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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?"
They have less of my money at $1.50, which is good. When they get what they're currently charging there's a risk they'll make more crap films starring clueless overpaid actors, and that's not a risk I'm prepared to take. I only watch a film once, so why pay more for a DVD than it costs to watch in the theater?
At least they can make some money now selling cheap DVDs instead of nothing selling overpriced ones.
Copyright has its right to exist. When someone creates something, he puts time and money behind it, develops it and he should have a chance to earn money that way. If you take this possibility away, the looser would be the artist who is already getting ripped by the studios. Studios wouldn't sign contracts with him anymore. They'd wait for him to perform, tape it and distribute the song that way, without giving him a cent. Or they wait for him to spend his own money to press a few CDs, rip those CDs, hype it, and sell it as their own.
And we all know how much they know about marketing and hyping, and how little about art.
In fact, killing copyrights would even put those artists out of business who still create art. They're few, they're well hidden on the 'net and you have to search them, the studios won't throw them at you.
And as a bottom line, we, the ones who enjoy their art, would be the loosers on this one.
Copyright isn't the problem. The problem is that the balance is off. Copyright came into existance to create a balance between those who produce, those who distribute and those who consume content. The balance is way off. But that doesn't mean we have to throw the right out, we just have to put it back into balance.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1.50? You don't even have to go that low. Make them 5 bucks and you already have a deal.
Your plan would work in the US. Unfortunately, the article is talking about China. These are two very different markets. And as deep44 mentioned, when you're competing with 75 cent versions, 5 bucks is still too much. $1.50 seems like a very reasonable number for this trial run.
This guy's the limit!
If they sell discs where the main feature (i.e. the movie itself) is crippled, for example by lower bitrate than on premium edition, by having no English language track, or by having forced subtitles to go with, this won't beat pirates.
If they sell discs with high-bitrate main feature (DVD-9 filled to the brink please), original-language soundtrack available and no UOP gimmicks, they win. Hell, if they do it consistently, they could sell such discs for a whopping $4.30 in Russia and I would gladly buy them over pirated ones. Besides I throw the box away, anyway, and pack the discs into a wallet to save space right away. Just give me the properly mastered stuff, no frills.
To bad I suspect the cheap licensed edition would be crippled. Then pirates, who care about customers more, get my business.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
I think the important thing to note here is that piracy *can* be beneficial in some circumstances. It doesn't mean that it always is.
This guy's the limit!
when you abuse your monopoly position by price gauging, piracy becomes your competition.
Shame humanity has to enact change through illegal acts. Next up we change the US government via sniper rifle.
/= Immoral.. Yet, if something is illegal long enough, people seem to think it is immoral.
Aren't pretty much all changes enacted through 'illegal' acts? civil disobedience, revolutions, founding of the United States of America..
Illegal
--- We need more Ron Paul!
People who steal are very good at talking people into thinking that what they did is OK
Ya mean like constantly expanding the range of copyright laws so that nothing ever actually goes into the the public domain, so the free money cow never dries up?
KFG
I've seen several people refer to pirating as "stealing". Keep in mind, it's only stealing when you would have gone out to purchase it in the first place! At least that's how most justify it.
If I clone something (like a nice stereo, for instance - impossible, but for the sake of our conversation), it's not really stealing it. If I make it available to other people (i.e. like sharing my stuff on P2P), that's almost worse than stealing... but if I clone something that I wouldn't have purchased to begin with, that's incredibly easy to justify, because there's no money lost. Again, I wouldn't have gone out to purchase a $25 DVD, whether it could be had for free or not, just like I wouldn't have gone out and purchased a $1200 stereo when my $150 Aiwa that I already bought works great. There's no physical product missing somewhere... I cloned it. Now if I could only clone a Viper...
The ultimate question in my mind is, what is the actual cost of manufacturing and distributing? It's like a $0.03 piece of plastic, the disc that is. Generic packaging like they talk of here can't cost very much. If it gets 15x the people to start buying movies again IN ADDITION to the people who currently pirate them, well... for $3 or $4 per release like some have suggested, I bet they stand to make their money back.
Certainly the music industry won't be far behind in this little "experiment".
...gives you a unique perspective and brings home reality over their BS they spew. I'm in a similar half a century + change personally screwed by those bozos. A couple of my pet peeves are them continuuing to muck about with gun rights after they promised the 68 act would be "it", no more after that, and later on with the huge illegals amnesty during the reagan years (I think, don't remember, 84??), then they said they would "crack down" and "enforce the laws on the books".
Oh ya, my all time *favorite* "random courtesy roadblocks". WTF is up with that?? Remember back in school we were taught only supremely evil and totalitarian bad places like east germany and whatnot had those sorts of roadblocks (Your papers please!) and how wrong and illegal it would be here?
Man, there's a bunch. You are right, people of a younger age don't have any frame of reference on some of these subjects outside of an academic one.
Now here's one I keep trying to maintain a frame of reference on, the great depression. It's hard, but I try, I keep it in the back of my mind when I look at economic news andd geopolitical events. I wasn't around then, but my parents and aunts and uncles, etc, were, and I distinctly remember the stories they told me about it and how amazingly fast things can change and how utterly bogus the stock market/government currency manipulators are when it comes to hosing the population with their congames. Keep promising them just this huge something for nothing deal until they are all sucked in, then WHAMO, drop the hammer and walk off with all the REAL wealth leaving the peons holding the bag with worthless paper. Seems they pull this stunt on a big scale every other generation or something, because it takes that long for people to "forget" those "leaders" main skill set is *lying*. They are professional grifters.