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Is Piracy In the Consumers' Best Interests?
moviemodel writes "Warner Home Video in China are beginning trials of 'simple pack' DVD releases at $1.50. They state they are doing this as a test to see if they can recover a market lost to pirate DVD's at 75c each. They also sell higher priced and more complete DVD sets as 'silver' and 'gold' packs. Maybe this marks the beginning of movie industry realism and long hoped for shift in business models, forced by piracy. Perhaps they can take it on as a better model for movie downloads worldwide, facing the same problem of competition from pirated movies. Is such a model viable in the long term?"
stealing isnt rigth term.They just copy the information.Nothing stolen.
I wonder why people look at "piracy" so
prejudiced, it isnt a very good thing helping more people to get their entertainment and information?
At cheaper cost and even free with file sharing (BitTorrent,file hosts,etc).
Piracy is "wrong" because it promoted as such by cartels that hold copyrights.
Free world doesn't need such leeches.
They will get rid of sooner or later.
12 of 36 000 is 1/3000 = so your math is out by a factor of around 10.
$8 for a DVD isn't so bad (assuming the rest of your calcs are correct - I didn't check)
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
A few years ago Polish magazines started to include DVD movies. I'm not sure how the deal with the distributors worked but essentially you could buy a magazine without a movie for $1-$2 or with a movie for $3-$4. With some less popular movies you could even get 2 or 3 movies in one magazine so one movie could cost you $1 (I got 3 excellent Almodovar's movies this way). The magazines were doing it for the promotion and probably didn't earn anything extra (but got more circulation). The movies were indeed basic, in a paper envelope, without extras, without other language versions but they were just fine. The movies were not new but you could buy good movies that were a few years old or sometimes last year's movies. I don't know how the deal worked for the distributors but I bought several movies that I would never purchased for a full price so they got a profit from me. The only drawback was that the selection was limited (essentially with several magazines on sale at a time you could choose among several titles). But you also got the magazine (ussually a stupid one, though) free. The movies are still sold this way so it seems it is profitable.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
That position is very short-sighted. It isn't "theft" to extend copyright laws. The rough analog to the copyrighted material devolving from private property to public property is Congress writing a law that causes your house to be turned over to the city after 100 years. While you almost certainly will be dead when it happens, what public good is enhanced by destroying private ownership?
That's not even a roughly accurate analog. Real property is finite. There is only so much real estate on the planet. Ideas are not. Therefore, scarcity of real property exists without any outside involvement by the state or any other actor. Scarcity of intellectual property is a legal construct designed to provide people who create innovative ideas with the ability to profit from them for a short time, in order to spur the development of new ideas, which are beneficial to society as a whole.
The impetus for creation of intellectual property right flowed from the goal to improve society by providing a carrot to innovators. It was government intervention in economics, not the development of a fundamental right akin to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
While I'm sure the public good can be shown to be "served" by confiscating physical works of art, it still smells like theft to me. Is the case any less obvious with intellectual property that is essentially entertainment?
The public good has not been shown to be served by confiscating physical works of art, which is why in the United States the government can't just come and snatch up that Picasso you have hanging in your den. Intellectual property that primarily serves entertainment purposes is not physical. It is constructed by the legal system, in the same way that any other IP right is constructed. Recorded art in particular is the beneficiary of government largesse.
If there were no way for us to record musical works or create movies, artists would still be able to make money through live performances, because those performances would be naturally scarce, without any government intervention. This is in contrast to the situation we have today, where music and movies are anything but scarce. They are all around us, distributed in a wide variety of forms. Yet the movie and music industry would have the government continue to enforce an arbitrary scarcity that bears no relationship to economic reality. If we were talking about the distribution of physical products like silicon chips or automobiles, we'd call this protectionism - government intervention that serves no party but the big businesses being protected. Ultimately, it doesn't even serve them, given that it only shields them from economic forces that should be causing them to alter their business model.
Copyright coverage for a short time does spur creation of new art, but copyright of any duration is always a tradeoff between the previously-existing natural rights of society at large and the artificially-created rights given to the copyright holder.
"The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but '[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.'" - Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. (1991)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I wish I could agree with moviemodel's dreamy idealism, but I've seen enough of the ugliness of the MPAA to believe that it's completely unfounded. The situation in China is desperate, it's not only cheaper, it's often more convenient to purchase pirated movies there, and often you're getting some pretty decent fake packaging and decent quality rips too. The MPAA does not have the power to manipulate the Chinese government as they do in this country and they are finally realizing that they must compete at the basest level - competitive pricing, to survive there. Between lobbying and lawyers, the MPAA will continue their reign of terror in the US at least for years to come.
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Congress has breached a lot of such contracts with the public in the past fifty years or so.
Perhaps the difference between me and most Slashdotters is that I have actually been alive through those 50 years.
To me these breaches are not historical breaches of contract with the public, but actual breaches with me.
I was made specific promises that specific works would enter the public domain at a specific time.
They did not.
This is the breach, not merely that copyright law was modified.
KFG
I think the contributor needs to check his sources....
;)
Walking into the supermarket tonight I bought "V for Vendetta" for five RMB, currently thats about 60 cents. He's obviously a tourist.
It really is that bad here - but ive noticed that some studios are already doing this. Ive seen 60 RMB ($7) movie packs that are what we would see in the states - but who the hell would think of buying that when the best movies are not only cheaper but on every corner and more convenient. That said I have seen some maor releases (Harry Potter for one IIRC) that were on sale for only 20 kuai ($3) but still - when I can get it for 60 cents and its just around the corner.....
Its funny, a few weeks ago there were (almost) no bootleg DVD's for sale in Beijing. Apparently the government randomly declares "No Illegal Wares" weeks like twice a year. Who knows. The more I stay here the more it makes sense - and that is the scary part
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Thank god somebody understands. If everything was priced relative to earnings you might as well go and make everything free, because you've removed my incentive to work hard. If I could do nothing all day and still go out to the store (or down to the auto dealership) and take stuff home with me, you can damn well bet I wouldn't be busting my ass getting up at 6:30 Monday morning to go to work.
Yeah, I've heard all these quasi-socialist arguments that "people aren't motivated by money and physical goods, they'd still work for the joy of working," and I think it's a load of crap. I'd probably do something with my time, but you can bet it wouldn't benefit anyone but me: I'd be sitting around building radio-controlled airplanes, probably, or maybe seeing how cool a home theater I can build in my basement. The world and the economy doesn't benefit from that, at least not in the way it benefits from the job I normally do (and wouldn't do, if it wasn't the ticket to a standard of living that I enjoy).
Any system which gives a low-value worker access to the same things that are available to a highly trained worker just destroys the motivation for a person to work hard and produce more. People work because they want things: a bigger house, a nicer car, put their kids into better schools, whatever. If you go into work every day because you honestly love your job, and you'd do it regardless of whether or not you were being paid, congratulations on putting one over on your boss, because they're overpaying you! The great majority of people do what they do because they think it's worth doing in return for the compensation they get. Make it easier to get that level of compensation, and people will take the easier jobs.
It should be obvious, but there are a whole lot of quasi-socialists who have their heads in the sand, and think that they can somehow create this wonderful world where rice farmers in Indochina and software engineers in Delaware can both drive the same car and have the same DVD player because they both work as hard. It doesn't work that way, and never will.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In China, the price of pirated DVDs in Shanghai (pirated DVD capitol of the world -- they have brick and mortar shops) is firmly set at 8 kaui by the pirated DVD mafia. Whereas you can haggle with Shanghai shops on nearly anything (I got a North Face jacket for 20$ when they wanted $150), I couldn't once budge even a street DVD hustler off the 8 kuai price point (they're people that walk up to you on the sidewalk and sell unsleeved DVDs). The street "Rolex" hustlers, by comparison, would usually haggle down to a 10-to-1 ratio off their starting price.
8 kuai is right at $1 right now (buying at 7.99, selling at 8.02), not 75 cents. So they're coming in closer to the pirates price point than that. And Chinese people I talked to actually prefer real goods; it's just hard for them to justify when the pirated goods are so much cheaper... sounds like it should work.