Slashdot Mirror
Most File Sharers Would Pay For Legal Downloads
An anonymous reader writes "Two separate studies from Australia and Holland give the lie to corporate entertainment industry claims that file sharers are unprincipled thieves out to rob the honest but harshly treated movie and music studios. Over in Oz, news.com.au reports, 'Most people who illegally download movies, music and TV shows would pay for them if there was a cheap and legal service as convenient as file-sharing tools like BitTorrent.' And from the EU, 'Turnover in the recorded music industry is in decline, but only part of this decline can be attributed to file sharing,' says Legal, Economic and Cultural Aspects of File Sharing, an academic study, which also states, 'Conversely, only a small fraction of the content exchanged through file sharing networks comes at the expense of industry turnover. This renders the overall welfare effects of file sharing robustly positive.'"
Paying $2/epsiode is not cheap. I would pay $1 for an hour long show (42 minutes in reality) as long as it is commercial free. IF you try to sell me commercials, forget it! 30 minute shows I would pay $.50-$.75, but again, only for a commercial free version.
The purchased copy would also have to be DRM free.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
I am not a downloader. Despite all of the content-producing industry's failings, I believe that I should pay for what other people spend their long hours producing, even if that means, in the end, what the artist gets is minuscule. I didn't invent bad contracts.
But what really ticks me off is when people actually prevent me from willingly parting with my own money due to geography. There was a show on the SciFi channel recently, Defying Gravity. It wasn't exactly the greatest bit of science fiction out there, but I like Ron Livingston, the acting was generally decent, the story was compelling, and on the whole, the show was entertaining. About halfway through the season, ABC cancelled the show. But Canadian and Australian networks continued to show it. You could buy the episodes online via Amazon's video page, but after the ABC cancellation, you could only buy the first half of the show. WTF? I fired up BitTorrent for the first time.
While I'm at it, let me say: region coding for DVDs is a gigantic anti-competitive crock of shit. Fortunately, I have me a region 2 DVD-R, a Linux machine, and Handbrake, so that I can actually pay for and watch good television from another English-speaking country.
This seems pretty logical to me. Speaking to my own experience, the things the I "pirate" lately have been because of convenience.
I "pirated" Avatar off of Bittorrent because I'd seen it 3 times in the theater already, but it wasn't out on video yet (I then bought it on Blu-Ray the day after it came out).
I "pirated" Survival of the Dead off of Bittorrent because it's not been released on DVD yet in the US.
I "pirated" nearly 200 individual songs off of Bittorrent recently, because I switched to Rythmbox and it couldn't import those songs with DRM'd content from my iTunes library (and though I technically can pay to "upgrade" to DRM-free music- FUCK paying twice just so that I can use my media on another player).
I truly don't mind paying for stuff, and I buy a lot of media. It's a matter of pricing and convenience. Don't DRM it - I don't buy DRM'd movies online because I don't know if I'll be playing it via XBMC (on either my AppleTV or my hacked Xbox), my Linux machine, or any other device that hasn't been dreamed up. They also better price it fairly. The $0.99 price point for a song I don't mind. It works, and I buy most of my music now with that (previously from Amazon because I'm trying to not support Apple, but now from the Ubuntu One store if they have the track). TV show episodes also shouldn't go higher than $0.99 each, and movies in digital download form shouldn't cost more than $4-5 each. That's about what the physical copies fall off to in a few years anyways. Why should I pay MORE for them not having to manufacture, ship, and stock a disc?
The studios are going to have to come to grips with the fact that they've lost a ton of control over a market that they once called every shot in. Consumers have been presented with a way to get what they want for free, but more importantly WHEN and HOW they want it. The latter part is what's important to me. I'm willing to pay if only to make sure that I'm getting a quality standard that a studio can provide as compared to some guy who ripped a copy of a movie with Handbrake and forgot to deinterlace it. When the "pirated" stuff just plain works better though, then they're just being naive if they think people will pay for an inferior product out of some sense of loyalty.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Actually I'm pretty sure that companies like Microsoft would enjoy his price scheme. A dollar an hour for commercial free use of their software? To his point, I agree with the price. I only watch TV on DVD. Generally I only pay 15 to 20 USD for a season. This turns out to be about a dollar an episode. I'm not sure why you would pay more for a digital copy than what you could buy in the store.
Still, if I buy a DVD I am forced to view previews, piracy warnings, etc.. If I pirate the same movie I get to skip all of those and watch the movie without 10+ minutes of crap. Sounds like someone is selling an inferior product and punishing legitimate users. These days copied discs are superior to originals. Oh, and no rootkits or viruses come pre-packaged.