Time is short. (Or why piracy is not the problem)

We are constantly being bombarded by claims that the music and film industries are being destroyed by rampant piracy eating away at their profits. This whole argument really annoys me, and partly because of the following really well illustrated point.

Click to load

I pay for a DVD and then waste loads of time being told not to pirate DVDs. If I had pirated the DVD, I wouldn’t have had to put up with all that.

So how does that fit with a title of “Time is short”? Well… You may have noticed that I did not write a single blog post last month – I haven’t had the time. I also haven’t had the time to go to the cinema, the last film I saw was the penultimate Harry Potter and it not only cost an arm and a leg, but a drink and some nibbles nearly cost me the other arm.

I also have not bought much music in a while – I haven’t heard much I particularly like on the radio, and haven’t really had time to go out looking for anything new, so just stuck with my iPod. If I did buy music, it would probably be a digital download for only a few pounds per album.

You might have guessed that I haven’t bought a DVD in a while – My lovefilm subscription gives me two DVDs a month to watch, and that keeps me busy enough with a little trashy tv.

I have bought a few X-Box games, and am likely to buy some more – Quite shocking really, as they are about £40 or £45 each. So that is eating up a lot of my time as I work my way through Crysis 2 (which is a truly awesome game) and try to resist handing over my wallet Portal 2.

I am also hacking away at Arduinos, rebuiling my media PC and hanging out on twitter and facebook. I wish I could say I even read some of my friends blog’s, but sadly the only items in my reader feed being read are lolcats, failblog, dilbert and xkcd.

As I have already said my blog barely gets updated as it is.

I bought a kindle a few months ago, and so have been reading a lot of books, which really is fantastic and of course consumes huge amounts of my time.

And next month (or possibly sooner) I will be a father, so that will take away all the free time I had for all the above activities!

So where am I supposed to find the time to watch all these films and DVDs that the industry says are being pirated? Piracy is not the problem – Crap films, high prices and, yes, time. They are what is causing me to spend less money on films and music. Instead I am spending more on games, books, gadgets, toys, and soon children.