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How Battlestar Galactica Killed TV
Don Melanson writes "Following up on the MPAA going after torrent sites, you may be interested in Mindjack's latest feature - Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV by Mark Pesce. It includes a post-script written in reponse to the recent Torrent site shutdowns." From the article: "While you might assume the SciFi Channel saw a significant drop-off in viewership as a result of this piracy, it appears to have had the reverse effect: the series is so good that the few tens of thousands of people who watched downloaded versions told their friends to tune in on January 14th, and see for themselves. From its premiere, Battlestar Galactica has been the most popular program ever to air on the SciFi Channel, and its audiences have only grown throughout the first series. Piracy made it possible for 'word-of-mouth' to spread about Battlestar Galactica."
I watched every episode off of bittorrent. Friday nights at 10 is quite possibly the worst time ever for me to try and see a show. I downloaded the shows and watched them when convenient. I pay for cable and get sci-fi so I don't see how anyone could reasonably consider it stealing.
Of course, now that they're rich, they call doing this 'being a criminal' and that it destoys the chance of new talent (or by extension, shows) being recognized and being able to survive, when the opposite is clearly true.
I work at the leading worldwide online retail store in the world (Amazon.com) and checking the stats for keyword Battlestar galactica in customer search shows a increase of about 750 % monthtly since the torrent incident was reported in the press.
I often read stories about this kind of thing; where a {piece of software, band, CD, Movie, TV Show, etc} gains popularity and a 'legitamate' user base as a result of piracy.
The most commonly used example of this is Photoshop (followed closely by windows). Through a very high piracy rate, and a very low litagation rate, photoshop gained so much market share that it is now the dominant application in its field (bitmap editing).
Adobe didn't condone the piracy of their software, but they also didn't actively pursue minor cases. That is, if some high school kid pirated photoshop, and used to create images for personal use, no biggie. If a company pirated photoshop, and used it for commercial purposes (and got caught), send in the lawyers.
So many people used the software illegally at home that when it came time to make a purchase in the work place, the choice was obvious. People already knew how to use photoshop, and kept hearing the name of the application over, and over again.
By allowing piracy (or in this case, downloading of tv shows) to happen amongst a demographic that 'doesn't matter' (home users that cannot afford the software anyways, or a small number of people that would have downloaded BSG regardless) but have influence over a demographic that does (companies that can afford photoshop, or friends and family that have never heard of BSG), companies can gaing huge market share. It's a grey area, but it has proven positive effects.
I'm really amazed by how many people have said here that they think downloading stuff off the Internet is okay, that it's just like setting the VCR, that it's not stealing. That really blows my mind.
I don't see much point in making a moral argument. I get the impression that talking about karma here would get me laughed out of the room.
How about a pragmatic argument, then? You want to be able to download high-quality TV shows and movies over the Internet, right? You want somebody to set up a store, like the iTunes Music Store, where you can legally get high-quality TV shows and movies. Well, guess what? Every time somebody says "Bit Torrent is just like a VCR" or "it's not stealing" or "I'm not doing anything wrong when I download," you make it just that much harder for Apple or anybody else to open such a store.
Every time you say something like that, you push the date of our opening back by a month.
If you won't buy a moral argument, will you at least buy that one?
...is that it is mindnumbingly irrational.
"I go to a convenience store and use my Star Trek Replication Device to copy a can of Diet Coke, without taking away the existing Diet Coke. I like it so much that the next day, I replicate a case. I tell my friend that I like Diet Coke, and he replicates his own case. Now none of us buy Diet Coke, and they go bankrupt. Noone will bother inventing new soft drinks anymore, since there's no profit to be made."
The whole "this is profitable" argument relies that a chain of events leading up to more sales (or other money-generating events like ad impressions). But if copying the first can is ok, why shouldn't the second, third or 100th be? Why should any of those you market it to bother to buy it instead of pirate it? You end up with a market with all marketeers and no customers.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You are fallaciously supposing a cause-effect relationship where there likely isn't one. People only fansub anime that they like. People only buy anime that they like. Therefore, the fansub vs market size don't share a cause-effect relationship, but actually have the same cause (people like the anime because its good). If its no good, not only would no one buy it, but no one would bother to fansub it either.
Compare the fansubs with the massive marketing machine that anime enjoys today (visit any Suncoast to see what I mean), and it is easy to see that relatively low-quality fansubs with practically no distribution to speak of have almost no effect on sales of anime.
Its the same thing with Battlestar Galactica. People watched the show because the show was good, not because of BitTorrents. The vast, vast, vast majority of the people who tuned into the show did so not because of some guy who watched it on a BitTorrent and told his buddies, but because of a highly hyped miniseries, multiple magazine articles, a featurette in TV Guide, commericials out the ying-yang, billboards, print ads, and yes, even word of mouth of those who watched the show legally (which are probably 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than those who downloaded it via BitTorrent).
This whole article seems to employ a lot of wishful thinking and some very sketchy, highly faulty, and impossible to prove logic to rationalize morally questionable behavior.
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I don't want to come off sounding like your typical anti-corporate zealot, but there's a big big BIG difference between a 12 year old girl violating copyright law and a multimillion dollar company violating copyright law.
Consumers are NOT an organized whole. They are not out to destroy anything. As long as the TV/Music industry chooses to evolve, they will never be put out of business. OTOH, if a company like Microsoft could violate the GPL, they could virtually destroy Linux for all but the most dedicated enthusiast (use their war chest to build a ton of awesome improvements, convert all of the commercial users and a significant portion of the home users, then slowly break compatibility.)
Your analogy fails because commercial enterprise is not the same as personal use. Downloading a TV show might not be "right", but it's not in the same league as major GPL violation. One is for profit; the other is not. Corporations do not (or rather should not) have the same rights that individuals do, and you just can't compare the calculated tactics of a software giant with a bunch of preteen p2p users who just wanna catch last night's Inuyasha.