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45% of Dutch Media-Buying Population Are "Pirates"
Anonymous writes "A non-government study in the Netherlands found that 4.7 million Dutch Internet users 15 years and older downloaded hacked and pirated DVDs, games, and music in the last 12 months — or, about 25 percent of the Dutch population. But there may be an upside to this unauthorized sharing/distribution: 'The average [Dutch] downloader buys more DVDs, music, and games than people who never download,' with illegal downloaders representing 45 percent of consumers who purchase content legally, according to the Institute For Information Law, which administered the study."
I can't stand this one. Just describe what it is you are talking about. If it's a video, just say "Video", not "Video Content". Nothing is being "contained".
25% are "pirates".
So 25% of the population are criminals and should be in jail?
Sounds like the law needs changing to me..
(Anonymous Dutchman)
An unscientific look at my friends seems to suggest that the people who buy the most also pirate the most. There actually seems to be a fairly consistent ration between amount downloaded and amount purchased.
It's been common knowledge for quite some time now. Only the industry insists on ignoring it.
On the face of it, it's illogical for them to buy anything but clearly there's some good reason for them to do so.
A lot of downloaders have surprisingly high ethical standards. Some purchase a legal copy, don't install it (because of DRM) and download the cracked version instead.
OK. I'll bite.
The article says that a lot of pirates are people that enjoy the content.
Sometimes, they even enjoy the content so much, they buy the official copy, just to inform the publisher that this formula works.
I'm one of them, I have piles of illegal movies and games and even bigger piles of CD's, DVD's and BD-ROMS of stuff I actually like)
Also, not all piracy is done because 'they want it for free'. If you want English subtitles in the Netherlands, you either have to import (illegal, won't play on DVD player) or download your movies, so I but the movie with dutch subs and download the one with English subs.
Oh, and yes, /sometimes/ it is worth the money to import (Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion), even if it costs >$75 to buy.
"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. It's the one thing I am indebted to her for."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You didn't get it right.
Why should people who like owning DVDs, Blurays and Games just buy stuff blindly ?
A lot of people I know download a movie first, and when they like it they buy a Bluray later on. I see this as a win-win for both sides.
Download statistics don't mean anything really.
Forgot to add.
Expect one of the RIAA advertising drones that seem to have been hanging out on slashdot to turn up and tell you that you're just being an evil thief who wants to justify his actions.
You see by complaining about DRM and stupid DRM features like you have experienced you're a "Pirate enabler" and since DRM is purely about stopping pirates you should really stop complaining, take it up the ass,let your hardware downgrade the video stream, sit through the unskippable advertisments quietly, feel grateful that they allowed you to give them your money and like it.
What is this article trying to say? That copyright infringement is good because the people doing it are actually also buying a lot of games?
No, it's saying that the industry is fighting the wrong fight. They're attacking their own customers.
That's bullshit. There is no correlation here, unless you studied the purchasing habits of a set group of people who couldn't pirate stuff for a year and they could the next year.
What the hell does that mean? If the study shows that people who buy more also download more, and people who download less also purchase less, than that's correlation. It doesn't necessarily say anything about causation, but the correlation is quite obvious.
Hardcore gamers buy a lot of games. If hardcore gamers also pirate a lot, then this is a disaster for people making hardcore games.
No. People buying lots of games are not a disaster for people who make those games. Those people finding a different hobby would be a disaster, though.
Put yourself in the position of someone making a game. If the guy who doesn't pay for your game buys a lot of CD's, that doesn't help pay your mortgage or buy your groceries.
People who don't buy your stuff don't pay your mortgage no matter what other stuff they do buy and whether or not they download your stuff illegally. Pirates don't matter. Customers do.
Everyone I know making games is moving to flash games that are ad-supported, console gaming, or doing MMO games.
Then you need to get acquainted with Brad Wardell from Stardock. He's the one who said "pirates don't matter", he's applied this to his single player PC games which don't have any copy protection, and sell very well. His strategy works because he focuses on pleasing his customers instead of chasing them away.
If people want the option to ever be playing single-player games, they need to stop assuming they can get them for free, and free-ride off the honest people who still open their wallet for decent entertainment.
And if companies want people to pay for their games, they need to stop assuming that they can hurt the play experience of honest, paying customers without chasing them towards cracked versions of the game that offer a superior experience.
It's a two-way street. Companies are trying to control their customers, but a free market simply doesn't work like that.
Amazing what a test drive can do for consumer confidence.
I don't think 50+% of the people are actually opposed to copyright. They're just opposed to it being used as an excuse for harmful DRM and other complications. They want to see their movies and play their games, and don't mind paying for them if they're any good, but paying lots of money for crap that doesn't work gets tired really fast.
I have noticed this too. The people who consume the most, well... consume the most. They are just content whores :) Some they will pirate, things they can easily get and like they will buy as much of as they can. They just want the content, whatever is the easiest way for them to get it most of the time. At least this is what I have seen.
So smart producers will make sure that paying for it is the easiest way to get the content. That means paid downloads without crippling DRM. That means your HD DVD or BluRay should simply work at full resolution no matter what. That means CD you buy should be rippable so you can put them on your mp3-player.
It's been common knowledge for quite some time now. Only the industry insists on ignoring it.
Yes, its common knowledge that there is a correlation, but are they in anyway meaningfully linked. I mean, the pro-infringement camp like to point to this and say, look infringement is actually increasing sales... the more people download the more they buy.
But is that true?
Here, for example, is a simple hypothesis that explains the correlation:
People who aren't particularly interested in music aren't buying or downloading much.
People who are interested in music buy and download more.
Thus the real question is:
Does downloading music actually increase the amount you buy, or is it simply the case that the people who are most interested in music download and buy the most.
A lot of downloaders have surprisingly high ethical standards. Some purchase a legal copy, don't install it (because of DRM) and download the cracked version instead.
Don't kid yourself; for every one of those, there is an entire legion of people who downloaded the cracked version and never bought the legal version, or at best buy it years later in some discount bin if they had fond enough memories of it.
The only question is what percentage of those that chose to infringe it would have bought it if that was the only way to get it. Obviously, a huge swathe of them would simply have done without.
Yes, its common knowledge that there is a correlation, but are they in anyway meaningfully linked. I mean, the pro-infringement camp like to point to this and say, look infringement is actually increasing sales... the more people download the more they buy.
Pro-infringement camp? Your choice of words exposes your biased world view. Few people are pro-infringement. Sure, they exist, but most people are simply pro-being able to use stuff. How much they insist on paying money for that varies, but it's all about the content, not the infringement. That's just a by-product of getting at the content.
Does downloading music actually increase the amount you buy, or is it simply the case that the people who are most interested in music download and buy the most.
...
The only question is what percentage of those that chose to infringe it would have bought it if that was the only way to get it. Obviously, a huge swathe of them would simply have done without.
You seem to live in a fairy tale land where there's a magical dial to regulate the number of downloads. Illegal downloads don't cause stuff, they are caused by stuff. If you don't like illegal downloads, you need to look at the real causes.
Even more so, illegal downloads aren't even an interesting statistic to producers. They should only care about the number of sales. If sales and downloads both go up, they're still doing something right. If sales and downloads both go down, they're still doing something wrong. The downloads don't matter, the sales do.
A situation where downloads are impossible is simply not going to happen outside magical fairyland. All that matters is: how do you get people to buy your stuff. Stop seeing downloads as missed sales. Many of them are sales, many others would never have been sales.
Actually Moser Baer has done something similar in India. They crashed the CD/DVD prices from ~Rs.1000 to ~Rs.100 (USD 20 to USD 2)
People now obviously prefer DVD prints over the pirated cam print. This should be and is THE only way to kill piracy.
Eclipse PDE and Me
I'm not supporting DRM, but isn't the illegal sharing of copyrighted materials is the cause of DRM at first place?
The fear that illegal sharing is hurting sales, certainly. Let's face it, copying software is as old as software itself, and trying to prevent that is almost as old. The problem is, it doesn't work. By its very nature, you can't prevent software from being copied, and invasive DRM is certainly the wrong answer.
If downloaders don't like DRM, then they should instead find legal ways to get over with DRM (ie. boycott, complain, sue) instead of giving a good claim to those using DRM on their products.
The downloaders aren't harmed by the DRM, the paying customers are (many of whom resort to downloading the crack despite having a legal copy). That's the entire reason why DRM is the wrong solution. It encourages piracy.
And suing your customers isn't a good solution either. The only good solution I'm aware of is providing better quality and better service to paying customers. That's what Stardock, Valve and (to a lesser extend, perhaps) iTunes are focusing on, and that seems to work.
'The average [Dutch] downloader buys more DVDs, music, and games than people who never download,'
Of course they do, this is something the RIAA (and consorts) can't get through their tick skulls. People who download media, often do that to sample stuff and, on the whole, are more prolific media users and consumers, it's just logical. RIAA has been going after their best customers the whole time, hopefully they will start realizing this sometime.
But even if they do, for me, the whole media industry is without redemption, I'll never forgive them for their tactics.
You forgot to mention terrorists. Selling pirate DVDs is one of the main income sources for terrorists. If you pirate DVDs you might as well be killing your own family, or raping children or whatever it is that terrorists do on the weekend.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
And pot is legal too - that settles it, I'm moving out there...
I thought that many artists earn the real money these days by live shows, anyway? So they're quite content to have their - erm - content downloaded because it gets them known and so people come to the concerts?
Piet Hein.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Not in the Netherlands. We took it from the sea.
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!
I'd have never thought that many Dutch went out on the sea and forcibly seized ships and stole their cargo. Seems rather high, are you sure you got your numbers right? Or perhaps you are using the wrong word?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy
"Patronage only worked because the huge wealth inequalities at the time meant that some - usually kings, nobles and churchmen - had loads of money to spend and wanted to show off to others of their class."
And what is the average wealth of the top 10%? Now compare with the bottom 50%.
THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE TODAY!!!!
It's just that instead of royalty, we have the Gates institution, the Bushes, the Van De Bildts (sp?), etc.
No fucking difference except they don't have to wear a fucking crown on their heads or raise an army.
What if the original poster has an high definition display which doesn't have HDMI inputs (many such "HD ready" TV sets were sold before HDMI was standardised a couple of years go)? The fact that he/she checked the capabilities of the analogue component output with the manufacturer and the seller before purchasing suggests this might well be the case ...
I could indeed rip my original disks to DIVX, but this merely serves to highlight the stupidity of forcing entire classes of consumer electronics devices to disable basic elements of their functionality in an effort prevent illegal mass content distribution that's already happening on a vast scale because CSS is such an ineffective protection mechanism that it might as well not be there.
Even more idiotic is the fact that they're doing this with home systems that no pirate of any sort would even consider using for piracy purposes. Professional counterfeiters need high-volume, high reliability systems, and amateurs use the Internet, so the only possible explanation for crippling domestic equipment with no Internet capabilities that's only designed to make a few copies a month is sheer bloody-mindedness.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I used to work with a guy who regularly performs at bars and taverns. Between that and his music lessons, he makes a pretty decent supplemental income. He can't make a living at it, but not too many musicians can make a living with performing music. That has always been the case, and no musician is entitled to be able to make a living at it. If you're an indie band, you will make a lot more money performing than you ever will from record sales with or without piracy. This even holds true for many big hit music name. Sell your records when you perform and if people copy them, you should be happy that your name is getting out and your patronage has a good shot at increasing.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
The other IP industries don't need 150 years to make a profit, but they do need a limited time (15 years).
Or five years. That's the point, really, though, we should be having discussions about just how short copyright can be and still serve the purpose of promoting the creation and distribution of content, rather than whether it should last two lifetimes or three.
IMO, the content industry has shot itself in the foot with the massive increases in copyright terms. They're now so long that the vast majority of individuals have NO IDEA that copyright ever expires!
That, in turn, means that most people have at best a vague understanding of why copyright exists and why it's a Good Thing. The "social contract", by which we agree to grant exclusive rights for a time in exchange for increasing the flow of material into the public domain is a strong moral argument for limiting piracy, but the 150-year copyright terms make that argument useless. Individuals can't think "Well, I don't want to buy that now, so I guess I'll wait until it falls out of copyright and get it then", so instead they think "Well, I don't want to buy that now, so I guess I'll just pirate it".
Of course there would still be people who pirate stuff that they could just wait for. But the moral argument against piracy becomes much stronger. Strong enough, IMO, to deter a great deal of it. What you'll never deter by moral argument is the "try before you buy" piracy, but I don't see a thing wrong with that, morally or pragmatically.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
actually , a file only contains bytes.
A program can convert those bytes to content , like text , audio ,video , which you can expierence with the hardware.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Just because the RIAA is able to buy its way into congress doesn't mean that the laws it writes are not subject to jurisprudence.
...there are people that are very angry. And they should be.
I believe in the rule of law and do not give 'god-like' status to the government in my mind, or in my obedience to it.
Truth is not a democracy.
The content industry has spread lies and fears based on dubious hypotheticals. Now that it turns out that either they were totally talking out their ass, or had an ulterior motive. This should challenge the system to change, as it is an obligation of politicians and people of a republic.
But given that these multi-billion dollar companies likely didn't get where they are by being stupid, looking at the "real" threat of of a healthy commons, and recognizing the roots of the constitution where it says, "Congress shall have the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", and compare it to what is going on in our legal system today...
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!