Threatening messages aimed to prevent digital piracy have the opposite effect if you're a man, a new study from the University of Portsmouth has found. According to the research, women tend to respond positively to this kind of messaging, but men typically increase their piracy behaviors by 18%.
  • Snot FlickermanEnglish
    94·
    9 months ago

    I don’t really understand the gender difference thing, because I would think that in general it comes down to understanding what “ownership” is and that it has been taken from us, replaced with “licensing” where we have to buy the same movie every 10 years on a new format, and now that streaming is THE format, companies have made The Producers real, where they can make a whole movie, shitcan it, and get a tax break. We’re dealing with items we’ve paid for being removed from our digital storage boxes, because the “rights ran out.” It’s wild, because it used to be that you bought a movie and it didn’t matter that the rights ran out you could still watch your fucking movie in your own home. Same for old video games. If you have old copies of Grand Theft Auto, you can still listen to the great soundtrack, because they hadn’t stripped the music they lost licensing for out of the new copies.

    I mean, going back to when the music companies were suing music fans for downloading music, the RIAA sued Limewire for so much that if the max payout was given to every rightsholder for all the piracy going on, that it would be a bill larger than the amount of money that actually existed.[1]

    When the fines for all piracy that exists would be bigger than the amount of money that exists, its clear that the system is fucking broken and has been.

    Nobody respects copyright, and that started when Disney fucked us all over with the Mickey Mouse Protection Act in the 1990’s.

    The rightsholders did this to themselves by making it increasingly draconian.

    When cops are playing copyrighted music when they’re being filmed so people can’t post it online without it being auto-removed for having copyrighted music in it, things are flat out fucked and everybody knows it.

    It’s akin to living the end stages of the Soviet Union with Hypernormalization. Everything is totally fucked, but everyone is running around trying to pretend that nothing has changed and everything is fine.

    For citizens who get nothing but working themselves to death and taxes that do nothing for them, piracy is one of those small “fuck you”'s that we can give to the rich.

    1. “The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) estimates that filesharing website LimeWire owes it over $72 trillion dollars (£46 trillion) in damages. … Given that the combined wealth of the entire planet is around $60 trillion (£38 trillion), the RIAA likely has no hope of securing this in damages, but believe this is what it is owed, reports Computerworld.com.” ↩︎

      • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        22·
        9 months ago

        As a man… that sounds about right lol. I was watching a show and then realised if I wanted the later seasons I’d have to subscribe to a different service and I took that personally and got annoyed and now I just pirate stuff. No one tells this manly feller what to do.

      • noobnarski@feddit.deEnglish
        6·
        9 months ago

        I would say risk taking isnt always bad and not always illogical. But yeah, as a man I know what you mean when you talk about testosterone and risk taking.

        I imagine it used to have quite a lot of benefits back when we were still sleeping in caves, shure you might die when facing a mammoth, but you could also feed the whole tribe for weeks when you succeed.

    • TheAmishMan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      45·
      9 months ago

      I think its simply, at least for a while, the tech space was male dominated. And depending on the type of piracy, it requires an amount of tech skills

      • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        Also, there’s so much “free” content that a lot of young ones don’t even bother or care about learning about piracy and how to do it

        • TheAmishMan@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          This as well. I will say even the time where i would normally spend watching shows on stuff like dailymotion primewire etc i know most just watch youtube channels

    • Crow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      35·
      9 months ago

      As a woman into tech I’ll chime in. We seem to have a mild case of ignorant as shit. My friends are all completely blind to tech and piracy. Now I don’t blame them because they’ve been taught by capitalist culture to care about pointless things since birth, but god does it hurt sometimes and make me want to claw my eyes out. Patience and education will solve the gap.

      • 🐍🩶🐢@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        9 months ago

        What is even more painful is seeing friends glued to TikTok on their phones all day when they have STEM degrees. I didn’t grow up in a typical household, so I have a hard time relating to other women, but I don’t get it either. Do your friends with kids seem to be this way more than those without?

    • Ledivin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      I would think that in general it comes down to understanding what “ownership” is and that it has been taken from us, replaced with “licensing”

      Your mistake is thinking that the average person

      1. Knows that this is happening/has happened, since it’s rarely clearly or prominently stated,
      2. Understands what it means, since it doesn’t often affect them,
      3. And in the uncommon scenario where both 1 and 2 are met: actually cares at all.

      It’s wild, because it used to be that you bought a movie and it didn’t matter that the rights ran out you could still watch your fucking movie in your own home.

      I understand the concern and I’m sure it does happen, but I have literally never heard this complaint from a single person that I actually know. What movies/services has this actually happened to?

      No argument against anything you said related to copyright laws, just to be clear.