IMO, there are three kinds of pirates.

The first are people without money to purchase the movie/song/software/whatever. They steal it because they have no other means. Is it morally wrong? Yes. But it doesn't necessarily translate into lost revenue because they wouldn't be purchasing the stolen item anyway. At worst, the creator/owner doesn't lose or gain any revenue for this. At best, the pirates spread through word of mouth the decent items, and people with money are more likely to buy it.

The second are people who could theoretically buy the item, but find the means to do so too restricting. Maybe it's because they'd rather own the media rather than stream it. Maybe because the only way to get a single TV show is by subscribing to an entire network's inventory. Is it morally wrong? Yes. Do creators lose revenue from this? Yes. But much of this can come from outdated distribution methods. I feel like this is more of a symptom of bad business than anything else. Make your content easy to access in multiple forms at a decent price, with quality material, and piracy of this type should theoretically decrease.

The third are assholes who steal to make their own profits. Like in this article, the Russian dub group who is receiving ad revenue from someone else's film. These people should burn.

I wonder how they could leverage the Steam effect? I haven't pirated a computer game since Steam came along - quite the opposite, considering the number of games I've bought but haven't played. If I could buy bundles of oldish or indie movies at a steep discount to own in perpetuity, I might well do the same. But online movies seem overpriced to me.

Curated bundles of indie movies -- one recent release with a few older/lesser known/smaller budget titles with a similar theme -- would be great.

As long as it has porn in the bundle, i still dont see myself spending money on it.

I'm led to believe that most computer games make (or don't make) their money back quite quickly, which encourages developers to heavily discount or bundle old games that they aren't making any money on any more anyway. Last year's games just aren't worth very much.

I don't know how much last year's movies are worth, but studios seem to prefer to kee[ selling old stuff at full price or distribute online through a subscription model. That doesn't work for me though. I might be willing to buy cheap bundles of movies/music that I might never watch/listen to, but I won't pay for a subscription that I'm not using.

I'm in the second category - I'll resort to a torrent if I can't get what I want thanks to stupid region restrictions or censorship (ie content edited for "American audiences"). But I also believe in compensating creators who make things I like, because I'd be stupid not to. I want them to make more things I like. I've watched movies from Netflix and then gone and bought the DVD too.

At the time of this writing, we’ve received around 7,000 donations for Holocene

That's actually really good. A general rule when dealing with IP online is to work in terms of per thousand, sometimes even millions. Simply because things like click through rates, purchases, etc are so sparse per impression, that if you were to sit there and base your numbers off of each individual impression you would go mad with depression. Unless you're working with the kind of manipulation engines facebook and google employ, IP adoption is purely a numbers game; Push as much organic traffic as you can at your content and then watch your numbers dwindle through the funnel as your click through rate is .01% of your overall impressions and your purchase rate is anywhere from .01% - .001% of your click through rate. That's where the advantage of piracy comes from, it's upping your overall impression rate. The more it spreads, the higher your overall adoption/sales are going to be. And that's all this is. Using piracy in this manner is just a free range form of advertising for donations. It doesn't actually account for how many people automatically downloaded the movie without watching, how many of those numbers were bots, how many people didn't like the movie... It's basically just spray and pray advertising to a very small demographic that know how to pirate films. 7,000 donations is pretty good.

And just a reminder, if your society's economic model is based on scarcity, then the day someone invented Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, your economic model was irreparably broken.

While I have no doubts that pirates will take your stuff and go crazy sharing it, this article conveniently avoids the fact that no one likes The Man From Earth: Holocene.

The original The Man From Earth was a great "bottle" movie where the entire thing took place in a single room for the most part. The depth of the movie came from the dialogue and the concepts it brought up, not from the cinematics (it could have easily been done as a stage play instead).

The sequel is like some sort of mediocre thriller that has almost nothing in common with the first movie. The first movie has great reviews, while almost everyone says the second one is garbage.

The reality is that most people probably don't enjoy the movie enough to contribute.

I loved the original but some movies by their nature don't suggest sequels. Did connor macleod teach us nothing?

Thanks for the reminder, i just put in a donation. The Man From Earth is in my top 5 movies, worth it just for that... Holocene was not very good though unfortunately.

Totally unexpected lmao. Who knew most pirates pirate because no money?

Every facet of the copyright/piracy fight which still matters can be found in the second paragraph of mechavolt's comment and the last sentence of steele's comment.

All other factors in the traditional copyright/piracy argument have been irrelevant for two decades now.