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The File Sharing Report
An anonymous reader writes "In July, Slashdot posted an article about the file sharing experiment, which was a database where users could report items they've purchased as a result of file sharing. The author has completed the experiment and written a report outlining the results. He offers the philosophy that file sharing is a result of the industry's failure to meet the business models demanded by today's consumer, and provides many suggestions to the various industries on how to take advantage of the market emerging from file sharing to generate revenue."
...and the reason that I'd, uh, consider downloading a movie - ADS. I *HATE* going to the theatre, paying $10 to see a movie, and having to sit through three or four commercials before I can watch a movie. I just paid $10 to see the movie (which will be full of enough "product placement" as it is) - I don't want to see ADS too! It becomes so much more tempting to download since the movie industry is making it obvious that they're trying to squeeze out every last dime.
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Since when is not buying something "hurting someone"? That is simply the beginning of a fallacious chain of logic. I have news for you: "not buying things" is not a crime. Making copies of things is not a crime. Theft is a crime, but theft, by definition, must deprive someone of the stolen item. Information shall be free.
I almost never purchased music before file sharing--in a typical year I would buy one album (and that was because I would get a gift certificate to a music store on Christmas.) Because of filesharing, I was up to trying out allofmp3.com when I heard about it--and since then I've purchased 10 albums in the last few months.
my problem with an experiement like this is that only people who actually bought stuff after veiwing/listening to it through file sharing are recorded here. What about all of those people who don't buy their movies after they download them, even though they enjoy them? Not that I'm supporting the RIAA or MPAA in any way, but people are still getting a free lunch at their expense. I suppose that their revenue does go up from file sharing, but will it be that way forever? If file sharing became more accepted, would people still go out and buy their CDs and DVDs after downloading them off of various file sharing programs?
Theory of flight?! I'll teach you the theory of fist!!
* For better quality recordings
* For a medium they can easily watch on their TV
* To avoid lengthy downloads
* To own the complete set
* The medium became available
This will not apply with the advent of savvier customers who own a DVD burner (for ripping and creation), the spread of digital tv, and increases in bandwidth. It is feasible to download a high quality episode or two now, but full seasons at high quality are still too large -- but not so out of reach once your connection speed is quadrupled in coming years.
I'm not sure I look at it as a failure on ANYONE's part. In general terms, the problem is simply this: in the past, Intellectual Property of any form (be it books, music, etc.) at least still had SOME natural element of "scarcity" about it, since its distribution was still limited by natural factors, such as printing expenses, logistics and transport expenses, etc. These factors made it nearly impossible for information consumers to re-distribute intellectual works.
Nowadays, however, the Internet has finally broken down even this barrier completely, to the point where we can now distribute intellectual property to the entire world with only a few clicks of a mouse, at virtually ZERO cost. At this point, the ONLY way we can now make intellectual property "scarce" or have any real economic value, is by trying to limit or deprive people of "natural rights" that they otherwise would have.
There are STILL two classes of people in intellectual pursuits: those who create information, and those who consume it. The sooner people realize this, the better. It is high time that we start accepting the idea that we MUST limit the "rights" of consumers if intellectual property is to retain any value at all. Information is may be easy to distribute, but anything that is truly valuable to people is NOT by any means easy to create or find. If we are to make it worth people's while to create music, art, databases, or any other kind of intellectual pursuit, we MUST come up with a way to limit the ability of information consumers to re-distribute such things on their own without payment to the person to created the information.
Well, I do think the music industry needs to find the online equivalant to the listening station at the record store. Find a way that people can listen to a an album once, so they can see if they like it. This is dificult to impliment, obviously. I don't have a technical solution myself, but I know it needs to be done because the market demands it.
Without that side of the situation also investigated, this "research" is pretty much a bunch of useless self-selected self-reported anecdotes from people who - let's face it - have plenty of motivation to exaggerate how commerce-friendly their activities are.
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Sorry for the rant... it's frustrating to see article after article of back-patting amongst the filesharers who claim to have no problems with not paying for items. As an artist (web design, photography), I would be greatly displeased if I found out others were taking my photographs and making copies of them without my permission, when I was attempting to sell them. If my artwork was horrible, and the people copying my artwork claimed that, why would they take my art? And if a portion came back after copying it and quietly paid me for it, does that make the initial copying "okay"? I think not.
What about it? Unless they stole the CDs to get those rips, it costs no one a penny except the guy who bought the hard drive and the bandwidth.
How much of their music do they actually own?
Unless they are a music publisher, none of it. You think those CDs you bought means you "own" that music?
You bought a CD. You can sell the CD. The CD only happens to contain the music - scratch it so it doesn't play, then see how much you can get for it.
Now, where there is no tangible good, there is no "loss" and no ability to deprive others - and, therefore, no ownership. As someone who just lost about 40GB of music to the brain-dead mandrake partition manager, I can personally attest to this - the "loss" was entirely my own.
My friends like to tell me that they wouldn't have bought the CD anyway, so downloading it doesn't hurt anybody. This may be true in some cases, but I think most of the time people just decide that they wouldn't have bought it post download.
I'm sorry you missed this, because that's the whole freaking point!.
Think about that part again...
I have avoided making purchases in spite of the fact I used to spend - literally - thousands of dollars a year on records, tapes, CDs and DVDs. Through most of my life, in fact, because I'm one of those "artsy" types who likes to have lots of the good stuff around. You think I don't miss my Smashing Pumpkins collection? My Alice Cooper discography? Sgt. Peppers?
You think it doesn't suck boycotting these motherfuckers? You really think none of us are making sacrifices? You think I can't tell the difference in sound between the MP3 rips available most places and the CD? I wish these motherfuckers would pull their heads out of their asses and get it together to the point I didn't feel like a traitor to my ethics (not to mention my Constitution) when I entertain the notion of giving them my money to replace the tangible items I have lost.
Most of the time you can find 30 second clips on Amazon or CDUniverse, even for small bands. I can see downloading copies of songs from bands that you cannot find any legit means to sample, but stop using this bullshit excuse of "oh they're just sampling" to justify most peoples' use. They don't delete the music and they keep listening to it in most cases. One of those little inconvenient logical twists is that you can also argue that many people wouldn't have bought the album anyway, because with Kazaa, et al. they don't have to.
The reaction of the people I lived with at my dorm when they saw that my music collection was not only legit, but that I had almost as many MP3s from my used CDs as they had taken off of AudioGalaxy was just... shock. I'm not rich, by any stretch of the imagination.
And you know what the irony of it is? Many of these "kids who couldn't buy them anyway" were driving much nicer cars than my 11 year old Honda Accord. It's nothing more than a bunch of rich brats who don't want to spend $10-$15 on a CD so that they can upgrade their beamer, at least around here. I just got Draconian Times by Paradise Lost in the mail today from Amazon's used products market. It cost me $5 before shipping and handling for a total of ~$7.50.
I have even more contempt for the RIAA than most of my geek peers because unlike them, I actually own all of my music that the RIAA wants to control. I didn't get it off of a file sharing network, I bought it either from a store or from the iTMS. That is also why when I bitch about those bastards that older people will actually listen to me. File sharers are free loaders, people like me have paid our dues to the RIAA and are getting shafted anyway.
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Or make it so that when you buy a disc it includes a code that lets you go to the web and...the band will let you ask them a couple questions which they promise to respond to.. Or they will grab their digital camera, take a pic *just for you* and send it.
Even better would be that you dont *hafta* pay, but if you go to their web site and enter the code, you get the ability to pay the band a few dollars directly, for that one time specialty (that way the band gets the money instead of it being filtered through retailer, distributor, label, etc)
Bands that self-promote already do this kind of thing. At least one band with a pretty large following (Einstuerzende Neubauten) has a website with a reasonably active message board, and when you pay your 30 euros or whatever it was, you get access to the parts of the board where the bandmembers will answer questions. Despite being a band with a reputation for strange, noisy music, the members are all pretty nice and do answer questions pretty regularly. You also get access to live video feeds of their rehearsal sessions, archives of the rehearsals, and a CD or DVD (or both depending on how much $$ you want to fork over) sent only to people who paid for that phase of their music (effectively a year or two membership). At live shows the people who support the web site can get camera passes, and they've been nice enough to set aside someplace after the shows where you can hang with the band and other supporters (they play places that hold a few K people, and there are maybe 50 "backstage").
Most indie bands that play small places are fairly accessible, too. They usually have a merch table set up and you can buy their stuff (sometimes at negotiable prices). It's usually run by a friend of the band, or they just sell the stuff at the front of the stage themselves after a show, and you can talk to them a bit. I think most people I know would feel a little weird asking you to just donate a couple bucks online without giving you at least a download, but plenty of indie bands offer complete tracks for free download. They then hope that you'll shell out the $10-15 for the CD, and then come see them when they play your town.
Fairplay to the author - that admission of bias was early on, and upfront. However:
Without the author giving stricter criteria here, one is left wondering if data that did not fit with the authors thesis was 'questionable' - it certianally would fly against his expectations, but that does not make it nesecerally invalid. Granted, given it was on here, there was probably a crapflood from the trolls that was justifiably deleted - but a reader cannot be certain it was just crap that was deleted.
There is also a serious flaw in premise with the study.
The latter quote is somewhat opposed to the former. If the value of a film is ephemeral, as the former implies, why do people purchase it? Both cannot be literly true.
The discussion of TV shows suggests there there needs to be a way for people to preview the shows, before purchasing, in order to drive sales. Doesn't the broadcasting of these shows on TV count?
From my reading of the report, the only thing I can draw from it reliably is: that some section of the people who download media later go on to purchase it.
That's not a strong conclusion, and skirts around some far more interesting (although much harder to answear) questions, such as: What proportion of illegal downloads lead to a sale? How many people would have puchased something if they could not have downloaded it, and how does that vary? [0]
In short, I don't feel anymore informed about anything after reading this report.
[0] For example, I think that highly marketed items (e.g. blockbuster films) and essentially not-marketed items (e.g. music from some unknown band) would show a difference here.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
downloading makes sense. in fact, the providers of these albums should make the songs available on their websites (i mean the whole thing not a 32k clip). I never added to this list but I've paid foreign record companies about $500 for music due to p2p. nothing to american labels because I figure since I still share after I download (so others can try it too), one day they'll sue me and I'll end up paying. not. :-D
Amen.
Not even close. The longer a theater runs a particular movie the more of the box office they get to keep but even after weeks the studios still get over 90%. Movies are loss leaders, for the theater, that they use to get people into what is really a popcorn store.
"...repackaging their libraries first for tape during the transition from 33rpms to LP records, LPs to cassette tape, and cassette tape to CDs..."
Actually 33s and LPs are the same thing, but you're right about them selling the same thing over and over on different media.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
You through? The tell me what makes it "their music" - and who "they" be? The record execs? Surely you aren't arguing that - those guys couldn't invent their way out of an inflatable pool.