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EU Piracy Estimates — Just How Inaccurate?
Last week we discussed news that a US government report questioned the reliability of piracy statistics from the media industry. Reader superapecommando sends in a follow-up written by Glyn Moody that examines a similar problem in Europe. Quoting:
"As far as I know, no similar analysis has been carried out for European reports. So I thought it might be interesting to look at one particular European report on the subject — not least because I've heard that its findings influenced some of the MPs voting on the Digital Economy Act. ... the net result of this 68-page report, with all of its tables and detailed methodology, is that four out of the top five markets used for calculating the overall piracy loss in Europe draw on figures supplied by the recording industry itself. Those apparently terrifying new figures detailing the supposed loss of money and jobs due to piracy in Europe turn out to be little more than a re-statement of the industry's previous claims in a slightly different form. As a result, as little credence can be placed in the report as in those criticised by the US GAO."
I still blame Metallica. When Load didn't sell jack because it was the worst album they ever put out they started screaming that the reason that Load of crap did not sell was due to piracy.
They are Janet Jackson's nipple of the piracy world.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
No estimates are going to be accurate. There are many more sources for files than these people will ever find ... and the **AA take every source they can make up and then pass it through a magic multiplication filter (the same one they use to calculate the value of their 'losses').
So when the supporting numbers are well and truly shown to be bogus can we invalidate all the legislation that they inspired as well? Hahah, yeah joking.
Shh.
There's no way to make any kind of meaningful estimate as to how much piracy there is, let alone how much or if any of that results in lost sales or gained sales. No data == no meaningful guesses.
Free Martian Whores!
Apparently, the report writers noted that the sale of eye-patches and peg-legs didn't correlate with industry claims of piracy...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
not very, as evidenced by the compilations of our small band of infomaniacs. what's even more evident is that most of us would rather not know the truth & prefer either flat out lies, watered down 1/2 truths, or just 'good news', true or not. fear prevails again.
never a better time to consult with/trust in your creators, who are not making the headlines right now. stand by.
Just like government services, half the people expect everything for free, the other half foot the bill. Pirates are just following the example their society has laid out for them.
calculating the overall piracy loss in Europe draw on figures supplied by the recording industry itself
Seriously? You know, there was a time when we believed the cigarette companies that smoking was fine based on the stats they gave us - and look how well that turned out.
This kind of self policing industry crap has got to stop.
The "substitution rate" is probably the worst figure in all these papers, mainly because it is far from constant. Perhaps, with enough study, you could find the substitution rate for one specific product in one region, but trying to get a national average by product category is ludicrous.
Since people like blaming Metallica, I'll use them as an example. Note that all these numbers were pulled out of my ass, same as all numbers.
You may get a substitution rate of 50% for Master of Puppets in Southwestern US. You may get a 2% substitution rate for St. Anger in Finland. You may get a 20% substitution rate for "S&M", and you'd be lucky to get a 1% rate for "Acoustic Metal". That's a massive change just for one band. How would you compare the rates between The Black Mages and Justin Bieber? Trying to lump target audiences like that will give you numbers about as meaningful as the ones I just made up.
Listen up, MAFIAA. We care about three things: quality, price, and usability. We will pay for the good stuff, and tell you where to shove your crap. We don't want to pay 30$ for a music album, $20 for movie tickets, or $70 for a game. Finally, we want to get stuff easily, that works with everything, and doesn't come with legal crap that shouldn't have a chance of standing up in court.
And if you can't give us those three things, you need a new economic model. How many bands are giving out the music for free and making money from concerts and merchandise? It's nearly impossible to pirate a t-shirt or an experience. How much money are "free-to-play" games making?
Stop trying to legislate a profit, and start spending as much on those three things as you do on legal fees. Maybe you'll actually make money by, *gasp*, making a desirable product.
In the sciences you put a huge effort into quantifying error. A result might be quoted as:
60
+- 2 due to limited sampling in a Monte Carlo experiment (statistical error)
+- 0.5 due to uncertainties in a previous result that this one relies on
+- 0.2 due to using an approximation in our math
+- 0.8 due to uncertainties in how we corrected for a bias (systematic error)
The presidential pollsters do this: they'd quote some number as "58% for Obama, with a 2 percent statistical margin of error, and an additional 1 percent error coming from the fact that we're not quite sure if we're over- or under-sampling cellphone-only voters."
If your estimates aren't *precise*, that's okay. You can still give an honest estimate with a large error bar. Do it, and honestly quantify your uncertainty.
It seems nobody requires those making piracy loss claims to prove anything they say. Consequantially, estimates keep going up, and have reached a ridiculously high level. Typical dishonest tricks used include billing the price of a full retail version for each suspected download (1. the full retail price is unrealistic 2. people would not have gotten the thing if they would have to pay 3. a lot of downloads never get installed/used/listened to 4. filenames lie and not everything is what is claims to be).
There is a really urgent need to either have serious negative consequences for those making claims that are inflated or to stof listening to those with high self-interest and get hard numbers. Just remember that somebody downloading a song, litening to it once and then deleting it is the equivalent to have listened to it on the radio and then deciding to not buy it. Content providers have a far to high opinion of the quality of the things they offer. Many people would just go without if pirating was harder.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You don't understand, some of these people have 20 or even 50Mbit connections, that's almost 915 times more than the 56k modem on which we base our figures...
The media industry has a nice dilemma here:
If the piracy figures are too small, then nobody will care about them.
On the other hand, if the piracy figures are too large, then the whole European population is criminalized, and nobody will care either...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Yes, piracy is rampant. I don't need some government study quantifying just how much it's happening. The reality is that content creators have to enter the market with their eyes open and accept reality. I happen to be a musician myself, and I can really relate, but we got by before recordings of any kind existed, and we will continue to survive and practice our art now that recordings are essentially free: Live performances. Works for hire. Voluntary donations. Value added (physical copy, cover art, printed lyrics, etc.). Ad revenue. All this (except the works for hire) can be done with Creative Commons music. Most of all, I don't delude myself into thinking I can give up my day job and be a rock star. I make a good, reliable living doing something that other people need. At night, I create things that I personally need to create. And I don't bitch about it when I don't get paid. I feel happy that anyone other than myself cares to hear any of it.
Nerd Rock In Progress
being replaced (as we fail to communicate) with 1/2 baked 'celebrity' gossip, or the 'trials' (more phony scriptdead fiction) & tribulations of our self-decreed 'betters'. that must be the way we like it, 'cause that's what we settle for.
as little credence can be placed in the report as in those criticised by the US GAO
That's not the point. The point of these studies is not to find out anything, and it's not really even to convince anyone of anything, it's to show that the problem has been exhaustively studied, and that "our" research is more exhaustive than the other side. When I was in government, we used to call this "science by the pound," and it could literally devolve into "my study is thicker than yours" type of arguments.
As a simple rule of thumb, if the body funding the study has a interest in obtaining a particular result, and the study supports that result, it should just be ignored.
They sold it, tough shit. If you want to control your ideas, don't sell them. Or contract out an NDA. But after all this time of stealing every single item out there, DO NOT come crying to us about theft of copyrighted works. YOU STOLE FROM THE PUBLIC.
So fuck off with your "I feel I am entitled" shit.
You don't feel I should do what I want with what I know of your stuff? Then don't sell it.
I wonder if they considered repeat downloads? As is, I download all my favorite movies and songs, then get a virus from all the downloads, have to format my harddrive... AGAIN... and then redownload them all over again. I think all of piracy might just be a couple of hundred people like me stuck in a nightmarish Download-Virus-Format loop.
1. When stating how much software "costs" they always use the list - or highest price, which is usually a multiple of the actual end-user site license cost.
2. They don't allow for typical disk-to-disk archival backups. Most modern sites use archival backup strategies, and copy data from disks to allow for recovery when a primary disk fails. This gives you two or three "software" copies, when in fact only one is used, the other two being archival - one on the same computer, the other on another (backup) computer. Only one license and one copy is actually in use.
3. They don't count educational site licensing. We've run into this where we purchase a three copy site license to use the software for students, and the terms state we can have three copies running at the same time, but the licensing was a via a purchase certificate online. At no time were more than three copies running.
4. The more they present a "problem" the more they can justify the audit and any fees. There is no incentive to correctly count licenses, only to ignore valid and different licenses, as this increases the total count and thus the punitive aspects.
5. I just like the number five.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
These figures are so implausible that it is a wonder that any government takes them seriously at all. It's clear that piracy does result in lost sales, but the music / movie industry is doing itself no favours by lying. Pirates almost by definition place less value on an item than a music industry. The industry might think a CD is worth 15 but the pirate clearly begs to differ. It therefore makes no sense to say a pirated copy = one lost sale since the pirate would be unlikely to have paid full price in any event.
Susan Boyle.
Sweet old Lady, got some bad breaks earlier.
She became a crystal clear YouTube phenom, and then this happened:
From Wiki:
Global interest in Boyle was triggered by the contrast between her powerful voice and her plain appearance on stage. The juxtaposition of the audience's first impression of her with the standing ovation she received during and after her performance led to an international media and Internet response. Within nine days of the audition, videos of Boyle -- from the show, various interviews and her 1999 rendition of "Cry Me a River" -- had been watched over 100 million times.[7] To date, her audition video has been viewed on the internet over 347 million times.[8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Boyle
And of course that episode was not bought 347 million times.
So that's the absolute end of the line of the RIAA hardliner tactics.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Take a look for a version of the album that was created from the multi-tracks used in Guitar Hero III... sounds way better than the retail CD. These tracks were apparently handed over to the GH team before the moron who compressed the shit out of the album did his dirty work.
Various version available on Demonoid, The Pirate Bay, etc.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
I'd say they are 100% inaccurate.
Seeing as it's IMPOSSIBLE to get a correct number, or even an close estimate of the number of pirated copies.
They can though, give you a total cost of how much they are wasting on DRM.
Be seeing you...
My employer is under paying me by 5 billion dollars, now think of how much in taxes you are not getting from me.
I think it's obvious.
1. The record companies make the content cost more (to compensate for "lost" sales) and more difficult to use (DRM)
2. People listen to less music
3. People buy less music
4. "Sales are down - must be due to piracy"
5. Goto 1.
If you think I am exaggerating, look back to what happened when CDs launched
There’s a game that many companies play when talking about gain and loss. It’s called a lot of things, but boils down to targeted budgeting. I suspect nearly all companies do it, but some use it within the context of “lies, damn lies and statistics”. Let’s say you target an 8% increase in sales over last year’s. You build your company’s spending around that. Now let’s say you only manage a 6% increase. Many companies will then claim a 2% “loss” because they didn’t make budget in spite of the fact that there was an actual increase of 6%. Some will go so far as to claim a 2/8 or 25% loss – that is, they “lost” 25% of the budgeted increase, even though the succeeded at 75% of the budget. I wonder if the RIAA/MPAA companies are playing this game. After all, if the losses, especially in sales, they tend to claim were real, their current sales would be zero. On the other hand, this game lets them look like they’re losing money when they are actually making it.
... to call the number that come from the RIAA or the MPAA statistics. "Assertions" is what comes to mind when I hear or read the stories from these folks.
Is there a magical counter somewhere that counts the number of allegedly pirated versus the legally purchased songs or movies? No. So what we get are nothing more than assertions from these people that do nothing more than to serve their crazy claims of having lost umptyump millions or billions of dollars in supposedly lost revenue.
Nobody, other than a few gullible politicians, believes these numbers. Unfortunately, these few can do so much damage. I'm encouraged that governments are finally getting around to saying "Uh... wait just a second."
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Why not just have a 20 dollar tax per person per year to pay into a pool. That pool will allow an average citizen to have access to unlimited content for official releases made by artists. The RIAA can then use technologies like bittorrent to distribute this content so they aren't paying a high cost for distribution. Taking this idea further, added content for those fans who really like a band could be purchased. Things such as bonus tracks, outtakes & live releases of concerts for 2-3 bucks for 15 tracks. Competition could still exist in this system too as a small fee from the pool would end up with the label which the artist was a member of. In the case of indie bands the band itself would sign up as a label and get the same fees paid to them.
I'm wondering how this affects the court cases that have been, because judgement of the relevant offences was pretty much driven by those numbers. I cannot imagine it wasn't patently obvious that the data was false, but I notice in these various re-calculations a total absence of such activity from the RIAA/MPAA side - logically, because they got those numbers accepted as fact.
You could call this lying in court, no? Wouldn't it be funny if all the RIAA convictions were decleraed a mistrail and they had to pay back all the court cases, and those offside settlements they blackmailed out of people?
I don't have a problem with them going after those who pirate in volume, because that's clearly for profit, but the odd sharing? That's killing your customer base - and justice.
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