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Ars Examines Outlandish "Lost To Piracy" Claims and Figures
Nom du Keyboard writes "For years the figures of $200 billion and 750,000 jobs lost to intellectual property piracy have been bandied about, usually as a cudgel to demand ever more overbearing copyright laws with the intent of diminishing of both Fair Use and the Public Domain. Now ARS Technica takes a look into origin and validity these figures and finds far less than the proponents of them might wish."
If you're pirating recent then nothing of value is lost :)
...that the people who wouldn't have jobs if there was no piracy are the same people who discovered these numbers?
As I've said before, the actual losses are zero. An opportunity cost only exists when an opportunity exists in the first place. Nobody is crying foul that horse and buggy makers are out thousands of jobs and dollars due to the advent of cars.
To content industry: the advent of the internet results in consumer p2p. It cannot be stopped. Deal with it. Do so by competing against it, not legislating against it.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Read TFA a few days ago... It's actually quite scary that lobbyists can throw around completely made up figures which convince lawmakers that we need law X for problem Y. There should be some kind of accountability for quoting random numbers...
.: Max Romantschuk
And not to mention, the massive loss of dignity to Talk Like A Pirate Day.
We all knew this; having a geek site say it doesn't mean much. Now, if the New York Times did an analysis and came up with the same information, and published it, that would actually be news.
Just remember that 74% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Sig temporarily out of service.
I would estimate the number of jobs lost to intellectual property theft to be very little, and probably mostly due to patents.
Please stop grouping trademarks, patents, and copyrights together.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
It's a ceiling estimate that exists somewhere in the infinite field of unfolding possibility... but it's usually not real in terms of the laws of this dimension.
Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture goes into detail about this subject and comes to the conclusion that it's a load of bullshit made up by the media companies.
Your analogy completely breaks down; buggy whip manufacturers went out business because demand vanished. Here, demand isn't vanishing.
I've always said I'd believe the numbers when an insurance company pays out a policy for the amount, and/or a company writes off the loss to the IRS in tax filings. Generally speaking, I don't accept claims that are in a forum or format that would not be construed as testimony by a federal court. I have never heard anybody with any authority to speak for a US corporation, give a deposition under oath that makes the claims addressed in the article. It is as though they tell their shareholders, artists, performance rights organizations, and their own attorneys, different things from what they tell the FBI, the Customs agents, certain elements in the media, and lobbyists. I'm thinking there might actually be a crime here, but what do I know?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It's turtles all the way down....
Reminds me of the quote: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics
- Samuel Clemens
all the jobs created by piracy? There's been how many software jobs created to come up with new anti-piracy software, DRM and the like. How many law suits have been thrown around bloating the salaries of overpaid lawyers and their ilk. Whole corporations such as the RIAA have been created to combat the travesties of pirates on the high webs.
How many jobs have been created due to the piracy itself. Napster has its roots in file sharing, if not for this company the likes of iTunes would not likely exist. Thepiratebay while not a piracy company would not be what it is right now with out some pirated content.
On the flip side of all of this imagine what the media would be like if artists did it for the art and not for the money. Movies such as Indiana Jones and the Crystal skull wouldn't exist. Aliens, wtf? Thats the kind of "art" that comes out of focus groups and market testing.
Eschew Obfuscation
Who says piracy doesn't CREATE jobs and purchases? What if someone wants to gain some proficiency in learning a certain program (ie: Photoshop, Windows Server, Exchange, etc), yet doesn't have the resources to do that? What if (s)he downloads that certain program and becomes a master at it (making NO MONEY off it)? THEN, they proceed to get hired on at a company that doesn't have this software yet, purchases licenses and then sets it up. Hmm, there are now copies of copies PURCHASED from the vendor.
However, these numbers aren't looked at. They look at the copy (s)he downloaded and tacks that to the tally of money they 'COULD' have received even though there's no way in hell (s)he/he would have purchased it in the first place.
I know as a fact this happens. This happened to me.
So to understand this properly. They are blaming the wallstreet (f*ckup) on piracy??
What really kills me is not that the RIAA and MPAA lied (*gasp*) but by how much they've lied. The numbers they quote aren't even vaguely believable. Even if one fudges some numbers and gets creative with accounting/HR tracking, the numbers are still off by several orders of magnitude. I can understand them fudging numbers (applying lost sales from a downturn in the economy to piracy, for example), but these numbers aren't even close to that. Not by the longest of long shots. As the article says, $200 billion is more than the movie and music industry combined. Are they really claiming they've lost more to piracy than they made? Are they really claiming that 7% of the unemployed are from their industries? Because that's what their numbers are saying...
Doesn't rebadge Snow White as their production, not Disney's.
Whereas GPL violators ARE passing off the code as theirs.
There should be some kind of accountability for quoting random numbers...
Unless you can provide a statistical analysis showing that the algorithm that producted those numbers was reliable, you really shouldn't sully the good name of "random numbers" with such back-of-the-haynes estimates.
Why do people have to be so black-and-white on this issue? Pirates think everything should be free and argue like they're entitled to steal. Argue with them, and they point to illegal MediaSentry tactics and DRM as justification.
The truth is both sides are wrong. The MPAA, RIAA, ESA, etc. forge huge numbers of loss, not pointing to money that shifted to another market. Pirates aren't entitled to steal, but people who produce IP shouldn't be entitled to harass their customers either.
If you really want to solve the issue it is quite simple.
Put out a convenient product, instead of a DRM-ladened one, and people will but it. People will even accept DRM if it isn't too obnoxious. People are buying music and video legally over the internet. Digital distribution is the future and the big boys better embrace it rather than fight it.
Next, if you want to see were the real theft is, it isn't 12-year old girls downloading Rhianna albums, but rather rampant pirating in places like China and Russia, where pirates mass-produce your material and resell it illegally.
The US economy would be vastly better off if they received money from the IP they produced globally. The entire world watches our shows, movies, listens to our music, uses our software, plays our games, etc.
A real international force (unlike the UN) should be able to enforce sanctions against nations who do nothing to crack down on massive piracy. Allowing pirated DVDs to be sold on the street is not acceptable.
Next, consumers in China often have less money to spend than their US counterparts (though that may change) and they are used to cheap prices on pirate goods.
The MPAA should HIRE the guys doing the best bootleg releases over there to turn around quick, legal, localized releases and sell them cheap to compete with the pirate market.
The sad thing is that pirate releases are sometimes vastly more convenient, and better than commercial releases. Check out pirate Windows XP CDs loaded with new drivers, pre-loaded apps, simpler installers, etc.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Wow. Talk a lot don't you.
I agree with everything the "piracy apologist has to say". You're preaching to the choir here.
I know that figure because thats how much an album I wanted would have cost me had I bought it. Instead, I downloaded it. If the download wasnt available, I would have purchased it. But since it was, I didnt have to spend my money. Another perfect example. I saw a training book I wanted, at the store. I came home, search for a torrent, and next day I had it. Again money lost due to piracy. I doubt Im the only one doing this. I know /. Likes to pretend that such pirating activity doesnt exist, but of course most of it is exactly that. People can easily download, so they easily download. Theres no information wants to be free here. Theres no philosophy at all. Just plain old fashioned theft. I would have paid for it, but I didnt have to. I wanted it, and can take it, so I took it.
Im sure the numbers are not as high as these groups claim. But they are by no means zero.
It can be go tiem now plees?
Yeah, these lying, thieving companies need to stop justifying it.
This sort of abuse of statistics happens all the time. Ars Technica's article was an excellent investigation into a very simple question - where do these numbers come from? It's scary how many government agencies just assumed they were true.
However the question is more interesting than the answer because no one has bothered to ask it before. Everyone just assumes that because the numbers come from government sources, they must be legitimate. This question should have been asked years ago.
Instead, as happens time and time again, this shows that if someone throws out a number with enough confidence, people will believe it. And once the number gets an air of legitimacy attached to it because of who's quoting it, no one will question it.
It's speaking something into being that didn't exist before, and enough people believe in it it is, in essence, true. Like the Hogfather in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.
What is the issue is that large companies who base their model upon production physical media are trying as hard as they can, with everything they got, to maintain the demand for their products. And they are allied with the distributors who also make ungodly amount of money selling physical media. Digital media, content downloaded of the web, is a direct threat to their profit.
This isn't about protecting intellectual property it is about protecting the flow of money. Of course I don't really think this is a surprise to anyone reading these forums. While this is counter-productive behaviour that hurts artists and consumers equally I have no doubt that the end for many of these companies is drawing nearer and nearer. Not having a good service for the digital distribution of content is the biggest threat to artists something they are realizing in greater and greater numbers. And I expect over the next decade that a exponentially increasing number of artists will find their audience through the web; and distribute their content directly to their fans/customers.
This of course means that yes, jobs will be lost. Lost because they are a part on an industry that can no longer exist in its current form. Of course most of those jobs are in Asia since we all know that CDs/DvDs are made in Taiwan.
The Long Now Foundation
If the copyright holders want to charge $1 for a song, or $15 for a CD or DVD, that's their business, I'd never pay those prices. When I copy a music or film that's being offered for sale at a price I wouldn't pay, I'm causing exactly $0.00 in losses to the copyright holder.
I usually watch movies which I downloaded through P2P when I ride the bus. If I didn't have the option to download those films for free or for a price I think fair, I would never pay the prices the copyright holders try to charge. I'd watch the scenery through the bus windows.
Or do you claim I'm pirating the view? Do you think we are morally obliged to pay the owners of property near the highways because it's "morally wrong" for someone to get entertainment for free?
In a certain way, it advantages the entertainment industry to claim such outlandish figures. If you're going to sue an average woman for hundreds of thousand of dollars, or bully a 12 year old child for upwards of 25,000$, you need to make your claim based on a tiny percentage of your actual losses. What court would allow a six digit suit against any ONE person when your ENTIRE industry losses only tally up a few millions? It's all part of being able to push around helpless citizens, like the Juggernaut picking on a class of non-mutant first graders.
I don't think credibility is the only reason. Think of it this way; Geeks read Ars, but WE already know the answers to the question! For an intelligent bunch of geeks this debate is already self evident. Politicians and legislators unfortunately only read the NYT, so if you want to get the word out to where it really matters then NYT is where the story should be headlined. It doesn't make the NYT any better than Ars for getting the facts, but 'the mainstream media' is where the political change will ultimately come from. At least that is until more geeks and /.'ers get elected to some prominent government office. Then Ars and NYT will be of equal value for social change, or hopefully even be reversed.
According to TheTrueCosts that $250 billion is EVERYTHING that is pirated, to include imports found in the US. So if it is pirated overseas, and brought here, it goes on our "bill." Anyway, according to the site it says the losses are as follows:
Movies 3.5 Billion
Music 4.6
Software 12
Apparal 12
Meds 32
Car Parts 16
For a grand total of......
80 Billion.
WTF? Where is the other 120-170 Billion dollars? I can't think of much else to "pirate" even though I've never downloaded brake pads before...
You make the fallacy of equating every pirated instance to a lost sale. Many songs are copied that would never be bought otherwise, and the same applies to movies and software. People would simply go without at the price demanded for a legal sale, or find a cheaper alternative (listen less, FOSS, etc.). So to say that sales are lost to piracy is no more valid than flogging the figures of $200B and 750,000 jobs.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You forgot the fourth: Research has shown.
but "random numbers" sounds so much nicer than rectally extracted data points.
How about "Proctonomics"?
Aside from mentioning that The National Enquirer broke both the John Edwards affair story and the Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy stories and was ridiculed for both why the mainstream media tried to spike them (both turned out true), just what constituted trusted media today -- an old name, or results?
Remember that the NYT also thinks that Barrack would make the best president.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
How many lawyer jobs did it create? What about engineers working on DRM and other antipiracy methods? And the guys that make the trailers that say copying movies is stealing, etc, etc. Where would they all be without pirates?
You're making the fallacy that most songs or movies copied would NOT be purchased at the current price, if it weren't available via a pirated version.
The truth is, we really don't know, because we can't form a control group of people that cannot pirate anything.
So you're admitting you're just a whiny, worthless, dreck of a human being with the ethical, moral, and mental development of a three year old who has learned the words "GIMME!" and "MINE!" and isn't scared to use them?
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
even though it in the public domain in the 1800's.
What the fuck are you talking about? That's just a bunch of bullshit - when do newspapers such as the NY Times ever ridicule the National Enquirer? Never - they simply don't refer to alien-abduction NE stories at all.
Moreover, stating that NY Times thinks that Obama would make the best president is also a bunch of shit. Granted, some columnists certainly do think that but David Brooks very obviously does not. Given how deeply in love DB is with McCain, McCain must have given that guy an awesome reach-around.
You're losing sales.
Let's go through the logic of that shall we?
Seems to make sense at first.
Problem with that logic is that it typically implies that every instance of copying equals an instance of lost sales which is clearly and demonstrably not true. Someone who cannot afford the authorized copy will never purchase it so that cannot be a lost sale. Someone who is unwilling to pay the price being asked is likewise never going to be a lost sale. Ergo the only population in question is those who are able and willing to pay the price being asked but decide to pirate anyway. This is necessarily a smaller population.
What really is being claimed is that copyright infringement cannibalizes a percentage of sales that otherwise *may* have come to the copyright holder. For digital works, the marginal cost of a copy is essentially zero so while the copyright holder may lose a sale, he/she/it doesn't lose any cash since they have not lost an asset they owned. It might induce a higher fixed cost per unit since fewer units are sold and the cost cannot be amortized over as many units. A problem to be sure but a very different issue.
It also implies that unauthorized copying never results in purchases of authorized merchandise. It is relatively easy to find examples of products where bootleg/unauthorized copies actually helped drive the popularity of the product to the point where authorized copy sales increase.
You'll notice the word theft never was mentioned because it isn't theft. This doesn't make the copyright infringement any more moral or legal but it does make it a different situation.
First off, downloading something rather than buying it does not mean that the industry lost a sale they might have made had the person bought the IP in question. Getting something "for free" by downloading it means you got access to it without incurring a cost. There is no guarantee that you would have taken the chance on buying the item in question on the speculation that you will enjoy it and feel the expense was justified.
I have in fact downloaded a few tunes illegally, even a movie or two. I do so very rarely as I am not much of an audiophile at all. I have however usually had 2 responses when I am done: either I 1) liked the item in question and went out and bought the album (sometimes more than 1 album if the band was something I liked), or bought the DVD because owning a physical copy of it makes more sense to me than simply having an file that may end up lost with a HD crash or corrupted by something down the road, and because I believe in supporting artists I appreciate. or 2) I end up deleting the toon or movie because its crap and I don't enjoy it. Why keep something I didn't like on my system?
I have, without any doubt in my mind, spent more money on buying things I downloaded than I have cost the entertainment industry in supposed "lost" sales. While I know there are people out there who download anything and everything and never buy anything physical as a result, I would like to suggest that are also people like me who treat downloading as as sort of "try before you buy" system, and the entertainment industry *never* seems to take that into any account at all. Furthermore they seem to take every instance of a download as a guaranteed lost sale, then like to inflate the impact of that download by some imaginary number of other people who also grabbed the torrent from me while I downloaded it, when there can be no real basis for their math on that. Essentially, the entertainment industry should be the *last* authority you can rely on for statistics on lost sales because they have zero interest in providing an accurate estimate.
Its great to see the Ars article debunking these outrageous figures, it would be greater to see the US Government require them to explain exactly how these figures were arrived at the next time they come up, because its pretty much guaranteed they are all smoke and mirrors.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
This is irrelevant, because you still don't have a right to something if you didn't plan on paying for it. Additionally, the people copying songs who you claim wouldn't buy it anyway aren't just copying it for themselves. P2P apps will share those downloaded chunks with millions of other "best friends" of that user, enabling piracy on astronomical levels. Your argument is one in a list of common arguments used to justify piracy and make people feel less guilty about it, but it doesn't change the fact that piracy is solely about going to PirateBay and looking for things to download so you don't have to go to a store and pay the creators for it. The ethical and moral issues run deep enough that pirates build entire mythologies around it involving cultural revolutions and civil disobedience, when the simple truth is that people are just freeloading because it's human nature to be greedy, and with no repercussions, the danger level is reduced in their minds so that it no longer feels like a legal or moral crime against artists. As much as we hated and mocked Lars Ulrich for talking about Napster...he was still right.
I look at it as going green - I'm reducing my environmental footprint by not encouraging authors to make and sell plastic.
Let's torture some numbers here.
Assume you have an average desktop PC consuming roughly 500 watts of power (power supply, 3D GPU, router, cable or DSL modem but no monitor turned on while you're downloading a torrent because you're trying to be environmentally-responsible).
Now let's assume you pay 14 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity.
Finally let's assume you spend one hour downloading a torrent of a new album or movie or whatever. Using the formula (watts x hours used)/1000 x cost-per-kilowatt-hour you discover the one hour download has cost you seven cents in electricity. Not bad, eh?
In comparison, let's assume it costs 25 cents to create a CD. That includes manufacturing and copying costs. Seven cents in electricity versus 25 cents in manufacturing costs (electricity, materials) is looking pretty environmentally-friendly.
Until you think about how long you leave your computer on. An eight-hour night of downloading torrents will cost 56 cents. And if, like me, you leave your computer on all the time, those pennies start adding up.
We have way cheaper electricity rates in B.C. than the rest of North America (6.15 cents per kilowatt-hour) but according to my calculations, I still pay $268.63 per year just to run my computer.
In comparison, I burn nothing but calories walking up and down the aisles at HMV looking for a new movie or CD. And all the electricity used to run the store is for every product in the store, not just one download, so the cost is really spread out (and included in the final price of the item anyway).
I'm not trying to make fun of your idea, but just to point out that while downloading music and movies COULD be more environmentally-friendly, it would require some real strict regulation of when the computer is on/off to really make it pay off.
You're wrong, if you read free culture it provides more then enough evidence to show that equating every pirated instance to a lost sale is not true.
How many jobs are created by pirates? Looks like we have a whole industry that goes after them.
I am more curious about the Album that you would have supposedly paid $79 for. I wouldn't pay that for any album. I could easily do without, listen to the radio, etc...
ANY research about jobs lost or created is usually either bogus or a can of worms. There are just too many variables. An educated guess is the best that can come of it.
Pro-H1B visa biz lobbyists also used job figures once to claim a net benefit; but experts who dug into the studies found lots of problematic assumptions and unanswered questions.
It's a popular political technique because it's hard to prove outright wrong. Its essentially a way to lie and get away with it, or at least never be solidly falsified.
Table-ized A.I.
People don't demand the physical CD, DVD, etc., they demand the content. How that content is delivered is secondary.
If the content is essentially the same, the delivery method is secondary. The problem is that the content is often different in important ways in online-purchased media and physical CD/DVD media. First, the online-purchased media may have a lower resolution audio or video or graphics. Second, online-purchased media often (but not always) has much more restrictive DRM. Both of these reduce the value of online-purchased media to the consumer. The price to the consumer is not reduced to nearly the same extent, if it is reduced at all.
I have bought MP3s online (American Baroque, FWIW), and will probably do so again. I have never bought audio with DRM online, and probably never will. We have a few hundred CDs, and have ripped most of them to our MP3 players; this convenience is very important.
I have also bought a couple of PDFs online, which turned out to be crippled by DRM (maximum 10 pages printed per 30 days, maximum 2 PCs authorized for reading, etc.) and then the store ceased providing authorizations for new versions of Acrobat Reader; the store was Adobe itself. As a result, I will not buy PDFs or any other ebook form until they are available without DRM. Printed books are a similar price to ebooks and much better value.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
You can't just equate a loss to one entity as a loss to an ecomony as a whole, which the proponents of the IP laws always like to do. All theft has an economic loss, however the loss isn't based on the sales price, but the cost to produce and deliver that product which goes unrequited.
While the distributor did not receive that $79.99, someone else very likely did. So you used that $79.99 to buy something else, let's say a new coffee table. That's a loss for the IP market, but a gain for the furniture market. So while the IP industry may suffer due to this behavior and jobs lost to it, the furniture market benefits and jobs are gained in that sector.
So what is the real loss to the economy when theft occurs? The real loss is the labor and materials cost to produce the item stolen along with distribution costs.
While the production of an IP product can be just as expensive as the production of any other product, replication and distribution costs can be driven down to pennies, effectively reaching almost no cost. However, replication and distribution costs of non-IP products can only be driven down so far and will always be a significant cost. You can create and distribute a 1000 copies of an IP product for next to nothing in cost. Creating 1000 coffee tables and distributing those will cost significantly more.
If each product is priced the same per unit, which would cost society more? The theft of a 1000 copies of an IP product priced at $79.99, or the theft of a 1000 coffee tables?
All theft is bad. However, crafting laws based on numbers and logic that is flawed is also bad. IP laws create artificial monopolies. Further extending those monopolies is an economic cost also, since this removes competitive pressures to drive down the cost of the product.
However, even if IP theft were reduced to zero tomorrow, the IP industry would simply trot out another whipping boy with equally dubious arguments. It's in their economic interest to always seek stronger monopoly laws, since this will lead to higher profits.
In attribution theory, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or overattribution effect) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based, explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing situational explanations. In other words, people have an unjustified tendency to assume that a person's actions depend on what "kind" of person that person is rather than on the social and environmental forces influencing the person. Overattribution is less likely, perhaps even inverted, when people explain their own behavior; this discrepancy is called the actor-observer bias.
Not that i regularly approve of the (more often than not vacuous) terminology "invented" (look up the "definition" of self-esteem variability and its effects if you're ever bored for a particularly painful example of such a concept), but yours is just about the paradigm case for a f.a.e., even if you *were* kidding :P
It's been proven multiple times that if you look at actual downloads versus purchases, the loss is indistinguishable from 0. I see the value in having multiple studies for the same claim, but it does make it less interesting for the informed.
Also it's important to note that any figures from anti-piracy groups will have two assinine assumptions:
1) Every downloaded song WOULD have equaled one purchased CD. No one ever buys individual songs from the outlets available to them, and no one EVER EVER buys a CD and listens to more than one song. (I suppose there's some truth that most albums have at most one song worth listening to.)
2) Every single person that downloads songs WOULD have bought every song if it wasn't available for free. (Once again, greatly overestimating what their albums are worth.)
How can it be "loss" when it's just a negative change of the net income, they are still making mountains of money (although the amount is really not relevant here).
Oh, they are trying to maximize the profit. Purely gaining money isn't enough.
I'm slightly Marxist about it.
BS! 1.7M DOWNLOADS is not a 53% increase in business. 1.7M downloads is a 53% increase in downloads. The businesses are spread out throughout the various businesses such as iTunes, Verizon, Sprint, Napster, RealNetworks, etc.
Go back to school.
#2: Uh, sir, I'm not sure that figure will quite do it...
Dr. Evil: Well, okay, then. Two... Hundred... MILLION... Dollars!
#2: Yes, but you see, that really not so much money anymore. Congress spent more than that on their new gymnasium...
Dr. Evil: Alright. Try this then: Two... Hundred... BILLION...
(#2 nods)
Dr. Evil: ...Dollars. Alright--let's contact the press...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
if the provider of the content actually provides something WORTH hassling for (leave aside paying), i go to the movie, i pay, and watch.
but if they do not, and just mass produce shit after shit similar to each other just to gobble up cash (pretty much all production these days), well, in past i would maybe bother to pirate and watch 5-6 years ago to pass time, but now i got tired of even that. i just dont.
see, one can get tired of pirating shit even if its free.
youngsters do that. they will do that until they get up with watching crappy content.
Read radical news here
producing something for $1 m total cost, and then trying to sell it for $10 bucks to millions while having $0.01 distribution costs (thats cd distribution costs actually. not even online) per item and trying to make at least 10 times the profit whilst having a total control of the market is not something we consumers like. your price should be comparable with your cost. you should NOT fuck us under the guise of selling stuff.
Read radical news here
And if you only have Linux machines, Steam is really convenient when you are at a LAN party and want to play Half life 2 with your friends. Just install it, legally. (I've only done this on three machines maybe there is a limit..)
"You're wrong, if you read free culture it provides more then enough evidence to show that equating every pirated instance to a lost sale is not true."
If you read Forbes magazine, it shows data that proves otherwise.
"Studio time, recording equipment, instruments, etc. are not free."
Those are the cheapest part of a sound recording, aside from the artist's time. A pretty good rock/pop album can probably me made in the mid 5 figures. Less if you have a decent home recording studio, which can be built for well under $20K. Promotion is typically the most expensive part of an album and retail markup.
Real Audiophiles don't download crappy MP3s.
The content industry wants you to PAY FIRST before discovering that it's crap that you wouldn't ever want to keep or watch again. No free samples here.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If you read the newspaper (you know, all of them) you can run for Vice President. Even better, if you can't read you can run for President.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
I'll give you a free hint: College students working two jobs at $5 an hour voluntarily purchasing 50,000 CDs in a year. I file that as "unlikely".
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
you can get mp3's delivered by mail? no? then what the FUCK are you talking about?
Let's examine the worst feasible case scenario for buying entertainment: the poor arts student. They may download entertainment thousands of dollars in value every month, far more than their means to own. Naturally, no-one expects them to buy all their media, since it's not possible without multiple unrepayable loans coupled with stupid banks. Also, naturally, because of their big influx of media, a few more or less pieces of entertainment here or there obviously won't phase them too much.
However, think about what would happen if they didn't have access to any media, retroactively. Would they still be unphased? Is the value naturally that low, or is it just from gross oversupply? Would they miss it? Would they just think, "eh, it's just a few hundred gigs of crap per month. I'm sure I can entertain myself with MS hearts, or something like that."?
Pirates tend to underestimate just how much they are addicted to their habits, and how much the "crap" they download is worth to them cumulatively. Hence the (false) evaluation of "Value: ~zero".
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Uh, no he isn't, he's saying that you're losing sales. By not enforcing piracy, you will lose sales that you otherwise would get. It's a completely separate fallacy (that's equally ridiculous) to assume that just because individual instances of piracy may or may not be counted as lost sales, that sales haven't been lost.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You are a dolt. Read what I said again, and understand. And stop pulling numbers out of your ass; it makes you look retarded.
A study would be nice wouldn't it? There isn't one.
So I guess we will have to go on common fucking sense? Theres a whole bunch of articles that note a slight net decline in sales (per track) as people move from CDs to digital distribution. Common sense would attribute that to people not wanting a whole bunch of filler and the "Radio Edit" that usually comes with a whole album.
Basic logic would then suggest that if sales aren't being impacted by piracy, then the pirated tracks are not supplanting purchases.
Common fucking sense would tell you that your mates would never have purchased that 100 gig mp3 collection.
Dolt? Retard? You, sir, are a cunt. You are trolling around with your retarded dissenting opinion, ignoring any information avaliable, and bleating "more studies are needed".
So again: College students won't spend thousands of bucks on CDs. They don't have thousands of bucks. Retard.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
"If you read the newspaper (you know, all of them) you can run for Vice President [wikipedia.org]. Even better, if you can't read you can run for President [wikipedia.org]."
and if you read socialist monthly, you can run as the first african american president.
So you claim there are articles, but no studies. Very interesting... I can only assume that the articles are making baseless claims, just like you are.
No where do you even back up that sales aren't be impacted by piracy, yet you build your whole argument on that premise.
You also assume that every college student has a 100 gig MP3 collection.
So are there studies or aren't there? You claim I'm ignoring information available, but there's nothing but articles speculating. Why should those articles hold any more weight than your arguments, where you make up numbers?
You then claim that college kids won't spend "thousands of bucks on CDs," because they don't have that kind of money. Again assuming that all college kids are poor (a silly assumption), that all of them wouldn't spend any amount of money on music.
Your best assumption is that stealing is ok if you wouldn't have paid for it anyway. Ya, good logic there.
Don't get mad at me because I'm being honest about what's going on, and that I'm simply throwing out there that the truth is likely in the middle; piracy IS hurting sales, but not as much as the RIAA claims, but probably more than you admit.. which is pretty likely since you're whole argument is that they are losing $0.