever so accessible...
Then, I wanted to watch legitimately purchased DVDs with my kid without sitting through five damned minutes of unskippable crap, including retina-burning screens telling me I'd better not be dreaming of piracy... OR ELSE. AnyDVD solved that.
Well, now with Zip.ca and Netflix.ca, we kinda have a Canadian compromise. See, I want to pay for legitimate access to my media. I want to watch it on my TV, my computer, my iPhone, without hassle. I'm prepared to pay for this access and convenience. Now, it seems our Canadian government is getting in the way of things, hence Netflix.ca's appalingly bad selection.
Oh, there's stuff to watch, so it's kinda worth the $8/month. But seriously, why, when the tech is there and the market is clearly there, does the Canadian government see fit to protect us from accessing streaming content of stuff we want to watch - especially when it's accessible on other media available in Canada?
So... I'm pretty sure that there's increasingly no good reason to illegally download media, not when there are legitimate cheap alternatives (emphasis on 'increasingly').
Canada is so woefully behind in regards to new media and streaming options that it really isn't funny. Even if we were to suddenly have options like the American Netflix selection or Hulu, our ISPs have us setup with download caps so low that we couldn't enjoy them.
ReplyDeleteI'm not one to pirate, but the system as it exists is flawed. Canada is too far behind our neighbors to the South when it comes to these things. The solution isn't to go after the people pirating, it's to improve the system to the point that piracy simply isn't needed.