I know a lot of us, myself included, like to believe that piracy allows us to consume problematic media without supporting artists we do not like. But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product. HBO is absolutely keeping tabs on piracy of their show now and seeing our traffic the same way Crunchyroll used to keep tabs on pirated fan-translated anime back when they cared.
Also, there is a similar ethical zero-sum game with all other Harry Potter media and products. Normally we can buy on the secondary market if we need a hard copy to scan and rip but don’t want to support the creators. But almost every Harry Potter book in circulation is purchased by someone with intention to sell for a profit, and HBO is also likely keeping tabs on sales and resales of DVDs of the old movies. Every time money leaves your bank account for Harry Potter media, you are directly feeding the ecosystem which sustains the Queen of the TERFs.
It’s honestly pretty incredible how morally radioactive this one human is. Orson Scott Card is equally repugnant, but the Ender’s Game series doesn’t even have a small fraction of the market share of Harry Potter (IMHO this is the fault of that movie being just okayish, not good or bad, but that’s another topic.) Trump’s MAGA movement is comparable in badness, but there really isn’t much most of us can do other than voting and never shutting up about how unconstitutional the things he is doing is. Rowling really is comparable to Disney or Nestlé, and she’s just one person, not a whole company.
Right now, the only ethical way to consume Harry Potter is watching or reading movies and books on your copies that either:
- you obtained before 2020
- were given to you for free in some non-trackable way, e.g. offline or sneakernet.
There is no ethical Harry Potter consumption within capitalism. We will have to see if this changes once she is dead.
There’s a bunch of flaws in your logic here, not the least of which is:
There is no ethical Harry Potter consumption within capitalism.
Piracy isn’t capitalism
Edit: let me be more clear–
You’re trying to resolve one ethical dilemma with another unresolved ethical dilemma: You’re trying to resolve: “Can one appreciate an artist’s work while acknowledging that the artist is detestable?” with the same logic as “Is digital piracy an ethical workaround to media capitalism?” and combine the two arguments into one solution: “Is it ethical to pirate Harry Potter media from HBO, even though I find both Rowling, HBO, and capitalism detestable?”
It’s like asking, “As a strict environmentalist, is it ethical to drive my EV to the market if I know I had to charge it from an energy grid powered by coal plant (that I had no choice but to use)?” Because no matter how much personal opinion and moral relativism enters the ethical calculus, there’s a logical breakdown at the crosspoint of systemics, when individual participation merges into participation at scale, how much your choice is actually a choice at all, how much your choice would make any difference, and on and on…
but before all of that, it doesn’t make any logical sense to even go down that path since trying to resolve one ethical dilemma with another - especially expecting a black-and-white answer - is just a bit silly.
But privacy doesn’t cancel capitalism. HBO doesn’t need to know who downloaded, just how much people downloaded.
Capitalism is going to happen regardless of piracy. HBO is going to make the show regardless of how many people pirate it.
HBO doesn’t need to know who downloaded, just how much people downloaded.
They don’t need to know either of those things
But privacy [sic] doesn’t cancel capitalism.
It kinda does, but that’s not really the point
Piracy is in a sense the purest form of capitalism. It costs slightly more than nothing to send a file over the internet, and so if the efficient market hypothesis was true everyone would be pirating all the time. The suits and the corpos know full well that their products compete with piracy’s offerings at the low, low price of free + a VPN or Usenet subscription or a 3D printer. The smarter corpos know that they can gague a market by keeping track of torrents of their movies/shows. We aren’t insulated from the free market down here just because we don’t pay for shit.
Piracy is anti-capitalism. And while it may cost you something to send a file over the Internet, it doesn’t necessarily cost me anything. And if capitalism is producing something and selling it for a profit, piracy is the opposite of that: taking a copy for free, regardless of the method. Thus: anti-capitalism
Just because of the method of piracy you happen to choose may cost you money doesn’t change those underlying facts. especially because it is perfectly possible to engage in piracy without engaging in capitalism whatsoever. just because in the example you have cited, you have chosen to commingle the two does not mean they cannot be mutually exclusive.
OP, have you heard of the Streisand effect?
Please reread my post, I think you missed my point.
Omg… About to go find out why I should stop reading Orson Scott Card… Thanks a ton OP.
He’s as rabidly against the existence of gay people as She Who Will Not Be Named is against trans people, he just isn’t able to actually do anything about it, partly because a large part of the income from his books is tithed to the LDS church.
Sci fi and lds man. Yeah, I looked it up and was very disappointed. I had never looked up anything about him personally before that
I feel like by this logic you shouldn’t have even brought it up since they also track Internet engagement…
Marketing teams only track engagement on major social media, having a discussion about it on lemmy is not going to impact their metrics or even be considered
Have you work in marketing analysis before?
yep
i agree OP
fuck the haters and lowkey transphobes
I’m just here to bring to your attention Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”, both the books and the assorted TV show, which is quite awesome in its own right, even if it diverges from the books by quite a bit. There’s a whole world of awesome outside of HP, and even if it wasn’t, I refuse to recast in my theater of the mind the extremely talented and deeply regretted Alan Rickman and Dame Maggie Smith.
The Magicians show lost me with the sudden graphic rape, that was then portrayed a good thing. Sucks you got raped but you get a consolation prize of extra powerful magic! Also the rapist has magic semen, and they need to get more.
Look. You’re not wrong that there is a really scary (I would perhaps say very intense and absolutely triggering, but not explicitly graphic. There’s definitely graphic violence, but yeah.) scene with SA. But the god semen thing was a different deity and they gank the original trickster deity that did the SA.
When watching I do have the timestamps for that scene written down and do skip it. I skipped it when I introduced my wife to the show.
Not telling you what to do, but there is good content there. That’s probably the single scene in the series I seriously tell people to avoid.
I’m sorry it upset you the way it did. And now I’m seriously feeling like typing this is not the right thing, but my tism brain wants to explain more and better.
