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Piracy More Serious Than Bank Robbery?
An anonymous reader writes sends us to Ars Technica for a dissertation on how detached and manipulative the discussion about copyright is becoming. "NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing, when it should be doing something about piracy instead. 'Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,' Cotton said. 'If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.'" Ars points out how completely specious that "hundreds of billions" is.
I have to agree with this AC. I have found myself appalled when people actively voice notions like business interests should be afforded more protection than individual or civil interests. These people TRULY think this way. It's not just another attempt at manipulation of the system or any such thing. These people have the mental malfunction in their brains and they truly believe it's correct.
This should lend a little light over what lobbyists and various government officials and legislators might be thinking and where the root of the problem may actually lie.
Seriously though, this debate is getting tiresome and at the end of the day, I feel no more enlightment on the subject.
These people fail to see how stupid it is to scare the public with billion dollar figures. I frankly don't give a crap if company x lose a y dollars per year. My point is that if a company is struck by heavy use of piracy, then their business module is entirely misplaced. It could be too expensive, too difficult to purchase, only a tiny useful function out of many less useful ones, and many other factors that contribute to such outcome.
Take a music CD for example. It's expensive, impractical to purchase, often DRM:ed and includes maybe two, three or four songs that you like. This is why iTunes and other comparable services are slowly taking over that "lost" segment that chose piracy over unthoughtful music labels.
I don't believe that we are criminals by nature and I doubt that most of us prefer to "steal" rather than purchasing, but the companies have to find solutions very soon and adapt before piracy becomes a habit and not just an escape.
Last but not least, I am yet to see an anti-piracy statement that admits to the positive effects of pirating. After all, that's how many artists, movies and software developers gain a lot of attention. Do you think Photoshop would be widespread in Europe if there was no alternative to that idiotic $1,500 price tag? At least people pirate Photoshop instead of turning to the cheaper alternatives. And when have you heard Adobe admit to this?
Full Tilt
> Really? Is the time and effort put into creating entertainment, imaginary? If someone pirates entertainment, can all that be gotten back?
Err... if someone produces entertainment that no-one buys or pirates, can the time and effort put into that be gotten back? I don't see your point. Just because time and effort are put into the creation of entertainment is real, doesn't mean that the "losses" caused by someone pirating that entertainment are real. It's entirely possible that every person who pirates the entertainment would never have paid for it, even if it were not available for pirating. Then again, it's entirely possibly that every person who pirated the entertainment would have paid for it were it not available for pirating.
Until someone determines a half-way reliable method of calculating how many people did not pay for the product directly as a result of it being available for pirating, then the "losses" remain as some unknown value between (0 x $PRICE) and ($NUMBEROFPIRATECOPIES x $PRICE).
Sorry what was that? I was just busy making a backup of my DVD of The Big Lebowski I bought last week so I could remove the "piracy is a crime" intro to the film. It's so annoying having to wait through 2 minutes of "don't copy this or else!!!!" crap, I want to drop the DVD in and watch the film straight away.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Insightful? That mod wasn't posted by a software engineer i'm sure.
As a proud member of the development corp, I do really feel insulted to hear the sum of my creative energies, and the sweat and blood of my work referred to as an imaginary product. That said, I understand what you're trying to say. The real problem the MPAA and RIAA have is trying to apply traditional economic theory (based on scarce-resource distribution and pricing) to an unlimited resource (something that once created, can be replicated ad-infinitum.
Why they want to do this is obvious, it's a licence to print money. Unfortunately for them, under these traditional economic theories it is the scarcity of a resource that makes it valuable (gold, platinum, wood) and an unlimited resource has very little, or no, monetary value.
Thus DRM, which is fundamentally an attempt to impose scarcity on an unlimited resource, thus creating artificial value. It doesn't work, because the methods are inefficient and if content has intrinsic worth itself, DRM reduces it by making it difficult to use.
I'm not sure how we're going to get around this particular problem and it is concerning for all of us involved in creating the content. There needs to be money in creation in order for us to get paid to do it, but the traditional methods of commercial software/music/films may not be the most efficient.
Perhaps we need to explore commoditization of software, or perhaps a return to the patron model enjoyed by artists of the last several centuries. Hard to say.
Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both
Let's go back in time 100 years. It's 1897. Music of that time was different, granted. So was the technology to record and distribute it, but artists were paid for performing music. An artist became famous because they were good. If they were really good, people would help them out and let them record for a modest fee, but the sales would get the artist a majority of proceeds.
Eventually, music became something influential on a corporate level. Zoom forward to 1957, 50 years ago from today. Artists began trying to market themselves to "record companies" in stead of their audience. The record companies would fund up and coming artists, who were usually established acts already. The elusive "record contract" would be still geared to pay the artist a good sum of money, but the cut for the record companies was getting bigger. This is where it began to snowball.
Lets move to more recent times. Now we have record companies finding talentless bimbos and tryhard boybands to front this multi-billion dollar industry. Not only that, the record companies are taking most of the proceeds and the artist is forced to tour/mime in order to make the kind of cash that would have been available to them 50 years ago. Good artists who may not be the 'in' thing at the moment (as in, not pop/emo/rap) struggle to get a recording contract. Even when they eventually do, it's on the record companies terms. Desperate to get noticed, most new artists will sign anything just to become famous.
So now record companies are making ridiculous amounts of money off the consumer and kicking the artist to the kerb when they are no longer the 'in' thing. This is bad for music, and bad for the consumer.
So when I torrent the latest album from the artist I like, does that make me a criminal? Even if I go to their concerts, buy merchandise and do all I can to get them money knowing that the record companies don't get as much of a cut from touring? I think, if anything, I'm doing the right thing. It's a very Robin Hood mentality, but stealing from the record companies and giving to the musicians is the way I believe in.
I think if everyone else did what I do, music would be in a better place.
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- You will feel that you can get music for free, and spend more money on other things, or
- You will be exposed to more music, and spend more money on music.
For some people it's the former, for others it's the latter. I've seen studies that show that both are the majority. To me, this says all statements of the form 'piracy cost us $x' should be taken with a pinch of salt.The recording industry has lost several sales to me in the last month, even though I don't pirate music. I listen to Radio Paradise (which won't exist much longer, if the recording industry lobbyists have their way). A few times recently I've heard songs I like, and gone to iTunes with the intention of buying the album. Since it wasn't available without DRM, I've decided not to. If it had been, then that's a £7.99 impulse purchase they could have had. Did I pirate the music afterwards? No. I just chose not to spend any money on music this month. Instead, I went to see a play performed outside locally, bought a load of books, and rented a load of DVDs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"I spoke to a guy who does DRM for an online game publisher. Once, they rewrote their algorithm which instantly rendered all existing cracks for the games useless. Sales jumped by 40% that month. Why? surely none of those who cracked the stuff would have bought it anyway?"
I downloaded for free an album that I didn't had. Gave it to a friend. One week later, said friend told me a coworker of hers bought the album after hearing it in her car.
I downloaded a game for free, a mainstream game from an editor which doesn't have an active anti-piracy stance, and next week my step brother bought it.
See, you have one anecdote, I have two.
Perhaps we need to explore commoditization of software, or perhaps a return to the patron model enjoyed by artists of the last several centuries. Hard to say.
As a consumer of some custom made applications, I'd have to say this is the direction the market is going. Rather than paying a low price for off the shelf software that doesn't do what we want, we pay developers tens (or hundreds) of times what a boxed software would cost in order to make exactly what we need. In exchange for the exorbitant cost, we get direct input on features and design, and the developers know exactly who is using their software and what it's doing.
Am I saying this is the best for all circumstances? No, for commodities like web browsers and image viewers, this sort of mass-appeal software should be inexpensive or free -- I think Apple has done a great job developing a full suite of *quality* inexpensive (and free) generic tools for their platforms. But for more powerful apps that require years of development and research, the patron model is still the most ideal situtation for both the users and the developers.
We can do it very effectively.
- First, ban all trading on eBay and Craigslist etc. That will immediately have an impact on pirated goods.
- Secondly, employ large numbers of suitably skilled IT people to find and deal with all servers which allow file sharing. Shut them down regardless of the consequences. If your website is on one of those servers, well, guilt by association was good enough for Sen. McCarthy.
- Third, punish student file sharers appropriately. Put a large police force (let's call it the KGB for short) in all universities, public places, high schools etc. Send convicted criminals to - well, somewhere unpleasant. I'm sure the Russians would lease the Kuril islands, or even parts of Siberia.
- Fourth, only allow CDs and DVDs to be sold by shops with a permanent KGB presence.
- Fifth, ban all computers capable of storing user-transferred content to everybody except corporations with a turnover in excess of $1 billion per year.
- In fact, to be on the safe side, mandate a return to magnetic drum technology and dishwasher size storage. That will get rid of all those iPods and similar piracy devices.
This will work because, before long, the annual turnover of the presently constituted recording industry will fall so dramatically that losses from piracy will be completely insignificant.Pining for the fjords
You fail to consider what i see as the main driver of piracy....price. Why does a Beatles CD cost $17? The Beatles recorded back in the 60's. The Beatles toured in the 60's. Why is the price so high? So the record labels can promote the next no talent boy band? So the no talent, leech, executives can stay in coke and hookers?
AllofMp3.com had/has the best online music site bar none. You could get just about any format you want, any bit rate you want, etc... And it was priced to encourge you to buy more music. No bullshit DRM. No outrageous pricing. It was priced per MB. So the better quality the recording, the more you will pay. A reasonable model...not perfect...but reasonable.
Why do people pirate Photoshop? Beacuse it costs an arm and a leg. Personally, i use Gimp, which suits my needs. Hell, even Paint.net does most anything a non-professional could want.
The main driver of piracy is the ridiculously high prices charged by the MAFFIA and software producers.
you are mostly correct, but you seem to miss my point. You don't for instance, justify the stealing of phones or phone lines as a means to beat AT&T,
Instead you advocate the ability of others to offer competing services. This is absolutelly valid, and is what I was getting at.
That I have no problem with, its justifying piracy as a means to protest a monopoly which causes me problems.
After all holywood was formed by stealing patented technology and moving to california to escape opressive laws..
Oh wait, shit, um...
"intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year."
A couple of observations:
1. If people were actually forced to buy the 'intellectual property' that they currently copy illegally, I suspect that the vast majority would not or could not. Therefore, there would be no economic or social benefit to preventing illegal media and software distribution. In fact, you could argue that it would do social harm by limiting access to music and films. On the other hand, not preventing armed robberies would have very real and nasty social and economic consequences.
2. If, indeed, intellectual property theft is that high, one could probably make an argument that it is actually helping the world economy. If people/companies actually had to pay out a few hundred billion dollars more to buy legal copies, it would result in a few hundred million dollars less for silly things like capital investment and salaries.
3. I suspect that the bulk of that "hundreds of billions" would be going to a few very large companies that are already making extremely high profits. Making a monopoly stronger through punitive legislation is probably not in the public best interest.
OK, I'll try to go a little slower this time around.
No, because you left the verb "to pay" out of that sentence's first clause, and demand for entertainment products is highly elastic. People have the ability to be entertained by shitty products (I certainly do), but it doesn't mean they view them as worthy of money, or that their absence would leave a gap in a person's entertainment that they'd be willing to pay to fill with those products.
This is the same flawed logic put forth by the "Nader cost Gore the 2000 election" types. It is predicated on the mistaken assumption that, in the absence of some options, most people will select other options that they find undesirable just for the sake of selecting something. While this is true for products with a rather inelastic demand - food, for example - it is certainly not true for entertainment. This logical error also stems from equivocating demand for the product with demand for the content. Demand for luxury goods is not just a function of content, but of price, and the fact that someone pursues a free product does not logically imply that they would pursue the same product with a higher price. The market for free downloaded movies is not the same set of people who comprise the market for movie tickets and DVD's - there is crossover when looking at movies as a whole, but movies aren't purchased as a whole, but individually. For any one movie, these are different groups of consumers.
The fact that movie studios are making record profits from blockbuster movies indicates that they still have a large market of consumers willing to pay for their product - not just the audiovisual content of the product, but the associated theater experience or nice packaging. People aren't buying less DVD's, they're just seeing more movies that would have normally slipped under their radar when price is a consideration. In my experience, downloading movies enables consumers to make informed choices before laying down cash for a legitimate DVD. It doesn't lead to them buying less DVD's; it just greatly increases the likelihood that they will be pleased with their purchases.
As silly as conflating piracy (selling a substitute for a product, or stealing that product for resale) with the creation of an uncapitalized market for a product that did not previously exist, based on the confusion of "product" and "content?" Not really.Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
lol me too! maybe we'll be there soon :P
Anyway, that '100's of billions of dollars' comment annoys me because
intellectual property theft is more like 'i could've made an extra 10k on the top of the 2 million i already made!' Where as bank robbery and break-ins are actual physical property being taken/damaged. Something someone's already paid for. I can understand why musicians and software developers etc. get so upset over piracy, but anyone who thinks that law enforcement should spend more time and money fighting piracy rather than bank robberies and other crimes where people get hurt and even die needs to wake up and take another look at reality.