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Feds Question Big Media's Piracy Claims
WrongSizeGlass writes "CNET is reporting that the GAO's study of big media's piracy claims has raised some questions. (Here are the study's summary, highlights [PDF], and full report [PDF].) 'After spending a year studying how piracy and illegal counterfeiting affects the United States, the Government Accountability Office says it still doesn't know for sure.... The GAO said that most of the published information, anecdotal evidence, and records show that piracy is a drag on the US economy, tax revenue, and in some cases potentially threatens national security and public health. But the problem is, according to the GAO, the data used to quantify piracy isn't reliable.'"
So... It was stolen data?
Just ask the RIAA for their data on piracy. They should have accurate information.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Of course they're going to use whatever statistics, presented in whatever fashion, to make you think that if you don't legislate everything to maximize their old businesses model without change, that everyone will suffer for it.
It's common sense not to take the RIAA/MPAA at their word. Not just because of their previous questionable tactics (suing individuals, scare campaigns,etc.), and how wrong they have been(like the MPAA saying that the VHS would be "the Boston Strangler" of the film industry when it expanded their market tremendously)... they're going to hate anything that, in their view, has a negative impact on their revenue.
Big media piracy question Feds.
Get used to it. Capitalism is dead. Corporate socialism is alive and well.
You know, despite the seemingly ultranerdy reputation of Dungeons and Dragons, there are actually quite a few un-nerdy people who play it. Skipping past a slew of big names, I think one super-cool, hyper-athletic example is enough. Vin Diesel. This guy, who plays total badasses in his movies, is actually a laid back D&D player in his spare time.
How can you effectively attack a position without a comprehensive understanding of it? If you want to say piracy is not leading to a decline in sales, then you need real numbers to back it up. For all the vitriol we throw around here on /., there is a whole lot of anecdotal posturing, but not a whole lot of solid numbers. The same goes both ways, of course, and I'm ecstatic to see the GAO investigating these claims.
Let's lay myths to rest. The truth is where we must start from, not from our foundation of biases. As long as you think that D&D is just for loser nerds, you'll never be able to understand the game and its enthusiastic audience.
apparently they werent able to fill that agency full to the brim with lobby endorsed appointees yet.
Read radical news here
Let's say that I leave my 1995 Toyota Corolla running outside the Best Buy one day. I come back with my $4 copy of "The Frighteners" to find that my car has been STOLEN! I then file a police report that says my car was worth $6 million... would I be busted for filing a false police report?
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
I'd bet that the RIAA's settlement devouring extortion machine is doing more damage to the economy than the piracy is...
Any self-serving statistic which sounds too big for the group that it's associated with is false. 40% losses from piracy? Unrealistic. 25% of all American women have been raped? Not even close (there'd be more rape victims than all other crimes in most jurisdictions then).
...the data used to quantify piracy isn't reliable.
Um, I'm not sure how to say "DUH!" without sounding like a smartass so, well, let's just call me a smartass.
DUH!
Seriously, of course the data is unreliable - it was paid for by the media corporations in an obscure and twisted mass circle of references that would make any academia's head spin. I hope and pray that this investigation is treated seriously and delves deep enough to find the truth that the numbers that the media corporations have been bandying about for years now are all bogus.
I think everyone would be fine discussing piracy and it's impact on the industries involved just so long as _REAL AND ACCURATE_ numbers were used rather than the trumped up bullshit that we've seen so far.
In addition to the fact that most "piracy" numbers are little more than self-serving bullshit, still warm from the asses of entertainment lobbyists from which they were pulled, is the fact that they all too frequently aggregate multiple flavors of "piracy", each with its own distinct properties.
For instance, the only way that "piracy" in the sense of "bittorrent kiddies" can threaten public health is by lowering the cost of sedentary entertainment that helps make us lardasses. On the other hand, "piracy" in the sense of "misrepresenting your sugar pills as some copyrighted/trademarked drug" can and does kill people. Similarly, the idea that bittorrent kiddies are of the slightest use to organized crime is silly. If anything, they are the lower-cost competition. On the other hand, buying poorly-copied DVDs from the shady looking street vendor probably does funnel money in dubiously savory directions.
I assume that this aggregation is largely intentional, allowing a sort of "rhetorical shuffle", where the scariest aspects of each flavor can be pulled out in turn, to create a composite that sounds far worse than it is. Talking about prevalence? Use numbers drawn from casual internet piracy and schoolyard swapping of burned CDs. Talking about risks to life and health? Answer as though all "piracy" involved fake medicine. Playing the "gangs and terrorists" angle? describe all piracy as though it were being conducted commercially by cartels. If you slip from one to the next, without ever clearly distinguishing them, you can fairly easily create an impression that "piracy" has all the worst attributes of its sub-elements.
The GAO needs to say, in very explicit terms, just what they are referring to as piracy. For instance, are they talking about the folk that knock off DVDs, repackage them in semi-legitimate looking boxes by the thousands, and pawn them off on the streets and on Ebay? Or are they talking about the folk that torrent [Insert Latest Blockbuster Title Here]. The summary and highlights both talk about risks and issues such as pirated, knock-off pharmaceuticals being a safety problem (although the scope of the issue, they admit, is hard to determine). That's all fine and dandy and more data and investigation certainly does need to be conducted.
However, the GAO needs to be very strict in saying that, "These harmful effects are caused, particularly, by these harmful activities." Using the blanket term piracy just screams for some bastards at the RIAA/MPAA to hold up investigations like this in some PR forum and say, "See, it really is a problem, we're not just pissing into the wind! Neener, neener, neener," when, in fact, the investigation may be looking into an entirely different market, like the above cited case of pharmaceuticals. I don't have the time to read the full report, yet, but I hope the GAO will be responsible enough to be very clear about which activities, precisely, seem to be correlated with which results. The less they use the term, "piracy," which is a term that has been completely bloated, raped, and thrashed over the past decade or so, the better.
Of course, this is just my opinion.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Its no secret that the RIAA/MPAA have been putting up fake torrents to catch pirates for years. When you take that into account, you can easily inflate the number of "pirates" to near unrealistic numbers.
Company A sets up a torrent hosting a fake copy of Avatar with 1000 seeds, 10000 leechers and 1,000,000 completed downloads.
Company B does a basic search for "Avatar torrent", sees Company A's torrent and records it.
Company C, which owns Company A and Company B, then goes to the U.S. government and claims "We lost over a MILLION Avatar sales from piracy! We demand a government bailout!"
the data used to quantify piracy isn't reliable
Ya think, DiNozzo?
"There's no doubt that the music industry has declined significantly over the last 10 years," Lamy said. "Countless studies have blamed this on the fact that millions of people have been getting their music for free online. That has translated to thousands of lost jobs in the industry and that's undeniable."
I get music for free online!
I get free samples from iTunes every week.
I get free music from magnatune.com every day.
I get free samples distributed directly by the artists and advertised on 3hive.com.
I don't buy as many CDs because there's so much legally distributed good music online. I buy music online as well, but not as much as I used to buy CDs, and I usually only buy a couple of tracks instead of the whole album. So I don't need to pirate music for my demand for the traditional music distributor's high-overhead services to go down.
I don't buy a newspaper any more, because I get better and more timely news online, some through reprinted wire services, some through independent journalists. I'm not "pirating news" any more than I'm "pirating music". I can see how this is a problem, but it's not a problem that's going to be solved by writing stricter laws or putting people into jail... or by charging newspaper prices for digital news. The internet makes distributing information more efficient. Businesses based on a percentage of older more expensive distribution mechanisms are going to have to change or adapt... but trying to use the law to attack a decreasingly important part of the problem isn't going to solve it. It's not going to magically become more expensive to distribute bits... it's going to get cheaper. There's going to be less and less overhead to get your margin from as the industry gets more efficient.
Piracy affects distribution sales somewhat, yes. But the other half of what recording companies do is promotion, which involves controlling how new artists appear on the scene and building up their audience by airing stuff on the radio, movies, and elsewhere. Cultural art like music and movies don't really follow the classic supply/demand rules... the more people are exposed to a song (that doesn't suck too much) the more it enters their consciousness and they want to hear it again. So really they can make or break an artist merely by planning their promotion schedule and exposure, a measure of control they probably don't want to give up.
A pretty good way to save on entertainment expenses is simply to not listen to the radio or watch TV. I've barely had any impulse to buy any album or movie for the past few years, and also no budget for entertainment.
Some time ago I did start listening to some internet radio, and ended up hunting down and purchasing stuff from some artists I found I liked. But without exposure to the promotion, either through piracy or through encountering the music on the radio or ads or wherever, the product had no demand from or apparent value to me. So I believe it's more the cultural control that the RIAA is intent on protecting, rather than the distribution revenue. Piracy erodes more at their control of cultural contributions through authorized channels than at their sales revenue (which mostly goes to people without the money budgeted to buy the retail version anyway, and which only serves to increase their interest in the product).
They're approaching this all wrong.... IP law needs to be rewritten to protect the future rather than the past; attitudes need to change so that people choose retail over piracy or counterfeit because they want to somehow support the artist's future work, and some approach should still allow the freeloaders to freeload, since not much is going to change them and the present-day battle for their mindshare is probably worth more than their walletshare.
Every hard disk not sold by Paramount will be counted as 20 incidents of piracy.
--
BMO
I think you misread the summary. The GAO is saying that while there are lots of reports that show piracy is this big problem, those reports are based on studies that are total BS. The RIAA/MPAA most certainly does not want anyone pointing to this.
Also, the article in the first link says that the GAO investigation is looking into *all* forms of piracy, other than the Somalian kind of course.
In what appears to be a setback for Hollywood and the recording industry, the government said that it sees problems with the methodology used in studies those sectors have long relied on to support claims that piracy was destructive to their businesses. The accountability office even noted the existence of data that shows piracy may benefit consumers in some cases.
once upon a time, there was this communist terrorist unpatriotic business model called "radio"
they would play songs, get this, FOR FREE. anyone could hear it without having to pay money and signing away their rights! can you imagine something so socialist and unamerican?!
then this would create DEMAND for more of the artist's product
of course, in the era of radio, the demand was for vinyl and cassette tapes
but here's the funny thing:
in the age of the internet, the "radio" is the browser and the listening area is the entire world
and the publisher IS THE ARTIST HIM/HERSELF. no distributor needed
and the demand created is for paid concert gigs, advertising endorsements, personalized content, etc.
what is this wacky unamerican world?
i would think it best be called a free and unfettered marketplace: unfettered by an OLIGOPOLY or a MONOPOLY
see the big lie, RIAA, is you are not preserving american financial interests. you are preserving an entrenched oligopoly that simply isn't needed anymore in the age of the internet, and your death means more free and unfettered capitalism, without any oversight and intrusion. i think some people call this "american"
imagine that
corporate interests != free market. and as any student of economic history knows, the true enemy of capitalism is not communism or socialism, it is monopolies and oligopolies strangling the market to dominate it
in short RIAA: the interests you defend represent a distribution economy which has been rendered technologically obsolete, AND you hamper the free market place, AND now you wish to intrude on individual rights enshrined in our constitution in order to preserve your technologically obsolete business model. how about this instead: FUCK OFF AND DIE ALREADY
you've been rendered obsolete. deal with it and die. that is your only fate, whether you accept it or not. it does not reflect well on you to be so thoroughly and inevitably defeated and not know it yet
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd seriously like to know. If they honestly believe piracy is hurting their business and that their data is sound, they should put it on their taxes as a business loss. The IRS will sort it out.
When DVDs became more popular and fell in price, I found that I could get a full 2 hour movie on DVD for $20, while a 45 minute music only CD cost $17. I began to buy more movies than music, and my personal CD consumption fell. I don't know how many others out there were like me, but I doubt I'm alone. I frequently wondered how many folks like me were fueling record companies claims that CD sales slumps had to be caused by piracy.
Now, for the last several years I've been witnessing format wars between Blu-Ray and HDVD, both of which are poising to replace DVDs and convince me to buy my collection of movies a second time. Blu-Ray has "won" the format war, only to be threatened by streaming video and digital distribution. For the last several years I've been reluctant to invest in DVDs that may soon become obsolete, or to invest in new technology such as BluRay (for which I'm also not comfortable with certain consumer-unfriendly aspects). I don't like the modern DRM models either, so I find myself not buying movies anymore and instead rent and stream through services like NetFlix.
Again, I wonder how many people are like me, and how many "lost sales" that are blamed on piracy have absolutely nothing to do with piracy.
And that's even before considering inflated numbers, people who download digital copies of media they already own physical copies to, people who are only downloading because it's "free" and would not buy anyway, and fake torrents planted by copyright holders themselves to trap pirates.
Piracy is an easy scapegoat.