P2P File Sharing Ruining Physical Piracy Business

TorrentFreak has a short post up talking with a former physical data pirate, who sold his wares in flea markets and made buckets of money in the 90s. By the end of the last decade, his money flow had dried up, and he places the blame squarely on the shoulders of P2P file sharing. "Tony is very clear about why his rags to riches story has gone back to rags again. 'File-sharing, P2P - call it what you like. When you asked a customer why he wasn't buying anything, 9 times out of 10 it was BitTorrent this, LimeWire that ...' P2P is a very powerful machine and although Tony could see that his operation was feeling its effects, he admits that he sat back and did nothing about it and consequently, his business has paid the ultimate price. Other industries affected by P2P should take note: Don't be a Tony. Overhaul your business model. Quickly." One would imagine overseas media sellers will have similar issues, as P2P networks become more common outside of the Western world.

Comments

Mod parent up

[Kadin2048]

I have no idea why this is modded 'Redundant.'

The situation outlined in TFA is interesting precisely because it runs contrary to what you might expect, namely that people would be too lazy to actually download multi-GB files themselves. But the story shows that this indeed is the case; at least the people who are cheap enough to buy pirated software at flea markets put a low enough value on their time to download the stuff themselves in order to avoid even the minimal cost of pirated discs.

I'm not sure what the lesson is here. There's a big question in my mind whether lessons from the 'grey (or black) market' can be taken as indicative of movements in the regular 'white market' -- online distribution probably is a lot more attractive to the kind of low-rent geeks who are buying hot software at flea markets than to very busy middle-classers with little time to spare or technical expertise.

Re:Allofmp3 is almost in a league of its own.

[cp.tar]

The black/grey market rarely has the white beat on so many fronts at once. Usually, in order to get the cheap price, you need to compromise on quality or convenience (need to go to sketchy part of town / flea market, etc.), so that it's only a certain segment of consumers (usually, those who place a low value on their time) who get the pirated version.

I'm not certain where you live, though based on your attitude I will surmise you live somewhere in the developed world.

There are places in the world where the price of software is quite disproportionate - for instance, here in Croatia Photoshop costs about two or three monthly salaries IIRC. And even in the richer parts of the world, there is quite a lot of software which costs a great deal of money, and is still relatively easy to find in the gray/black market.

If the price of the software runs up to several hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and the probability of you getting caught is slim, buying from a pirate is putting a rather high value on your time - it doesn't take more than a few hours, and the savings are vast.

But then, what do I know... from where I stand, capitalism seems to be based on the principle of getting something for nothing as much and as often as you can.

Tony should move to Ukraine

[Viol8]

Piracy of DVDs and CDs is flourishing there. Most people don't even have a computer , never mind an internet connection and if you go down the local markets you will find tons of pirated material (most of it done badly it must be said). Its about time people in IT whether media types or coders really wrenched themselves out of this western mindset where they seem to believe that because they have broadband and a flash PC then the whole world does.

Newsflash: most of the people in the world don't even own a radio never mind a computer.