Say what you will about Disney, but I can spend a few dollars to buy a Disney product on iTunes, and my kid can watch a beautifully made cartoon without being bombarded with advertisements for cheap crap. That's more than I can say for most of the rest of the tech industry.
You're better off reading a book to your kid, for free from the public domain, a public domain on which most of Disney's work is based. And you can thank Disney, amongst others, for the perpetually increasing copyright extensions which does mean that copyright works that happened after 1923 may never enter the public domain. So yeah, your few bucks spent on a bunch of shitty cartoons is used for lobbying.
And yes, my kid also likes Disney cartoons. It's innocent fun. But let's not fall over yourself with praises on the virtues of copyright. All moral justification for it fails in light of the ever expanding copyright terms. End of story.
Not really. I could buy them on DVD too instead of iTunes. The point is that copyright enables the production of these beautifully produced cartoons using a business model that's a simple cash transaction. No advertising, no privacy-destroying user tracking, just cash in trade for a product.
Copyright is not a divine right, it is granted as part of an exchange. Part of that exchange is that the copyright is granted for a limited time, after which the public can use the IP how they want.
If Disney and friends can change the deal to suit themselves, why shouldn't every consumer follow suit and make similar self-benefiting changes to the copyright deal and copy/consume Disney material without paying?
If you buy them on DVD or Blu-ray you will be bombarded by advertisements, and they were probably unskippable until Disney added a skip button and called it an invention (AKA "Disney Fast Play").
No advertising, no privacy-destroying user tracking, just cash in trade for a product.
If only that were the case. Does iTunes state in its privacy policy or EULA that purchase and playback tracking data is not recorded or reported to content producers? What about consumer devices (connected Blu-ray players, smart TVs, etc.) that report back to their masters like the recently discovered LG smart TVs?
Actually, part of the reason Disney films are so widely pirated is because you can't but them on DVD - their most popular films are only available on DVD for a couple of months every decade or so, and many haven't been released yet. Their business model is based largely around not making their product available. (Also, they dragged their feet spectacularly - it took the total death of the VHS market for them to move to DVD, just like it took widespread VHS piracy of their movies for them to release them on VHS.)
