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Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy?
Andorin writes "Anyone familiar with the piracy debate knows about the claims from organizations like the RIAA that piracy causes billions of dollars in damages and costs thousands of jobs. Other studies have concluded differently, ranging from finding practically no damages to a newer study that cites 'up to 20%' as a more accurate number (PDF). I figure there's got to be an easier way to do this, so here's my question: Does anyone know of any creative works that were provably a financial failure due to piracy? The emphasis on 'provably' is important, as some form of evidence is necessary. Accurately and precisely quantifying damages from p2p is impossibly hard, of course, but answering questions like this may lead us to a clearer picture of just how harmful file sharing really is. I would think that if piracy does cause some amount of substantial harm, we would see that fact reflected in our creative works, but I've never heard of a work that tanked because people shared it online."
No.
Gone must be the days when a creative work was loved for its contribution to the arts... Plato, Socrates -- failures, all of them, because their works are no longer copyrighted and thus can no longer make a contribution to society. /sarcasm
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Then people will pay for it.
If it's half-good it may still be worth listening to/watching, but not necessarily worth to pay for. (I'll wait until it comes on TV)
And then there is the rest - that's mediocre at best. Downloaded, test listened and then scrapped.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Logically, if you just flip the reasoning, any artist whose work is never pirated, should be the richest one, right?
A film producer had his film stolen, and the thief got a lot of money for the screenings.
The producer that ended penniless: Georges Melies
The Thief: Thomas Edison
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon
how long until
Huh - I've never heard of a retail outlet that failed because of women stealing bras from the packages, but it's still illegal and wrong.
There are a tremendous number of people who have grown up in an age where it is so easy to copy information, and where it is so easy to self-publish so you *think* you're creative, and the idea that it's not theft to benefit from someone else's hard work just because their work is easily copyable in a computer...it boggles my mind.
YOU sell widgets in a store, don't you? You and your store should definitely get paid for that. I write music for a living...I should only get paid for the first copy sold?
Yes.
I did some work for a man who paid to have drivers written for SCSI harddrives, a while a go, that was his edge over the competition. The competition simply pirated his drivers and sent him out of business. This may not be 'creative works' but the process is the same.
All the projects that couldn't get funding because piracy would reduce their profitability below the required threshold. Piracy can be chilling effect.
I remember reading at one time that the number of pirated copies vs. legit sold copies was as high as 3 to 1 based on the people trying to connect and play the game online. The end result: none of the other halo titles were released on Mac and one of the reasons cited was because the original was so heavily pirated. Now there may have been other reasons why it was never ported, but that was the cited reason.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Not exactly what asked for, but, video stores in my local area that have been there for years have all of a sudden all gone out of business. Pretty sure bittorrent had something to do with it!
At least by Hollywood accounting practices.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Not online as we know it (although BBS sharing was available) - but I recall Amiga game publishers lamenting that they couldn't get revenue for their product due to the higher skew in piracy. I never recalled seeing an Amiga owner with a purchased game back in the 80s - ever.
I wish I could find the link. The study was commissioned by a book publisher trying to find our how much piracy hurt book sales. Generally when a book is published, sales spike a few days later then drop, and it's a couple of weeks before it's scanned and on the internet. What they found was that when it hit the internet, rather than a drop there was a second spike.
Piracy doesn;t hurt sales at all, it generates sales.
Cory Doctorow explains it succinctly in Little Brother. Nobody ever lost sales from piracy, but obscurity guarantees lack of sales.
Free Martian Whores!
The question is inherently speculative. It isn't terribly difficult to find examples of, say a comic book series that was canceled because sales were 10% below what was needed to break even, or a movie that didn't quite make back the investment (even assuming non-Hollywood accounting). The number of creative endeavors which are just on the edge of financial solvency is pretty darn large. But what's essentially impossible to determine is what the actual impact of "sharing" on what-sales-would-have-been was in any given case. The best you could do would be to estimate a general range, and stipulate that any work that was within that range of being profitable "failed" because of it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
what newer creative works were never done because a previous
one never succeeded enough due to piracy?
(so, how would you even define "tanked" for a creative work anyway?)
Does anyone remember this game? It was really quite creative and a lot of fun, but the studio that created it wound up folding. They cited low sales, despite critical acclaim. Piracy kill it.
Just read
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/07/09/1621218/Hollywood-Accounting-mdash-How-Harry-Potter-Loses-Money
D.
You are forgetting about things people are not willing to pay for. With a really bad movie, the studio tries to cover up just how bad it is by not letting anyone see it ahead of time. They over-advertise it and hope for a good opening weekend before the word gets out just how bad it is. If the movie hits the torrents before it is released, then it tends to bomb in the box office. You might say this is only fair, but leaked movies tend to hurt the bad ones just as much (if not more) than the good ones.
Wonder why many games are released on console six month before being released on PC? : Piracy
Wonder why many small studios making games for the NintendoDS closed doors? R4 linker (you can say this is because the quality was bad, but this was only the first effect of piracy, they tried to target the very young and old public to avoid piracy)
As a game developer I think that piracy is a plague, not only because this tend to kill business models built around selling our products, but also because most pirated games are not enjoyed as they should.
Piracy is fast food, no depth.
On the other side, I should ask, what is the valued added of piracy?
What is the gain for society?
Dreamcast was released right before CD burners became prevalent, so there was no copy protection. There may have been other reasons the system failed, but piracy really killed it.
Sega Dreamcast
I refuse to believe the "future works" argument. It does not strike me as valid. You do not have to have PROFIT ASSURED just to produce a work. For some of us that /aren't/ shallow single-minded creatures, yes, there is a joy to creation.
And a joy to having one's work shared and admired by a large number of people, even if it doesn't net us a huge amount of money. Artists are the traditional impoverished sort. This is not a new development -- indeed, the obscene profits made by those agencies which churn out mass-produced art are the new development. And that is soulless.
Some of us hold ourselves to a bit of a higher and more idealistic standard still.
Also, hiiii. :)
If that's true of the 'creative' work that failed...
We most likely did not lose anything of value to society.
Art for arts sake.
If money is your only reason for making 'art'. It would be far more efficient to just go shoot someone and take their cash. I hear record execs have alot of cash.... *hint hint*
Falls under the last section "The rest - mediocre at best".
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Given that piracy tends to reduce the incentive to create new works, an equally relevant question is the number of works that would have been created but for the effects of piracy. An artist may abandon a good idea simply because he or she believes that piracy will make it impossible to recoup the costs of turning that idea into reality.
Not exactly a creative art, but the sega dreamcast was the last sega game console because the copy protection on the games was so easily bypassed that many people didn't buy any games.
Ask Conan O'Brien
You ever hear about hollywood accounting? Virtually anyone important enough that they'll receive "points" has been defrauded by their own studio/label.
You'll figure out why the RIAA/MPAA are so anti-piracy as soon as you grok that single fact. Any distribution channel or even publicity that doesn't trace back to efforts they may label their own will create a scenario where they face more serious lawsuits from their talent, plus more talent founding competitors.
It's time to put this dog to sleep. Don't buy their shit. Don't talk about their shit. Don't even watch their shit pirated unless you absolutely must based upon your childhood comic book consumption.
The next two time you feel like watching a movie, try Let The Right One In and Primer. I promise you they're both better than anything released by Hollywood during the last 5 years.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
When I first read the title, I thought that kdawson (I know, I know) was asking if a creative work failed in the sense that no one accepted it, it was not disseminated, etc. Then TFS says "financial" failure.
Problem is, the question (in any aspect) is too one-dimensional. Paul Gauguin was a financial failure, as were most painters who weren't sponsored by some aristocrat or other. Yet one would hardly call his (or their) works "failures" in most aspects of the term. Meanwhile, even in just the one aspect - money - well? Today, just try and buy an original Gauguin and say it's a failure. I dare you.
Even with recent/modern creative endeavors, the question is stupid. If you're creating a work of (art, music, or similar) just for the money, that creation is almost guaranteed to suck. See also the products of Britney Spears (...remember her? no worries if you don't), "Lady Gaga", or whatever manufactured 'star' of the moment you care to name. Viewed dispassionately and apart from the personality, the music quite frankly sucks ass. If we shift to works of writing, you can almost always tell at which point a writer loses his/her passion for the craft, and instead just does it for the money - the quality drops accordingly. Visual art? Heh - I'll pick on The Simpsons... about five years ago, it was glaringly obvious that Matt was just doing it for the paycheck.
But anyway, long story short - IMHO, the only way a work succeeds or fails is in the metric of how widely accepted it is, and in how long it remains in the public consciousness. The successes become treasures that never die in spite of passing centuries, the failures are forgotten in less than a decade no matter how widely marketed.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It would be useful to compare this survey with one that estimated the gains or productivity arrived from fair use of other works. What literature, art, music, programs, inventions, etc. derived from building upon other works have contributed to the GDP?
You can begin by adding most of the annual income and net worth of Disney.
I make music for a living, not because I enjoy it.. yeah, that's what an artist would say..
Seriously, how could anyone call themselves an artist, if money was the only block in producing there art?
The question is, how many creative works fail because they are taken down, based on copyright... I'd know several fan-made game-sequels, girl-talk, DJ Danger Mouse, bitter sweet symphony by placebo...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
now.. can you prove God doesn't exist?
And despite the popular claim of the opposite, you can prove a negative, generally by proving a different paradoxical positive, but still...
For my actual thoughts on it... I think there is a balancing act to be had in it. If you work is good enough that enough people will buy it to make it a success, then enough people will be willing to pirate it to hurt sales also. One of the big reasons for the online "pirating" today isn't the ease of copying (though it contributes) it is that the balance on the opposite side (copyright) has grown too heavy.
With copyrights as long as they are now, there is very little content that CAN'T be pirated, by definition. With shorter copyrights, more content would be available unencumbered. If you knew that you could get it legally, for free in a couple of years, (wait for it to come out on DVD... Wait till it is out on TV... etc arguments) would you be in such a rush to steal it? Again, only if the work was "good enough" to warrant the risk. Even then, the risk would have to be seen as less than the costs of buying it legally.
Not really the whole answer, but enough for a /. post
Back in the 8/16-bit days there were always claims by game producers that they were no longer supporting this or that market because of piracy. And fairly, piracy was pretty rampant on all the platforms.
I don't think there's a way to conclusively prove that piracy was the sole factor in killing a product. A popular creative work may succeed because of or despite piracy. An unpopular work may fail primarily because of piracy or because it's too niche or inferior to survive. The most pirated works are typically the most popular works.
I think, but certainly can't quantify, that the unhealthy obsession with piracy damages creative work more than the actual piracy. Case in point: the game industry has somehow thrived amidst rampant piracy for three decades now, yet the first "pirate-proof" title that comes out requires an always-on Internet connection for a single-player game and jacks the price up $10 over market, pissing off potential customers left and right. I'd love to know how well Ubisoft has done with that, but while I already buy my games I will no longer buy theirs.
There's so much hand-wringing about piracy in the various content industries, yet they'll continue happily annoying their paying customers with backdoored music CDs, region coding and no-skip intros on DVDs, etc. at a time when those customers are no longer hostage -- making pirated goods even more attractive than the real product above and beyond being free. Even when they manage to pop out something innovative and friendly like Hulu, the suits just can't resist the impulse to ruin it.
maybe someone can help,I do seem to recall an online only game a few years back that said that due to the amount of pirated copies connecting to there servers during there first few days, the servers crashed, and there sales tumbled and never recovered putting them out of business. It was back when online gaming first became popular..
Porn
Failed because of piracy?
There number of factors that contribute to the overall success or failure of a creative work are vast, and affect each other in an endless variety of ways.
At no point can you say that something failed because of piracy.
Maybe it didn't sell well because it was crap, or too expensive, or poorly marketed, or whatever. Maybe that increases the significance of piracy... or does it decrease it? It's impossible to know, but even if you did it's still just one factor in a sea of other factors.
With Hollywood Accounting, every project in the film industry is a financial failure. Due to what, other than crooked accounting practices, is up to the MPAAs interpretation.
The game.
Crysis is a well known example of a video game. While technically profitable, it was not competitively profitable, in that it performed much worse than other games of its scope in the past (for example, Doom 3) as a consequence of piracy. This would imply a substantive loss due to piracy. Try Googling crysis piracy, or read a link here: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19203 The CEO of Stardock wrote an excellent article explaining business models for accounting for piracy, specifically commenting on the Crysis case. http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512 Later, piracy would prove to damage his game Demigod's short term viability, though technical measures (DRM in abstraction, though in practice just a method to detect pirated copies of the games) recovered it from likely failure. Piracy is perceived to be a sufficiently significant problem that dealing with piracy is as important as dealing with marketing, deadlines, etc. It's a core business concern. What you're asking for then is "prove to me that measles is a horrible disease. Can you show me evidence of large populations dying due to measles in recent history?" You won't accept the answer, "we vaccinate against measles, everyone knows its bad but there aren't population-wide failures precisely because we vaccinate." DRM and other measures have made serious problems due to piracy unlikely, but they still harm the product. You also are problematic with "provably": "provably" by mathematical standards or by, say, business standards? No one can "prove" why a product is a success or failure, but merely provide persuasive evidence for it. I would imagine you have the same misunderstanding with the legal system, which does not require proof of "no possible doubt" but rather proof of "no reasonable doubt." There is no reasonable doubt that piracy harmed Crysis, making it (compared to other games) a financial failure for Crytek. To the readers of my comment: my point is that there's clear, reasonable evidence of the harms of piracy. But we're faced with a questioner who has an adversarial and unconvertible frame of mind.
Before the Spiderman movie even hit the cinemas, a reasonable quality copy was distributed on the net to millions of people via p2p.
The movie went on to be one of the biggest box-office hits - AND had huge DVD sales when it was finally released for the home market.
Wait a minute..... Huh!?!?!?
AC
I live in Australia, and none of those things are available here, as far as I know. So I am still pretty sure it was bittorrent.
I don't know that I would call it an outright failure, but the PC game "Starsiege: Tribes" from Dynamix certainly got walloped by piracy. I chatted with one of the engineers after the game's launch, and he sadly reported their server stats showing 300k+ people playing the game, with just 70-80k or so sales. They had a complete and utter lack of any DRM (not even a simple disk check), making the game wildly easy to copy. Hell, the install process was just a straightup file copy from CD to HD.
No two ways about it, the game sold poorly, but was quite successful with players. I certainly don't mean to imply be any stretch that every player represented a lost sale, but I definitely believe that the complete ease with which the game could be copied (ie, right click on the install folder, and select "ICQ this to my buddy") led to very disappointing sales.
Most games that sell poorly are poorly made games: the market is the final judge of quality. However, I also firmly believe that had Tribes had some basic form of copy protection, the sales would have been much much stronger. I hate that I am now sounding like I advocate loads of DRM, but Tribes represented an almost pathological case with its utter lack of any protection, and I think this wound up hurting sales very markedly.
You do realize that most of the "creative works" that fail due to piracy will, by definition, not be known, right? A garage band that fails because three people buy CDs and share them with their friends will never be heard from. World of Goo has a 90% piracy rate but their popularity makes it a success, how many games developers look at that stat and don't produce any titles because they know the odds of actually making money is pretty much nil?
YES - Frantic Freddie For the Commodore 64.
Everyone had a copy - pirated. I meet the makers and they made virtually nothing.
Provably is hard. Lower (or negative) profits versus just what exactly? Expectations? You need to run a parallel Earth.
But you may find this interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sione%27s_Wedding#Copyright_violation_case
Here http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10444843 it is suggested the film made $4m with a budget of $3.8m to make. So $200,000 profit rather than the claimed $700,000.
Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, HMV. These stores were doing fantastic business during the 1990s, then the stores emptied out pretty quickly as Napster and file sharing became popular. Then came Amazon and iTunes. Now most or all of their US stores are gone. People say, that's because the CDs were priced at $16.98, lacked genuine creativity and artistry, had only one good song, etc, but that wasn't entirely true and at any rate didn't suddenly become true 8-10 years ago when the decline began.
Then people will pay for it.
If the quality is good enough then some people will pay for it.
Chances are, some people also will not.
We know that artistic works can be commercial successes based only on those who do play by the rules and pay for what they take. If this were not true, all kinds of businesses would have failed already. But this is missing the point, twice.
Firstly, only a proportion of people, probably a rather small proportion in some industries, is supporting the work that many people enjoy. Those people are getting screwed, because they are paying considerably more than their "fair share", while the freeloaders contribute nothing.
Secondly, we do not know how much better the incentive would be to create and share more and better works in future if everyone contributed in return for what they take today. Although it's popular to think of Big Media as The Enemy(TM) around these parts, the reality is that a lot of commercial creative work is made and distributed by much smaller organisations, which use a lot of the money they bring in just to pay the salaries and invest the rest in a very few new projects, often only one at once. In a lot of cases, the entire business at risk of failure if any of those new projects doesn't make it, so relatively few new projects are attempted. Instead, much of the follow-up work winds up repeating a previously successful formula that is likely to be a safe bet, rather than going for something innovative that might be a better product with rich rewards, but also carries a much higher risk.
If you doubt this, consider the number of game studios over the years that have produced a string of enjoyable titles but not survived a single bad one. Of those that have survived for a long time, ask yourself what proportion of their recent titles are new and how many are just the latest in a franchise with little real change from the last one. Ask yourself how many popular sci-fi shows that plenty of geeks enjoy still get cancelled in their infancy, because they don't bring in enough money almost immediately for those who bankroll them to continue writing the cheques until the series is established.
Now ask yourself, if there was both more money in the bank following a previously successful product and a greater potential profit from any new project, does this make it more or less likely that new and innovative products will be given more of a chance?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Provable losses is hard. Lower (or negative) profits versus just what exactly? Expectations? You need to run a parallel Earth. But you may find this interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sione's_Wedding#Copyright_violation_case Here http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10444843 it is suggested the film made $4m with a budget of $3.8m to make. So $200,000 profit rather than the claimed/expected $700,000.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
I used to work for a small game publisher in the mid '90s. We estimated the piracy rate of our product to be at around 90%, and we were probably optimistic about it - I personally met many people who admitted to copying our products, and we even got technical support calls for pirated copies occasionally.
Since not every pirated copy automatically translates to a lost sale, everything that follows is guesswork. We know that pirates liked our products and kept using them, so most of these copies weren't DIY product demos (most of the pirates were parents of young children, who were our target end user - if you think your job is rewarding, you haven't seen a 4 year old being dragged kicking and screaming (literally) from your product. Now that's job satisfaction!)
So I think assuming that 10% of all pirated copies would have been paid copies if copying was suddenly made impossible. That would have been enough to avoid laying off a couple of developers, and would certainly have made a huge difference for the company, which was just profitable enough to stick around.
I think it's easy to look at the MPAA and RIAA, and the amount of money involved in their products, and not feel too sorry for them. I sure don't, but I always felt the story for small developers, less popular musicians and independent film makers can be very different.
Are there any video on demand services available in Australia then? If not, then they can't be to blame, at least not here.
I had a program that was designed for a very limited use, maybe 5,000 users on a game, back in college (12+ years ago). I planned on selling it for 5 bucks a copy. My alpha tester uploaded an early version to a public site and told people where to download it, and suddenly I was swamped with emails for bug fixes, changes, the whole 9 yards. Problem was, it was little things they wanted fixed. The major portions worked, and people didn't really feel like paying for something they already have. Sure, I could have eventually come out with a new version and charged for it, but just the way it happened turned me off of the entire project, and I put a big F.U. reply to my email address to people requesting fixes on a stolen program.
Programs are different than creative works in many ways though, and not sure if they count as creative works this week.
and one much easier to answer would be "If the sky weren't blue, would people still eat hot-dogs?"
"Remember when I said I would never lie? Well, that was the first time."
Speak for yourself there buddy, I love lady Gaga to death! And how the heck do you propose to judge her music dispassionately? Counting the number of chords per second or something?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
There are a lot of creative work published thanks to piracy. Look at all the reports of RIAA reporting damages because pirating music, or justifying trillons of dollars of loss because of it, Isnt that creativity? isnt that art? The world could had miss that amazing display of creativity if werent because piracy.
Proof? No.
Interesting story? I thought so.
True? Who knows.
Iron Lore Entertainment develops a game called Titan Quest, Action-RPG, it was my Diablo 3 until that was actually announced. So supposedly the game gets leaked early somehow, but the leaked version has an unusual(?) form of DRM. If the game doesn't detect something (disk? code?) at the right time, it crashes to prevent the player from continuing.
Some of the earliest reviews of the game are done on this leaked DRMed version. The reviews aren't so great, claiming it's buggy, crashes etc. Likewise, the people who try first buy later, are discovering the same thing and not buying later, and telling all their friends to not buy also. End result, sales are miserable and the company goes out of business, unable to pay for development of their next game.
Some on slashdot would argue that this isn't an example of piracy making a project fail, but rather a bad choice of DRM making it fail. If you ask me however, that is really two sides of the same coin, if people didn't pirate, the DRM choice wouldn't have mattered.
[NOTE: I'm sure I'm getting some details wrong, perhaps it wasn't DRM but an early unfinished copy for example. That said, I doubt (hope) any incorrect details will change the message of the story]
because of onerous copyright law, old works that are completely forgotten are not allowed to be reused in new works unless ransoms are paid
even though, ironically, if the new works are allowed to proceed freely, renewed interest in the old works would occur, causing them to generate revenue again
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ask Gravity for information on profit made when it finally made its way into the American market. If they actually made money for a while, then the MASSIVE amount of piracy that was occurring due to their server code being leaked did not hinder them from making money.
Has a large shopping center ever failed due to shoplifting?
Has a country's economy ever completely failed due to counterfeiting?
Has a beach ever failed, due to people stealing water from the ocean?
Yes, but not in the way you are thinking.
Parana Film could not obtain the rights for Dracula from Bram Stoker's widow, so they riffed off of the story and were consequently sued by the Bram Stoker estate.
The film had already been released, but the outcome of the trial was that all copies of the film were to be destroyed (some _hand_ inked frame by frame to get a blue tint- destroyed).
Parana film went bankrupt and the only surviving copies of one of the greatest horror films are all illegal bootlegs.
Welcome to the future of copyright.
> You might say this is only fair, but leaked movies tend to hurt the bad ones
> just as much (if not more) than the good ones.
Pre-release leaks are 100% due to ineptitude on the part of the producers. The solution there is better internal security, not more laws.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
the commodore amiga, the computer for the creative mind, failed due to piracy.
And a doctor worked their entire life to have the knowledge and skillset to cure a patient... but a doctor doesn't get paid every time the patient's heart beats.
Listen, I'm all for a fair compensation for the artists, and against copyright infringement... but your specific argument doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny.
Those two consoles are more or less even technically. Most titles are released on both consoles with roughly the same price with the difference being that it is quite easy to pirate games on the 360 but impossible (or at least extremely hard) on the ps3. So to figure out if piracy hurt sales, compare how well often pirated titles sell on the 360 vs the ps3, while taking into account market share differences.
So if it is substanially less profitable to develop titles for the xbox than the ps3, then piracy hurt sales. Otherwise no. Seems simple enough to me?
Football Odds
I heard that Behind Jaggi Lines was abandoned because of widespread pirating, back in the 80s. However, the Wikipedia article doesnt mention this, so I dont know.
Copyright is a "right" only because the Constitution created it, unlike actual rights. It's a privilege, a monopoly created by the government:
That promotion is at odds with the explicit right to freedom of the press and the implicit right to freedom of commerce. The test of whether copyright's terms are based in a legitimate power of the Congress is whether it is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. And when the absence or failure of that government promotion by protection doesn't leave science or the useful arts without progress, the test doesn't show the protection to be based on that power.
Leaving aside whether entertainment is either science or a useful art, it's also clear that copyright prevents progress in it, as well as in science and the undeniably useful arts. Progress in those fields is measured in knowledge and creativity, which has for a long time been prevented by copyright.
So we have clear evidence that copyright prevents progress, and a lack of evidence that its promotion is necessary or effective.
Copyright is unconstitutional in all but the most rare cases.
--
make install -not war
Okay, so the question is piracy the straw that breaks the camels back?
It's an easy scapegoat, especially for those who have failures.
However there was a great article I don't have the time to search for at the moment, which demonstrated the folks who pirate are not the market who buys, and conversely, as has already been pointed out, greater exposure is a wonderful thing. So little is lost to pirates, because they are less likely to have purchased the product to begin with. Meanwhile there is a gain, if they share the product with someone who generates revenue.
An example of this is free services that try to switch to charging. They usually lose most of their client base, since it's a different market that's attracted to free services than those who prefer paying.
A LOT is paid for exposure, PR and marketing, imo, piracy should be covered in those budgets and perceived as a boon rather than doom. The key is to get it into the right hands, the reviewer how has a strong committed following, the pirate who has the greatest dissemination.
Ultimately, what would be most wonderful is to have metrics covering various piracy outlets, to determine which offer the greatest conversion rate. Perhaps those coupon codes redeemable at purchase which already track which outlet was the referral would be useful here?
Finally, once entities start to take advantage of the (currently free) piracy channels of PR and marketing, and have useful metrics to measure their campaigns, I could see pirates going professional and charging for their services.
Pirating the pirates if you will.
The entire southwestern coast of Italy and parts of the Sicily coast were depopulated by piracy. Demographics there haven't rebounded since the 16th-18th centuries.
Sione's Wedding http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0464184/ which is a New Zealand made film, was claimed to have been heavily hurt by piracy (people were distributing this via burnt DVD's as well as torrents before release... (another indication that people in the movie industry are the source of such releases, imo).
according to wikipedia, "This movie is also well known for a high profile court case over breach of copyright law. An employee of a post production company was found guilty and sentenced to 300 hours community service.[1] Movie producer John Barnett estimates the movie lost $500,000 in lost box office takings and DVD sales."
however, this ignores 2 things... first, the movie was pretty bad... everyone ive talked to who have stated they have watched it said theyd not watch it again... secondly, hollywood accounting http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml as shown here on slashdot, hollywood tends to use creative accounting to show paper losses for movies such as the last Harry Potter movie, which can take nearly $1b USD in revenue... how can we believe much if any of what they say?
I'll pass on discussing the relative merits of being a fan of Ms. Gaga, to get to something you mentioned:
And how the heck do you propose to judge her music dispassionately? Counting the number of chords per second or something?
I guess I was imprecise. What I meant was this: If you just heard the song; without the marketing, the media-pumping, or even a picture of her. Or even better, if you heard the song played 50 years in the future, without ever hearing of her beforehand.
A case in point: I collect (half-assedly, I admit) old 78 RPM records to test on an old 1947 Trav-Ler record player and radio that I rebuilt (finding the tubes was the most challenging part). I have stuff that was "pressed" in 1918 (this is pre-vinyl, so they were made the hard way back then). The non-successful musicians' records are drop-easy to find - Goodwill's clearance warehouse occasionally has bins of them... and in spite of excellent quality materials (and a new needle), the music is, well, awful. Little wonder I can buy them at roughly $0.25 per pound. OTOH, finding something from a successful musician (e.g. Glenn Miller) means having to hunt the records down, and sometimes paying a lot more for a mint-quality record than one would for a modern CD of the same musician's work.
To that end, what do you think a Lady Gaga CD will go for in (roughly) 2070, do you think? More importantly, how widely do you think her songs would be played by then? Would anyone still alive then even know or care who she was? That my friend is the big metric of success or failure concerning creative works.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/27/uma-thurman-movie-motherh_n_515731.html
More people downloaded it than saw it in UK theatres.
Though correlation isn't causation.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The real damage caused by piracy aren't the works which were created and then failed to produce return on investment (this is all to easy to do without piracy), the real damage is done in works which are never created in the first place due to the perception that piracy would make them financially irrelevant. The poster is all concerned with "provably," but really, if you sit down with any group of investors and propose a new creative project, the provable effect of piracy is when the investors walk away from a project because they won't get their money back before pirates saturate their market with ripoffs.
Even in patented space many works (especially medical devices) struggle to make a profit before patent protection runs out. Patents are more beneficial to the world at large in this respect - ideas which can be realized in a reasonable time are pursued, and then within 20 years they become public domain. The effective infinite life of Copyright is wrong on so many levels. I think a reasonably time limited copyright scheme would be more respected / less violated, and more productive in the creation of new works, as opposed to the infinite repackaging of existing brands that we have today.
World of Goo
That was the most famous one I can remember. It was excellent, everyone I knew had a copy of it. Turns out they only sold a few thousand copies and the programmer quit doing games.
Everyone says (and I agree) that SC2 is one of the best PC games ever made. Unfortunately it was also one of the most pirated PC games ever made, and so the creators never really made much money from it. If any creative works could ever be considered "failures" because of piracy, I'd say 80's-90's computer games would be up there...
Then again, I don't think that means it should be called a "failure" - profitable or not, it's gotta feel nice to have made a game consistently in everyone's top 10 list. But it is one of those times you wish the creators had received a bit more financial recognition for their work.
Bordering on offtopic, but my favorite quote from Paul Reiche III (SC2 designer, hilarious writer, and currently head of Toys For Bob) in a GameSpot interview:
The correct question is "Have creative people ever lost out on proper rewards as a result of bootlegging?" The answer, of course, is "yes" and anyone who denies this has never tried to earn a living in a creative line of work. (There are absolutely legitimate questions about whether current IP is the correct response to this problem, but sensible debate requires that the right question is asked first, not an idiotically woolly one)
Taking a candy bar from a store leaves the store minus one candy bar. This is theft.
Giving away candy bars across the street so nobody is willing to buy the store's candy bars (that they paid for and expected to be able to sell at a profit) is not theft even though it seriously damages a store's business.
There are relevant anti-dumping laws (if I'm doing this just to hurt the store, particularly if I want to drive it out of business so I can then jack my prices), but there are plenty of circumstances under which it might be perfectly legal. Suppose that I have actually come up with a way to make and sell equivalent candy bars for less than the store paid in the first place. That's just sharp business.
I'm only stealing from MovieCo if I leave MovieCo without their movie. (To be painfully precise, if my plans would have deprived them of their movie.) As long as they still have their movie, even if its commercial value has been reduced, it's not stealing.
It may be morally wrong, but did the housing market meltdown which left your house's value less than the amount you owe on it constitute stealing your house? The answer is no, because it's still there and you're still living in it.
Such obviously ridiculous analogies definitely make me lose respect for the people making them.
Ok, bear with me for the analogy I'm about to make, because I understand that not all copyright violation is piracy, and piracy isn't theft... but this is like asking if any businesses have failed due to theft.
What I mean by that is: If the business failed, probably you never heard about it. It's rare that a business would fail due to theft after becoming well known. Real, successful businesses experience theft, and it harms them, but they can account for it in their business model and control it to a degree that the theft does not cause them to fail. But if they don't control adequately, they can certainly fail due to theft. But it's a known, solved problem and so well-known businesses generally do not fail due to inability to control theft.
On the other hand, if something is pirated a lot of something, probably you have heard of it. Because things are pirated a lot because they're popular. You don't pirate things you've never heard of, because you've never heard of it to know about it in order to think about pirating it in the first place.
So piracy won't cause something to fail. It sucking will cause it to fail.
The real question is will piracy have a net positive or a net negative effect on the revenue generated by a popular, successful product. Something can be harmful without causing it to fail. And a secondary question is, is a net negative harm caused by piracy something that cannot be accounted for in the business model, such that the business can succeed despite the harm.
My guess is that completely unchecked piracy can be harmful, but that there seems to be no way possible to adequately control it. Thus, the business model needs to change from one of selling copies of something, to something else.
What that is, no one has any clear idea of, and what works for some may not work universally. Thus, the collective constant shitting and re-shitting of the industry's collective pants.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
FM radio itself didn't fail. But the creator was victimized by piracy.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
the loss (just in human life) is immeasurable, yet the offenders continue to claim to be the victims. see you on the other side of it?
meanwhile (hopefully not for very much longer); the corepirate nazi illuminati is always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their (slippery/slimy) 'platform' now. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
never a better time to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)
"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--
"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me .... I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." --emerson
no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about 10,000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding & excess by a few, resulted in negative consequences for all.
consult with/trust in your creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land." )one does not need to agree whois in charge to grasp the notion that there may be some assistance available to us(
boeing, boeing, gone.
Can anyone give me one provable example of a cat that would have lived but died because schrodinger opened the box?
If the industry is to be believed, new artists never got the chance because their seed money never made it through the studio into their hands. How can you prove these artists would have succeeded? The box was opened, and we went down a different path.
I believe don't believe for a second that the industry claims are true. But you cannot prove they are not because they cannot provide provable details of an alternate universe.
Projects that can be pirated (software, movies, etc) have low maintenance costs and high creation costs. If the funds didn't exist to create the product, then it wouldn't be created and there's nothing to pirate. Once there is something to pirate, you can't kill the project, but you can make the venture unprofitable enough to discourage someone from doing it again. So the question isn't if a project has been killed due to piracy, but if someone has ever decided that a project isn't worth starting because the market isn't profitable enough. There can be a significant number of these but you'd never know, since the project was never started and therefore nothing exists to know about.
Unfortunately not all of us can put food on the table by giving everything away for free. There's a time and place for free/open software, but there's also an advantage to have people create something where the costs of that creation are spread across many customers rather than a single firm or with advertising.
Copyright is still a legally granted right. It does not matter if you don't like it. It doesn't matter if you think it is unfair. And, it doesn't matter if "they" can prove the amount of damage because even if the damages were zero, it is still against the law and a violation of someone's legal rights.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I wonder why GNU/Linux hasn't been gone already, cause AFAIK when people started developing it, there was no much of a money involved. Taking in consideration how much of a *pirated copies* are made by now, it should probably be bankrupted already!
How do musical artists stay afloat in a dodgy economy?
Of course, thanks to the freewheeling Web, where there's always a workaround, sometimes Terrasson doesn't get paid anything for his music -- like the time in 2007, when he released Mirror, a solo piano recording. Within 24 hours, he says, people were downloading it for free from a Russian site that could not be shut down remotely.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
because, piracy of any material is directly proportional to its success. and if something is a success, it already makes the money it can make in a market with the current prices and distribution channels.
publishing, distribution companies harm the creative content much more than anything else as of now. they constitute a huge percentage of the end cost that reflects on the customer, and the original creators receive only minor percentages compared to that. in music, its even more horrible - artists receive cents over the cds they sell, and instead are forced to earn money in long concert tours. they incur wear and tear, start behaving extreme, antisocial, or take up drugs to alleviate the stress, and often become unproductive or, even need hospitalization after some point. only, a few artists and bands who were able to negotiate their own terms with the leverage they had early in their career are able to continue in a meaningful fashion. (madonna etc)
the experiments of radiohead, nine inch nails proved that even if you yourself encourage piracy, or even give out your album entirely, saying 'pay however much you want', you can make much more money overnight that you would make by contracting a major label and going on concerts for over a year. when this becomes a commonplace method, bands may not earn as much as the initial experiments. BUT, it is almost certain now that they will make much more money with much less effort, than they would be able to when going out on tours for a major label.
Read radical news here
Who cares, unless you're in a "creative" industry? I don't give a damn whether they make money or not, I mean good luck and everything but it's none of my business. As a consumer I only have an interest in the projects that never got commissioned due to the potential backers having been put off by piracy. That's more relevant and relatively easily measurable - you might have to get through the industry BS, but to "provably" answer the original question you need a time machine.
Come to think of it, if a project was never made then you can consider that a financial failure. Somebody spent at least some time and probably at least some money submitting it to there's your loss right there.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Global_Frequency
Great comic, really, really good TV pilot, done by the guy who did Blue Beetle, and is now doing Leverage. (Written by Warren Ellis.)
According to the story, Warner was so pissed about the pilot being leaked, they killed the show. God knows why, to be honest.
...the real damage is done in works which are never created in the first place due to the perception that piracy would make them financially irrelevant.
This was my initial thought too. However what I don't understand is why the technology sword does not cut both ways. It is true that technology makes it far easier than it has ever been before to pirate material but it also makes it far easier than ever before to produce that material. Unlike the past there is no need to risk a massive budget on every new act. Give the riskier acts smaller budgets and see what they can do with them. After all if they are less popular they will probably also be less pirated and the ones which do take off can give you a great return on your small investment.
As promised, I finally posted a series of articles on artificial scarcity on my blog.
Because home taping killed it.
The only harm that filesharing causes is emotional harm: it makes some people in suits butt-hurt because their speculated sales and profits didn't materialize. Nothing was stolen, because those profits never existed in the first place. What corporations now call "piracy" is once again nothing more than creative bookkeeping - at which they are notoriously proficient - that seeks to mislead people into giving them what they want (our money transferred to their bank accounts) without a fight.
The fly in the ointment there is that the same kind and style of painting was judged to be teh suck when it was signed Han van Meegren, but praised as a masterpiece when signed Vermeer. You know, they don't make 'em like the old masters any more ;) And when revealed as forgeries, well, today again you get snobs and curators going "yeah, well, it couldn't have fooled _me_. I mean, you can see it's teh suck" in interviews.
Let's face it, some of that old stuff only goes so well because of a perverse form of marketing. People are told that Vermeer or <insert 18'th century composer> are the great stuff and stuff that only properly cultivated people can properly appreciate, and you see the Emperor's New Clothes in action.
How many would go for that stuff if they didn't know the piece and you told them it's composed by some intern working for Disney?
And since you mention music from 60 years ago, you don't think those records may be hard to find only because people who grew up with them bought them? Frankly, it seems to me like most people's tastes end up fixed around a certain age. So you get 80 year olds still swearing that Frank Sinatra is the real music, and 60 year olds swearing by disco, and so on. And each generation thinks the music of the next one is crap and only bought by brainwashed idiots.
In fact, even about the Jazz and Swing music of the likes of Glenn Miller -- just since you used that example -- some old fart back then decried it as the mindless crap kids listen to these days.
Here's a funny thought though: the way people have complained about how everything about the next generation is worse for the last, oh, 2000-3000 years straight, if there were any truth to that, by now we've _all_ been listening only to crap, unlike the wholesome and good music that the likes of Socrates listened to.
So here's my prediction: 60 years from now, you'll have old farts reminiscing about how these new bands kids listen to are all mindless crap, unlike the great music of Eminem, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spear and Lady Gaga that they grew up with. Those were the great musicians. Not because any is objectively better, but just because that's the point in time their tastes remained frozen.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of either of those myself, but I also have no need to delude myself that there's something objectively better about the crap _I_ listen to, compared to the crap kids these days listen to.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire 100 million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, without a second thought and irrespective of what that did to the year's profits. What do we do with a crappy movie? We double its advertising budget and hope for a big opening weekend. What have we done for the audience as they walk out of the cinema? We've alienated them. We've sold audiences a piece of junk; we just took twelve dollars away from a couple and we think we've done ourselves no long-term damage. -- David Puttnam, movie producer; GQ magazine, April 1987
Circumcision is child abuse.
I thought they usually solved that problem by selling the rights to MST3K?
Those two are mutually exclusive. If you can't accurately quantify damages then how can you prove that a work's failure was a result of piracy?
You're just setting up a question that can't be answered so you can go "SEE! LYING RIAA BASTARDS, NOBODY COULD PROVE IT!" That doesn't help anybody in the debates swirling around piracy.
Humans have a gift to share knowledge and learn from experiences. Any idea you share, be it music, algorithm, art or code has the potential and should, if its good, be shared for the benefit of all humanity. The problem isn't the fact that people are sharing ideas, the problem is that people are trying to control this by using a profit model. Maybe its time to rethink the economic system as a whole and what constitutes rewards, etc.
supposed to be creative? No! They are supposed to make money. And piracy of goods readily available to the markets does harm profit (but most pirated things are not readily available to the market).
By the way, no, piracy doesn't hinder the creative process.
10 yrs ago. While not technically 'piracy', he discontinued further chapters of the eBook because people weren't paying anything.
The concept was, 'download the next chapter, pay what you want'. Well, apparently for most people, pay what you want = $0. Would be the same today.
A lot of people in here have stated they'd toss the artist a few $$ if downloading a torrent. How many actually have, and this is a tiny segment of the entertainment consuming population.
...to the ridiculous lengths people will go to to justify theft? Seriously, there is free software for every niche, and gigatons of free movies and music. If you don't want to pay, load up on all the free stuff that's there for the taking.
Oh.. quality isn't good enough for you? Then fork out the dough.
Our legal department told me not to discuss this at the time, so no names, although you'd never have heard of the game anyway.
We had a leaked pre-beta version put on the net as a zer0 day warez. (By the nephew of the head of the publisher's marketing department, though he insists he never took pre-release games home for his nephew.) The trouble was, the pre-beta had a game killing memory corruption bug that made it impossible to complete any of the missions after the intro. (That's why it's not called a release version. Some people don't seem to understand that.) The first 3 reviews to come out were all of the leaked version. We could tell, because there was a last minute change to the player artwork, and all of the screenshots showed the earlier version of the player sprite. All 3 reviews complained about how buggy the game was, and how tedious it was to keep reloading from a crash, etc.
So, the few retailers who'd pre-ordered pulled it from their shelves. Other game mags tossed their review copies unopened because "They'd heard it was too buggy to play." Big retailers refused to take orders for it because "nobody's ever heard of it".
Now the game had some serious design flaws rammed in by a publisher that had no idea what we were doing, so it was never going to be a big game. The publisher predicted sales of 100,000. Looking at the way they'd made us neuter one of the key design points, we said maybe 30,000 to 50,000 on a really good Christmas with a strong tailwind. We'd be lucky to break even, but we were already planning the sequel.
We sold 2,400.
No reviews beyond the first 3, no shelf space because of those 3 reviews, no sales. That pirated pre-beta absolutely killed the game dead. Ultimately that loss caused the studio to be wound up and sold off. (The reason legal said to keep my mouth shut, all sorts of things happened as a result of that game sinking.)
A quick google shows that the game isn't even listed on "The unofficial studio X games list." Piracy killed it so thoroughly that even our old fans don't know it existed. (I wonder if they'd believe me if I told them about it.)
Actually, a torrent release HELPS the good movies... Even mediocre movies like Wolverine benefitted from pre-release. Only the truly bad movies where every patron feels duped out of their $10 suffer.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The problem with media these days is that its all owned by corporations. Its not like the artists/directors/actors get 100 percent of the money from their art, whatever it may be. The media corporations nickle and dime the shit out of everyone and pay their artists/directors/actors a pittance in comparison to their own take of it. I would much rather my money support an artist than some rich dude who doesnt need any more money. Understandable, some actors/artists/directors are fithy rich too, but I would argue they deserve it more than upper management of some corporation since they actually created something, rather than pilfered it of someone else.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Next question.
If you're a creative type, in the beginning, you'll create and be thankful that enough people like what you've done to actually download it. If you're successful, you can then charge. Unfortunately, creativity usually starts taking a dump around then.
This has far too often bee repeated by copyright apologists that it deserves a rebuttal at every turn. Copying is not stealing. When you steal something, the person you stole from loses possession of the stolen object.
Copying might be illegal in some cases, but that doesn't make it stealing except in a very metaphorical sense, the same way that digital "piracy" isn't real piracy. (Real world piracy is a very traumatic experience incomparable to unlicensed digital redistribution I would much rather be the victim of a software and media "pirate" than a real pirate pointing a gun at my head!)
So just because somebody illegally uploads a video, that gives 100,000 other people the moral right to illegally download it?
Many people have wanted me to do an instructional DVD (illustration). Others have done this and they appear on torrent sites soon after release, with a lot of traffic.
I have given thousands of hours of free instruction on public forums, and was happy to do so. It may be irrational, but I am not inclined to do DVD's, mostly due to piracy. I don't view it as theft, more like a market condition that has to be considered when deciding whether or not to produce something.
Islam.
It's nearly impossible to determine if a work failed (financially) due to piracy. You have to make some assumption about the percentage of pirates who would have paid for the product if they had not obtained it for free. Some subset of the pirates don't cost the IP owner anything, because they wouldn't have purchased it anyway. Actually, they may create additional revenue for the poduct by turning friends on to the product. If those friends choose to pay for it, the pirates are additional marketing. There are too many variables. The RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc. just need to learn to make good/better products.
seriously, the answers to this question are as facile as a 1st semester comp-sci major espousing the benefits of LISP as it pertains to programming thats functional. its too bad there isnt a Slashdot for the cultural elite. because, unless you have an MFA you have no "business" even attempting to answer this question. i wish i could go point for point, and eviscerate the logic of every single one of your arguments, but im too busy Creating Work to care. -0.
I think a lot of free/open source software isn't nearly as popular as it would be if not for piracy. If people who pirate MS Office had to pay for it, they would almost all be using OpenOffice. So for at least opensource software - piracy is causing them much more limited success.
No, actually I think the real question is not whether anyone has lost anything to piracy. The real question is whether there is a net positive benefit to society from the current excessive attempts to stop that piracy. There I think the answer is no.
- Tom
Ok. So I don't comment on slashdot, but this one really got me going. I've no love for the *IAA's and their like but Jesus Christ just look at the DS, a platform killed by Piracy. The only software that is viable on it at this point in time is Nintendo made, backed by a HUGE marketing budget, shovelware or has a high value commercial IP. There are a load of games that would be fantastic, if a little bit niche on this platform that quite simply will never be made because they are no longer commercially viable bue to R4 card piracy.
I say this as a developer who has produced games for the DS and as a gamer who see's nothing but people with R4 cards. This isn't some bitter rant, I was still paid for my work, but it's a simple fact the R4 card has just killed the DS for smaller dev's.
(no I don't support ACTA, 3 strikes or any of that other nonsense. but to claim piracy doesn't hurt is horse shit. Sadly piracy rolls downhill it's the dev's and people producing content that feel the bite, not the suits.)
The severity of ignorance contained in this question is astounding. The need for p2p users to justify their thief never seems to stop. First off the creative works that are: stolen, pirated, illegally reproduced, or however you choose to word it, doesn’t fail. The people, business, bands, and artists that make the creative work: go broke, terminate, or fail.
You want proof? Grab a shovel and start digging. If you’re familiar with Google it might be a good place to start. Look for some contact info for an independent music label and call them up. Ask them if they’ve had any problems with piracy. Ask them if there are any albums on their label that have sold less the 200 copies, but have been illegally downloaded more than 200,000 times on p2p sites.
Talk to some people that write code for a living. Ask them if they’ve ever had code stolen from them, or used without compensation. Talk to a photographer. Ask them if they’ve ever lost money from someone illegally using one of their images to promote something. Talk to a published author. Ask them if they know how many times their book has been downloaded and what that number equals in lost income.
Reading studies published by people hired by individuals or companies with a vested interest isn’t going to tell you anything. Talk to real people, ask them questions, and then actually listen to what they have to say. Done ranting, but 12 year old's need to know.
No, piracy might not directly hurt "the creative process", but for a lot of types of Art, the ambitions of the creator can only be realized with funding. Think of TV or movies- for most of us, even though we think 99% of TV programming and movies are utter rubbish, most of us have at least seen something in our lives which we really liked, maybe thought the show or movie even rose to the level of genius. Made us see the world in a slightly different way, or perhaps helped us feel better when we were in a funk, or just merely entertained us a lot.
TV shows can cost $1 Million or more per episode to produce (although, some types of shows can be considerably cheaper, like game shows). Movies can easily cost 10's of Millions or even $100 Million. Video games can cost millions to develop.
That money has to come from somewhere.
Currently, there's enough people willing to pay that there's still funding for such creative endeavors. But, I guarantee you that if piracy became very widespread, so that these more expensive types of Art to produce could no longer make a profit, funding would drop off a cliff, and much less Art would ever be able to be fully realized.
Look at, over the past few years, how many computer games have been console exclusives, not available on the PC, because the publishers just didn't feel it was worth the investment, because of piracy on the PC. No, Art will never stop being created in totality because of piracy, but that doesn't mean that piracy has no effect on Art. It's just really hard to say what Art was never made, what Art you never heard of, because piracy reduced the incentive for investment in creative works.
I believe this movie is one that is claimed to have done poorly due to piracy, and I do believe there is some truth to this although as always it's not the full story and piracy is not the sole reason why a movie fails to generate ticket sales. This movie went on to be heavily download, some say it set all time records as the most bittorrented movie.
Usually high box office takings has a strong link to high piracy. Indeed high demand and restricted supply means fans will take matters into their own hands and obtain content however they can. There is always the exception to the rule however, and I believe where a movie bombs at the box office but is widely pirated is where the genuine cases of creative works failing because of piracy lurk.
Now, consider The Hurt Locker, which was heavily downloaded to the point they are dishing out 5000 lawsuits, but has so far failed at the box office. This is not because of piracy, but because of demonstrable incompetence, because the movie was leaked a long long time before they actually even got around to getting this film distributed and then the release dates slowly trickled on around the world. Oh and releasing the DVD before putting your film in cinemas is not a good idea either. In fact they hardly seemed to have bothered to market it, despite being well recieved by critics and viewers.
TCOR received all the big budget hype and worldwide release. In fact everything was done right. It wasn't even THAT bad. So what went wrong? Is this a genuine failure due to piracy?
The movie was close enough to the level of being shit and not worth paying for, but probably worth a download. It also deliberately targeted the market of young male gamers who also happen to be the most heavily pirating demographic. Fail. It also completely failed to target the sweet milky teated cash cow of obsessive sci-fi/fantasy fans who will go see movie like Lord of The Rings or a Star Wars release three to four times over the opening weekend then continues on to run up the credit card on all the merchandise.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
First off, creative works are not anywhere near the same thing as installing a circuit breaker panel, or setting a broken leg.
A creative work is made purely for aesthetics, with no objective (or utilitarian) purpose whatsoever.
Now here's the trick - if you're making a creative work just to make money, then you've introduced marketing into your work, altering it out of necessity in order to appeal to the customer.
Now mind, this is not necessarily going to ruin the work - but in the vast majority of cases, the output ends up as crap. A smaller percentage comes out as iffy or okay, but nothing memorable. a very rare few can manage to overcome such an imposition and come up with something ultimately successful. It gets even worse when the whole thing is managed and packaged from start to finish (see also the typical manufactured pop star).
"The issue here is whether piracy has killed a work. Stick to the issue."
That's the problem - the issue is poorly defined at best, and IMHO irrelevant to what would define the ultimate success or failure of a creative work.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Book 5 for Twilight saga was illegally posted on the internet, and rampant piracy discouraged the author enough to discontinue the project. http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/midnightsun.html
Lets say our example project is a financial failure. Company closed, employees fired.
How could anyone show the piracy killed it.
Maybe you could quantify how many copies where pirated. But if there was no Piracy how many of those copies would have converted to sales?
There is no why to know. You could come up with many wild estimates, but no facts.
Then the real world business questions follow. Assuming no Piracy ( and dancing angels) Did it just suck? Was the value there? Bad price point? Not enough advertising?
You could not even construct a valid controlled experiment.
There were rumors that piracy was a big factor in the demise of LookingGlass Studios (Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Flight Unlimited... basically a lot of respected labor- and technology-intensive PC games that saw very widespread play but low sales.)
stephanie myer was working on some book, but because someone leaked it online, she stopped and refuses to go back to it. i'm aware that this isn't due to monetary reasons, as you had hoped, but it does pertain to the question.
...which are very probably (given the right analysis and access to accounting data).
Look at the gaming market of the Commodore Amiga in the late A1200 years. Piracy was at such a height that the piracy scene often had the games in wide distribution before the gaming companies, and in one case (If I recall correctly the company affected was Psygnosis) a game was actually released in the piracy scene _before_ it was released to market by the company (which implies a disgruntled employee).
If you want proof for actual piracy damage, you must look at the early years. This is what every of the drones thinking up their fictional damages are using for base, and the Amiga gaming companies may be the ones actually able to shed some light on the matter - especially those which were UK based.
This signature is DRM protected. By the DMCA, you are not allowed to counteract or oppose to it.
Back in my highschool and university days, I pirated a lot. Reason was money. I had little discretionary income so I'd take things where I could get it. However as I've gotten older and moved on to the working world, I've little need to pirate stuff. I simply buy it. It is faster and easier, plus I really do like doing the right thing.
Few, if any, sales were lost to my piracy. I simply could not afford the things I was pirating.
I think I have a complicated view of the entire copyright idea (shorter time frames with stronger enforcement is my preference I think) but here in New Zealand we have a very difficult time maintaining our local film and television industry and piracy can have a much stronger impact than in the states. Recently the film "Boy" (which is fantastic and very very local in style) has had some trouble because it's already being pirated before it has even had a chance to be released internationally. It's not like the producers wouldn't like it to have a large international release on the same day or something like that but it's just not an option with our small industry. Here's some more info on it:
http://tvnz.co.nz/entertainment-news/boy-illegally-uploaded-internet-3606531
I had a small company with eleven employees, and as the first Nintendo GBA flash cart was released, we had our contract pulled out from under us. So not just one work, in our case, but two, and a company, costing a pregnant woman her job and her health insurance.
But carry on with the navel gazing, pretending that just because you don't know about it means it doesn't exist.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Spore had the brand new SecuROM PA activation system when it launched. If you had a look on Pirate Bay, there were something like 100,000 peers on the torrent.
The protection gets you nothing. The amount of piracy on release is a representation of the amount of interest there is in a product. In particular with both of those games, people were curious but skeptical.
Also I'd note Stardock considers Demigod a success. They've continued to support it and so on.
You have to remember that no matter what, your game is going to get pirated unless nobody cares. You can't stop piracy, it has been tried in every way and it has all failed, even Ubisoft's stupidly invasive protection. So the question isn't one of keeping piracy numbers down, it is one of increasing sales. While if you could actually stop piracy you could in theory increase sales, it still wouldn't near equal the number of copies downloaded.
In terms of a server thing, the answer there is just ban pirates. Stardock just made a mistake with their code and it wasn't that pirates could play Demigod on the servers, it was that the check ins were screwing things up. They fixed it the next day.
Infer what you want, but Mr. Hasler didn't imply that. For just one point, he never mentioned moral rights one way or another - you put the words into his mouth. To save you the trouble of putting words into mine That makes you a TROLL
Who is John Cabal?
I have a similar anecdote. A friend of mine owns a game company. They made a game that was in the top 25 of IGN's best iPhone games last year. The game is a big success with many daily returning users. Sadly, the number of paying users is so low that it didn't even cover the relatively low costs of development ( small team, tiny budget ). I recall him mentioning something like that even if 5% of the returning users would actually pay (5 dollar) for the game, they'd be able to develop the next installment their fans are asking for.
I'm not sure what their DRM situation was exactly. I recall him mentioning something about Apple not really caring about their problems and the platform not giving them the means to effectively implement DRM.
Piracy to them is very real. It's sad seeing a team with such amount of talent and passion not being able to get a fair reward.
There is hardly any money in the music industry anymore. Bootlegging is a tax that most artists can't afford to pay. You have to appeal to a million listeners to get 100,000 to pay. So artists like Lady Gaga have to appeal to a billion to get a million to pay. So the stuff that's being hurt is the stuff with more limited appeal, more niche stuff. Artists who would have sold 100,000 a decade ago now get out of the business, or don't get in at all, or they die from lack of health care in the US. A lot of the infrastructure is gone. Music studios are gone. Local music scenes are much less than they were. The best part of record companies is gone. Live shows cost a fortune, with most going to insurance and security. There are ways you can say it is better for really entrepreneurial artists, but again, that's just a fraction, maybe 10%. Same for artists who can produce their own stuff, it's better in some ways but that's a small fraction.
In the past, no matter how you listened to music, whether buying CD or listening to FM, or even playing the jukebox at a diner, some money made it back to the producer of that music, incentivizing more music production. Now, there are a lot of ways to listen to music now where no money goes to the producer. The difference between low money and no money is profound.
In short, the problem used to be that artists with broad appeal would make a ton of money and artists with niche appeal would scrape by, but now artists with broad appeal are scraping by and niche artists are out. If only a small fraction of your listeners pays then the whole industry changes. You can't point to one album that suffered, they have all suffered, even ones that didn't get made. It's a systemic problem.
I'm ok with someone getting paid for making a work. We are a capitalist society, you gotta make money to live. I wouldn't do computer support 40 hours a week if I weren't getting paid for it. However, you shouldn't be able to keep earning from one work for a lifetime. If I fix a computer, I don't get to say "Ok you have to keep paying me money but I don't have to do more work, I fixed a computer you are still paying me for that."
Copyright needs to be for a reasonable length. You get to make your money on your work, but then it belongs to the world and you have to move on. I am not ok with this "You own a work for your entire life, and then your heirs get to won it for 50 more years." No. Not only is that silly, it is not the reason the Constitution says we have copyright. It says we have copyright to promote the progress of useful arts and sciences. To do that, work needs to fall in to public domain so you have to keep creating, and so others can build on your creations.
Commodore C64, AMIGA etc.
More anticompetitiveness than piracy, I could cite innovations in software that the government has taken and, as a result, put the innovator out of business.
Trent is amazing ! Like Pokey!!!!
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
The criteria in determining the success of a creative work would depend on one's perspective:
Here, the question is about creative works that were "a financial failure" with respect to the RIAA and their claims of financial impacts from piracy so we should look to how a success would be defined from RIAA's perspective. Interestingly, a failure in the eyes of the RIAA might still be a success from the viewpoint of both the artists who created that work and from society in general.
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
I have an impression that here in Russia Microsoft wants at least some amount of piracy: if one is not going to pay anyway better let him use pirated copy rather than switch to free software.
See the Ponosov's case which was initiated by the Russian authorities and Microsoft seem to have even tried to defend Ponosov or at least refused that their rights were seriously violated. Anyway that case initiated adoption of Linux and free software by Russian schools.
Meet Nobuo Uematsu and others, inspired me in ways that real instruments could not.
And you know what ? I don't care.
It's all about the heart.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
> 60 years from now, you'll have old farts reminiscing about how these new bands kids listen to are all mindless crap, unlike the great music of Eminem, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spear and Lady Gaga that they grew up with. Those were the great musicians.
I'd like to interject.
The main reason why 70s music is so widely listened to still is a a big exposure of 70s contemporaries to this little animal (symbiotic molecule?) called LSD-25 and friends.
It really inspired music not otherwise possible, and the beginings of culture not seen before (or after), and a lot of it was phenomenally not motivated by profit.
Some of it was even deep, well, that's subjective of course, but still :P
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
These regular /. threads about file sharing/RIAA/piracy are like a daily piece on a GOP web site along the lines of, "discuss: is Obama REALLY a Socialist destroying America?" (or similar posting about Palin or Fox News on Daily Kos) The vast majority of the hundreds of replies will take one side, with the implicit challenge of "unless you can convincingly answer every one of the points and stories posted by our side, and we'll be the judge of that, then we win", which of course is impossible. It's a pep rally for the school football team.
I'm too lazy to "prove" it. But I'm fairly certain that the rise of movie piracy is of of the main reasons why it is a dying company.
I'm surprised nobody has talked about the decline of the Hong Kong film industry. Though there are certainly other contributing factors, piracy has taken a serious toll on cinema in HK cinema.
...and steal whatever the hell I want off the shelves, because Best Buy will most certainly NOT FAIL due to my theft.
Evil is the money of root.
Had Islam been founded today it would never have made it. Look at the Koran. It's complete plagiarism, grabbing all the best bits from the Bible and Torah. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works would have had their collective asses in court in less time than the Muezzin can shout a call to prayer.
Also, due to a misunderstanding, the important issues about (a) washing pork 10 times, and (b) not eating your own hands and feet, have been completely misprinted causing untold inconvenience to millions of adherents.
Want to know why all religions were founded in the Middle East ... no bloody copyright !!!
Can't think of a single thing that has failed due to piracy. By the time people get around to pirating things, most of the money has already been made. The MPAA and the RIAA are only interested in keeping their coffers full and their wallets padded, in my opinion, and a majority of the "effects of piracy" that they proclaim are bullcrap.
You are asking an unanswerable question.
Stuff does not "tank" commercially because it is shared. It tanks if the sales are lackluster. Almost always, there are several reasons for this. One may be that people who would otherwise have bought the game are downloading it instead. So we are already at three levels of indirection.
If you want some honest estimates (and estimates is all you're going to get), approach the problem from both sides.
$450 gazillion of damage is certainly bonkers.
But so is "no effect".
Both are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. But where do you find evidence? Sure you'll find plenty of games where someone claims that piracy hit it hard. However, to turn that claim into proof, you need to prove not only that it was pirated heavily, but also that at least a considerable portion of those people would have bought it otherwise. Just because everyone plays it doesn't mean everyone would've bought it. The cost/benefit analysis simply changes dramatically between $0 and, say, $49.95
I can't think of any way to make a serious calculation of how many people would have bought a game but didn't. Way too many variables, and you can't ask them, either - how do you get a representative sample of an anonymous crowd?
So, in short, I don't think you'll get actual evidence.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Looking Glass, makers of the original Thief games, has generally been considered a victim of piracy. Their games were very well regarded but didn't sell well enough to sustain the studio. It's said that the sales were borderline, so if some of those who pirated the games would have bought them, the studio would have been able to continue.
Everyone thought he was so cool, Mr. Alternateen Poster Boy, Devin Ripley. He stopped playing football after freshman year, grew his hair shaggy, wore tight t-shirts and mumbled. He would sit in the library playing his guitar, cheerleaders cooing to him. The sensitive guy routine didn't fool anyone but the other popular kids; the rest of us hated him.
He was in a band called Seminal Oblivion with a group of college-aged burnouts who lived in the apartments a block from the school and spent most of their 'jam sessions' playing Sega. They played shows at downtown coffeeshops every month or so, and we always ended up going to see the other bands, who were actually talented.
One night, we were extremely disappointed because it was their CD release party, and so they ended up playing a much extended set of mostly covers of Nirvana and Elliott Smith songs, with a few metal standards thrown in to amuse the football boys in the audience. A friend of mine (not a close friend) had secretly developed a crush on Devin, and she ended up buying the CD. She justified it with some nonsense about supporting local music, but she stared at the shirtless photo of him on the sleeve the entire ride home.
I know what I did was manipulative, but I couldn't help it.
I forced her to come back to my house and let me copy the CD onto my computer. Then I let her retreat to her own home to gaze at Devin's intangible image in peace.
I uploaded the whole thing to Napster.
And I worked it. I sent messages to anyone who downloaded music from me: "Hey, if you like _____, check out this awesome song by Seminal Oblivion. It rulz, dood!" I talked incessantly about it in all the chatrooms. Days later, I got the same girl to part with the CD sleeve for half an hour while I scanned in the images. I wrote reviews and submitted them to anyone who might be likely to post them. I lied my ass off. But, most importantly, I Photoshopped the photo of Devin shirtless until he looked like every Carson Daly fan's wet dream.
I singlehandly created so much buzz on the web about this one stupid band that I had to maintain a constant connection to satisfy thousands of Devin-hungry fans. I made them rock gods, and they were all oblivious.
Someone finally clued the boys in, and Devin shoved me against a wall between classes one day. I was startled to see a tear in his eye as he spoke to me in his soft, effeminate voice.
"How could you do that? I'm a serious artist. Music is my life. How can I support myself, now that the whole world can get my music for free? What will I do? Where will I go? You've taken all the artistic control away from me and made my vision into.. into.. anarchy. You've.. you've ruined my whole life." And he loped off, a cheerleader catching him around the shoulders and glaring back at me.
At the time, I thought it was funny, because I thought their band was miserably bad. I figured he would move on. But a year later I came back from college and he was working at McDonald's. And all because I put his CD on Napster.
I support the artists I listen to [...] by paying to see them perform.
How did you do that before you became old enough to attend the venues in which they perform? Do you often leave the country to find such a venue?
Excerpt from an interview with the author, Marc Goodman at http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/GOODMAN.HTM
The game seemed popular and received great reviews. Did it do well commercially?
Nope. Datamost only sold around 5,000 copies of the game. I've gotten email from a lot of people and even met people who know and love the game and you know what? I've never met or talked to anyone who had an official copy.
Pretty frequently I see the recurring threads on software piracy on various newsgroups. People really believe that there is no impact from their copying software. Well, there is an impact. I couldn't support myself by writing computer games, so "The Bilestoad" was the last game I did.
I think you should be asking artists, writers, musicians, not geeks
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
I think more harm is caused by word of mouth, such as "this movie sucks, don't go see it - it's not even worth a rental!".
This routinely causes terrible box office figures and therefore should be outlawed. People need to sign NDA agreements
before they are allowed to see the movie.
I heard an interview w/ a (nationally recognized) band recently in which they said record sales were no longer a good measure of success - because their business/exposure/following was growing, and physical record sales were the only thing that declined in the last 2 years. Attributed it to a change times/how people get music. The RIAA doesn't like to admit that business is booming - they just focus on outdated statistics.
For people who really think piracy is ok, then try this test:
Go to work for the next 12 months and donate your paychecks to some one else. (You don't really need the money, do you?)
Then tell us about your experience.
When you steal films, music, art you are asking artists and many other professionals to work for free.
So, try it for a year and report back.
The question in interesting, but misses the point of why creative people's work should not be pirated. Their creative work may prosper, but the individual artist is forever not able to recoup those financial losses. In a scenario where there are producers or record companies, there are LOTS of creative projects you personally are not seeing b/c of piracy. There are LOTS of singers whose voices you will never hear b/c record companies are more and more afraid to take risks. In film, there are investors who make financial risks to bring you good movies. As the return on their investment shrinks b/c of piracy, they take fewer chances with investing in film and so -- are creative projects failing b/c of piracy? Yes... hundreds of them because those creative projects will never be made.
Kindergarden is where art is free. Grownups have bills to pay and children to feed. Grow-up and pay for your movies and music. Seriously -- what makes you think it's OK to steal?
Who taught you that?
When Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, those Atlanta based pricks quickly brought back something closer to the original and called it Coke Classic. David Puttnam must be yet one more self-absorbed movie-industry asshole (as redundant as that is) to have missed that shining example.
As other people have aptly pointed out, there's a lot of hidden complexity to the question. The more I think about piracy, the more I discover new complexities to the situation. I will say up front that I am against piracy.
The question is "Has any creative work failed because of piracy?" I'll assume you mean non-commercial piracy. Although, to be fair, you could ask the same question about commercial piracy. I often see people say that filesharing can't be proven to damage profits - their conclusion, therefore, is that filesharing doesn't damage profits. Those same people will turn around and claim that commercial piracy does harm the creator - though, they can't actually prove it (which seems weirdly inconsistent). Afterall, if someone sells pirated Avatar DVDs for $5, you can't actually prove that any of the buyers would've bought the official $10 copy. Maybe $5 is all they were willing to pay. Or maybe the pirate being in the right place at the right time caused the buyer to think about buying the DVD, but they wouldn't have bought it otherwise. Of course, I'm just playing devil's advocate here - to show that someone could argue that commercial piracy doesn't cause any harm to anyone, and they could even use the "you can't prove it" defense - even though the majority of people believe it does.
To use another example, if a store went bankrupt and that same store had shoplifters, then would you know that it went bankrupt *because* of shoplifters? It's hard to say. First, we don't have the hard numbers about the losses due to shoplifting. Second, you could always argue that a *good* store would make enough money to cope with the losses due to shoplifting. We'd never agree that shoplifting is right - even if we can't actually prove to a shoplifting advocate that "shoplifting causes good businesses to go out of business".
Saying "you can't prove it" doesn't mean that it's not true.
Another complication is the fact that, while piracy causes no *direct* loss (in the same way that shoplifting causes the loss of a valuable item), companies do lose out if people who would've paid don't pay. The effects of this can be pretty subtle. It might mean that the company hires fewer (or lays off some) people who were working on that product. This can result in a downward spiral - fewer workers means fewer improvements, which means fewer customers. On the other hand, if the company makes more money (because people are paying rather than pirating), then that company/creator can go on to make new products with that extra money. Those products that don't exist are part of the "loss" due to piracy.
It's theoretically possible that members of society self-regulate their behavior so that people who would've paid do pay, and people who wouldn't have paid simply pirate. Theoretically, this could lead to a situation where piracy leads to zero losses to a company - because they're not losing any paying customers to piracy. I really have a hard time believing that pirates are good at self-regulating their piracy this way. Besides, I know a few pirates who absolutely do not self-regulate. They used to buy stuff until they discovered how to pirate, and now they look at you like you're crazy if you pay instead of pirate. (One pirate, in particular, bought Adobe's creative suite for $2000 a few years ago, and now he laughs at the idea of paying for anything.)
There's also the issue of "Piracy as it exists" vs "Piracy as a concept". These are two different questions. It's possible that many of the people who are currently pirating are poor (which is part of the reason it's so common in college) and wouldn't have paid for it. The current situation might be skewed slightly towards the "self-regulation" situation I outlined above. On the other hand, there are activists who want piracy fully legalized. If piracy were fully legalized, you might be doing a lot more damage because current paying customers suddenly have no reason not to pirate - society has suddenly said i
A project fails because the expenditures exceed the revenue from the people who pay. It really doesn't matter how many people don't pay, unless you can show that there are people who would have paid, except for consuming via non-licensed distribution means. Think of it this way. A scene from Americana is boys gathered around a knothole to watch a ball game. Close up the knothole and do all the boys buy a ticket? Probably not, because, generally, they are at the knothole because they can't afford a ticket. If they could, they'd buy a ticket and view the game from a better vantage point. Any way, if you look at movies and music, the things most downloaded are also the things that sold the most units.
Infringement hurts the business - if it does - by reducing the revenues of the hit, i.e., still massively profitable, but not as much. A lot of commercialized art rely on a business model where the hit pays for 4 or 5 break-evens and the 4 out and out flops. If unlicensed views mean the hit can only pay for only 8 non-hits, and a producer is still making 9 non-hits, then the producer will see negative cash flow.
The trouble is, there are so many complexities, not the least being demographic changes, that it is very hard to identify the effect. Let's take a look at movies: box office has increased and is at record levels. Is that a real trend or the side-effect of 3-D novelties? Elsewhere, today, I was part of a discussion about "Jaws" and "Shampoo," the number 1 and number 4 top grossing movies of 1975. "Shampoo" won best picture. "Star Wars" the top grossing film of a couple of years later was nominated as best picture. Back then, well reviewed movies also find large audiences. Last year, "The Hurt Locker" set a record for the lowest-grossing Best Picture. Can the serious movie find an audience these days?
DVD sales, the real place where movies made their money last decade, are flat to lower. Is that a residue of infringement?
Whether it is or not, it's rather academic. Hollywood justified big budget movies for the following reasons: 1) there's a certain ante, in terms of starts, stunts, and effects, for a blockbuster movie, 2) the movie will do well overseas, and 3) the movie will do well in DVD. 2 and especially 3 aren't so sure, and as a result budgets are being reduced and actors are not getting their quote.
Hollywood will continue to talk about piracy, because whether it is really the cause of alleged lost profits, it plays well with Congress and has resulted in the de facto erosion of fair use and has closed up the knotholes in the ball parks represented by our recorders, computers, and screens. That can't hurt. But, make no mistake about it, the formula I first expressed, revenues from those who do pay must exceed expenditures, is close to their wallets. The high cost of marketing a film has led them to to shutter their "independent" film imprints. For the past couple of years, they've been saying no to producers on what would have been yeses, such as a sequel to "The Anchorman," Sam Raimi directing Toby Maguire in a fourth Spiderman, and so on. (On the other hand, they've paid licensing money in order to do development deals around toy brands. Yes, Lincoln Logs has a deal. Don't ask me, I can't explain it.)
We could look at the late 19th/early 20th century American music. There was a time when copyright was very poorly enforced, and a lot of musicians made music that would get ripped off by other entities, leaving them to penniless.
Just for reference, you can go to Wikipedia and look up:
Stephen Foster
Tin Pan Alley
(The first paragraph in the "Origins" section)
That alone would mean there are several real-life examples of artists getting screwed over piracy.
Stephen King wrote a book and released it online as an experiment. He asked people to voluntarily pay for it, as they were simply signing up and downloading. However, very few of his admittedly rabid fans did so, so he withdrew from the experiment. As his books have essentially guaranteed sales, the fact that nearly no one paid would indicate that in theory piracy could sink a project. And, one would expect that less popular authors would fare even worse. However, iTunes sells DRM-free music, so clearly there a market for digital distribution, largely if the whole process is so efficient that people don't mind buying.
Has any Creative Work succeeded because of Piracy?
Not free distribution. Not through Open Source principles. But because of Piracy.
I live in Vietnam and the posts I read here are all sound very American. They DO NOT reflect reality in Vietnam (and probably the other developing countries where most of the world's population lives).
Here, ABSOLUTELY, utterly rampant piracy destroys/has destroyed their media industries. Every block has a fake DVD store where you can buy movies for $.60 US. No music artist plans on ANY profit from their CDs, they are for promotion only, no movie makes money after the first run. (Musicians make money from live acts).
Do they still make music and movies? Yes but their budgets are very low (typically $2-3K for a music video, $250K for a movie). Paid distribution is likewise unprofitable, in the entire country (86 Million) there are less than 100 screens (US: 300 Million, 35,000 screens). As for quality; when was the last time a Vietnamese film reached global distribution let alone worldwide success?
Unless you want your media to be compromised solely of low cost (low financial risk) productions; hi-end spectaculars (Ben-Hur, Avatar) will become a thing of the past. Piracy is just another form of "the tragedy of the commons" which was recognized by no less than Adam Smith.
I used to work in the independent games industry. In 2004, I designed and wrote a little Action-Puzzle game titled Drop! (feel free to look it up on GameFaqs). We sold it in stores for $10, and online for $5, however, we got $.33 per retail copy sold (blame publishers) vs. $2.50 or so per online copy sold. We sold a few hundred thousand copies or so at retail across a 6 month period (#4 for sales for a couple months, but no one pays attention to jewel case games).
Here's the trick: the online version had an online high-score system. You could play the online copy for free, but you didn't get access to the shared high-score system unless you bought it. We sold less than 100 copies online, but saw several hundred thousand unique IP addresses hit the high score system every day (and this kept up for years, not just people "trying out the high score system").
For 6 months of work, I made about $30,000 on that (a couple other guys made similar amounts), which eventually didn't justify the effort - because people who want to play a game don't care about making it possible for the creators to keep making games.
I work for Microsoft now :P
People who make it a business model off others creativity are the ones crying out loud for their gravy. The creative ones will still go on to make something new, but what about the leeches(RIAA) in the middle who have nothing creative other than this payola system. A good product will have customers always willing to pay for it but others it will be a passing fad which gets dumped after a while.
I did pirate Halo for Mac several years ago. I however did own 2 copies of it for PC (first one broke). Therefore, I had paid $50 for the first to copies, and was not going to pay another $50 (http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2003/11/halo/ (doesn't show the $50 price tag anymore)) for the exact same game. $50 for an alright-at-best game is far too much to ask. That's why it was pirated too much.
That's why there's no market for expensive bottled water since everyone can get free water at a drinking fountain. Oh wait...
First of all, that's not true. There are some iPhone apps (like turn-by-turn navigation apps) that cost $50-$70 and sell surprisingly well. Secondly, app pricing is based on supply and demand. Any first-year CS student can write a fart-app or flashlight-app in 10 minutes, and thus there are hundreds of them in the app store and the price is driven down to $0.99 (or even free). Who would pay $30 for such an app? If the creator thinks he can sell 100,000 copies at $0.99 or 1,000 copies at $30, which price should he choose?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
it is clear who has really benefited: Lawyers. Seriously, the piracy industry keeps a large number of lawyers well fed, both prosecuting and defending.
The MS Windows 95 Trumpet Winsock was wiped out by piracy, when a magazine gave away a copy on a free CD. After that, Microsoft sealed their fate by copying the BSD stack.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"Have creative people ever lost out on proper rewards as a result of bootlegging?"
What's proper? Who determines that? the "creative people"?
Have you ever known a gourmet chef? how about a tattoo artist? or fashion designer? a high-end hair stylist? Are these "creative people"? does their stuff get copied? do they still make a living?
In 2000 Microsoft bought Bungie right after the first Halo was announced for PC and Mac. For many years Bungie operated as a Microsoft company and quit producing Mac games. Now the company is totally different, and I doubt they will go back to Mac gaming.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The classic example was Eli Whitney's cotton gin. It was a brilliant invention that revolutionized the production of cotton but a financial failure: the farmers all pirated the design and built their own rather than pay his exorbitant price.
http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/cotton_gin.htm
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
My tech-related book was published about a year after we sold it to the publisher - fully supported (with reasonable advance), marketing, nicely edited and excellent production values. It was/is even an "Official guide". But it was scanned and published on torrent about 4 months after publication... most of our current sales are to people using it as a textbook, not the hobbyists we really wrote it for, and simple analysis indicates that we're unlikely to ever get another check from the publisher. Sure, we got our advance, and I think the publisher should have done an electronic option right away, but the bottom line is that the book sold *way* fewer copies than projected, and the publisher *certainly* lost money on it.
The first 12 chapters were pirated off her computer. As a result she never published it.
I think the music industry is to blame for the decline in CD Sales. When the music industry created the single, the buying public figured you could now just buy the songs you liked. Sure, the death knell lasted quite a while. We had to wait for the technology to catch up. Plus the cookie cutter pop idols did not help their cause.
Freespace 2 was absolutely brilliant, well reviewed and a sequel to a well selling predecessor, yet it totally bombed. Yet I remember all the guys in my school who were into PC gaming were playing pirated copies of it (including yours truly). So yeah, looking back I guess it was destroyed by piracy.
Yes, my project. A very popular Linux distro uses licences copies of my ideas, code and background artwork. The license being "free to distribute but never for payment, no exceptions". The piraters distribute for money.
Now I do get donations for my work but I can see through eBay sales that the piraters have made thousands vs my few hundred. The problem is that every pirate version purchaser then becomes a support leech and I can easily detect them (it's not their problem) because the Linux distro needs to be run a special way on hacked hardware otherwise it breaks due to limitations in the hardware platform.
I have pulled away from the project because of
the pirating when a pirated who made $1400
sent me a $2.50 donation. The project is simply dying as I was the lead and other team members are also frustrated with this problem.
I may have missed someone already saying this, but I believe that you are asking a question which is impossible to objectively answer.
In order to actually give you an answer, someone would need to show both that the work lost money and that it was because of people illegally downloading it for free. I see several problems with your request.
-1- I have to show that the work ACTUALLY lost money (Harry Potter).
-2- I have to show that the people would have paid if they couldn't download it for free.
-3- I have to have an accurate count of downloads to see if it would have made money.
Of course, I could also ask a question or two in return. If everyone in town takes a little corn out of a farmers field, but the farmer cannot get an accurate count of how much was stolen by each person, where they still stealing? If he goes bankrupt, could I justify by asking if the corn I took was the corn that put him out of business? If he raised his prices to cover the loss, could I claim that he would have raised his prices anyway, so it's OK?
At the start of this decade when all of this was just starting, and high res mobile video was QVGA on an HP iPaq using MPEG1 - I spent $50,000 buying "New Media" rights to about a dozen new indie films. My pitch to the filmmakers was that they would make a killing with a 50% share in all the money we were going to make. Why? Because I was the only guy in town who had figured out how to compress to fit a feature on a 320MB IBM MicroDrive and still look great at 320x240.
What a flaming idiot I was! It seemed like everyone on the PocketPC boards had my files but I never made a dime. I did get to grind through my life savings, my 401K and my credit though! Worst yet, the amazing filmmakers who maxed out credit cards to do their films all went broke too.
So... Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy? You Have Got To Be Kidding - Right?
I happen to be the webmaster (really, sysadmin, but why quibble) of a popular Mortal Kombat fansite.
In the first "generation" of Mortal Kombat (MK 1-4), every one of the fighting games made their way to PC. As soon as the first of the second "generation" games was announced (Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance), we were bombarded with people asking about a PC version, because only console versions had been mentioned. We asked reps from Midway (including a head of marketing) at E3, and the reps told us they had no plans to make a PC version, as they had never made any money on the PC versions.
Between E3 and the game's actual release, the questions regarding the availability of a PC version only intensified, and many folks were irate that there were no PC versions. Then we got to thinking about it... we knew a lot of people had PC versions, but there was no money made on it? We knew the games had no DRM, so it wasn't hard for us to believe that a good chunk of the people who had gotten the PC version before (and were asking for it now) were pirates. In fact, one of our staff members actually caught out someone demanding a PC version admitting he pirated other game software...
So, yeah, I can say that the entire lack of MK for PC now is due to piracy. The earlier games got pirated all to hell and they never made money off those ports, so why bother porting if it's not worth the money?
Does anyone know of any creative works that were provably a financial failure due to piracy?
Far as I can tell, out of 500+ comments, the answer is no. Then again, out of those 500+ comments, maybe a dozen actually address the question.
Three Squirrels
I happen to think Lady Gaga is quite original and talented, although I don't like every song she sings.
btw: You are wrong, many great artists created works on commission(works for hire), including leonardo da vinci and michaelangelo. No i'm not comparing Lady Gaga to DaVinci.
Don't we have plenty of examples where the whole lot of money to be made in the Arts displaces effort and attention from worthwhile, but less popular endeavours to easy-on-mind drivel ? Do we really want marketers and bankers in charge of our culture ?
Weren't a lot of artists now recognized as Greats destitute during their lives ?
Isn't people's culture budget fairly constant, thus piracy allows them to have access to more culture, which they couldn't do otherwise ?
Don't out-of-copyright works contribute more to culture than all of the still-copyrighted works put together ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Was Schrodinger wearing a hat?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
i think what the RIAA and MPAA say is just a load of crap. im sorry but te main people wineing about piracy are the people will million upwards of billions of dollars in there bank accounts. they only way tey can say piracy hurts is if the movie or alum or game is question was a total bomb out to begin with making it obvious wether or not piracy was involved they still would have lost money, look at the gaming company that have been making the most complaints but at the same time the compaies are reporting record profits every quarter. it the movie dosent come out of the red during its time in teaters then its there own fault for the movie being crap. most music arts already get there moent from te record companys beforehand plus they make money doing live shows, the companies are not out money because the cd that they carge 13.99 for costs them one .01cents to make? i thought when cds came out these same record companies said they would be cheaper than cassettes, but when we did use cassetes i remember cd's costing more even know production costs were less.
plain and simple piracy does not make these companies suffer and it does not cost a loss of jobs. whats costing us a loss of jobs is the goverment still allowing these and any other company to outsource overseas so they can pay pennies to the workers and screw us out of good jobs. im not sure about alot of you, but i have been let go twice because te company i was with outsourced to india. ive heard tons of stories of it happening to people i know. if the company is american then all support, customer service, tech support should be american workers, not someone from india that we all have a hard time understand and the only thing they know how to do to help you is try and upsell you something you probably don't need.
and look whats been going on recently the riaa is using a law firm to go after people basically blackmailing them to settle out or be screwed, its turned in to another way of making profit , it as nothing to do with making them pay for piracy ,god knows if there allowed to continue this hell theyll be theones helping these things get leaking cause why would they want to make 20 of a dvd when they can get you to settle for 2,000 for downloading a copy that they purpously leaked out on the pirate bay, i bet you theve done it. all in all there just crooks using piracy as there reason for all this. there all filthy rich who cares if 5-10% of the peolple who have there movie,album,game,etc... did not pay for it you made enough off the 90-95% who did.
Basically, this article asks "please prove the non-existance of payment". Next article will be "please prove the non-existance of God", followed by "please prove the non-existance of purple-orange striped midget Yeti's".
You cannot prove something does not exist.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
If only I'd patented my fart-app way back in 2007.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
And another point, actually. Your example of a better artist of old is... Glenn Miller? The guy whose band was criticized at the time as being too commercial and lacking feeling in its letter-perfect playing? The guy whose music was panned by some critics as being commerial novelty gimmicks instead of real jazz? The guy that even one band said about that he gave America what he thought America wanted? Heck, the guy who only started being a success when the band started being heavily sponsored financially so he got enough exposure?
_That_ is your example of something total unlike nowadays manufactured, commercial gimmick bands? I mean, geesh, that band _was_ the Backstreet Boys of '39-'42, at least if you listened to the old farts panning it at the time.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Some ip thief stole my idea for first post.
No, that was the time when Coca-Cola deliberately created 100 million cans of faulty Coke. Heh. Actually I've never tried the "new coke"
Also, do not diss David Puttnam, check his IMDB profile. He has quite consistently produced quality, high-class movies, such as The Duellists, Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, Local Hero, The Killing Fields, and The Mission.
Circumcision is child abuse.
If Coca-Cola's financial survival landed on those 100 million cans, do you really think they would dump them?
The anology only works because Coca-Cola could, I presume, survive losing 100 million cans worth of profit, even if it means lending money to make the next batch. But then again Coke is a clear-cut formula, as long as nothing screws up in the manufacturing, they'll make that money back. Movies are an artform, its success is dependent on the audience liking THIS PARTICULAR movie, regardless of your previous or future titles.
Some pre-release leaks are marketing stunts.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
A lot of gaming houses are moving away from PC as their primary platform for single player games as a direct consequence of piracy on the PC. Yes, there is pirated stuff for consoles as well but apparently not enough to hurt sales as much. And yes, PC versions of games are still going to be available. The thing is that the games are going to be designed first and foremost for consoles and more casual(read braindead) type of gaming.
The question proposed is "Has any creative work failed because of piracy?" The real question is "why has piracy become acceptable?" I Think we can answer this in 2 parts. 1) Congress has made copyright so long that it is essentially "forever" in terms of relevance. This also has an effect of stifling new work that may make use of, or resemble, something else released since it will never become public domain in our lives. 2) Because the respective industries have taken great pains to lock out any works they do not own, they have no reason to produce anything but music, movies etc. that meets the lowest common denominator since it is cheaper to market a few groups or movies than thousands. The book publishers still thrive despite thousands of choices and a vast array of independent publishers. Sure there are some blockbusters and duds, but they still make money, and would without the incredibly long copyright period. This policy of force feeding media and eternal copyright has made the whole idea a joke. Couple that with the "creative accounting" where the artists don't get paid and no one respects the copyright law. Why should they? The only ones who make money seem to be the ones intent upon curtailing our choices and creativity.
Filesharing is a minor issue compared to industrial counterfeiting - I've hear the proportions of loss estimated as 10% online 90% counterfeits. The estimate itself was actually (when I asked) substantially distorted because the research underpinning it (for a major US TV network) showed that the real proportion was 1% to 99%. This was felt not to be credible, and so it was changed to reflect various intangible factors like predicted growth and future impacts due to demographics and exchange rate changes.
Of course, you can't prove that anyone has gone under because their IP was stolen, those lost sales are an opportunity cost so they don't show on any spreadsheet. This is the trick that is used to kill any investment project in any enterprise and to persuade everyone that the status quo is the way to go - because the sales you do see have definite margin and definite costs and these are provable, so new products and different products are choked away.
The question is really - does this have a negative effect on the industry of music, film or TV? At the moment I would say that it's not clear that it is, but again - who can say what the situation would be if the counterfeiters were closed?
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
I've been writing music for years and sometimes it's really good. Many of you have probably heard some of it - but would never know, because the only way I've ever made any money from this is by selling tunes for commercial use. You might hear it as the background to a educational video or maybe in a low-budget commercial. You'll never hear it on the radio on on the stage - but not because of piracy (although I've had tunes pirated - usually by corporations, not individuals or sailors with peg legs and a parrot on their shoulder).
The biggest obstacle to making any money in the music business isn't pirates - it's the record companies. Through their control of distribution and marketing they pretty much are the gatekeepers. If you don't sign up with them you'll never be heard. If you do, you might be heard but you'll never get paid. You may see some recording star climbing out of a luxury car or limousine and dressed like a king - but those things are rented by the studio and charged to the artist as promotional expenses; the studios use creative accounting to insure that they keep all the money for themselves. The artist's real lives aren't anything like what you've been shown - if they have a real life at all.
To add insult to injury, there are "performing rights" organizations like ASCAP and BMI that keep track of who is playing what and make sure that the royalties are collected and distributed to the artists. Or that's what they'd like you to think - they've got the "collect the royalties" routine down pat - but their "pay the artist" routine is still a work in progress - somehow, they just can figure out how to track down the artists so they just hang onto the money. It's a great business for these folks - they've even got laws in place that insure that they'll be able to shake people down and keep the money for years to come.
If you think that the recording industry associations are there to protect the artist - the truth is that they treat the artists even worse than the way they do the "pirates". In the recent past they've gained new legislation that makes the creative efforts of artists the property of the record company - and the record company can pay the artist as much or little for it as they wish. The artist can't take their creations anywhere else because the law says they belong to the record company.
In case you wonder why there's "no good music being released" perhaps it's because the talented artists don't wish to subject themselves to the recording industry's abusive practices - if you can work your tail off and not get paid, or sit at home and not get paid - what do you think is really happening? It's not the pirates that are causing artists to stay away from the music business, it's the music business and their practices that has caused the artists to stay away.
Is this going to change any time soon? No - the government is in the pocket of corporations like these and their mutual back-scratching will continue for many years to come.
The long answer is:
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Bah had more oooo but filter was blocking it :/
What a shocker, someone on pro-piracy, anti-copyright site Slashdot says piracy has never caused any creative work to fail.
Meanwhile, PC gaming is in the shitter while console gaming has risen to new revenue heights. Gee, I wonder why that is? And if you think I'm just stating my own opinion, Epic itself has cited PC piracy as one of the reasons they focus so much on consoles now.
Besides that, it's just common sense. If an artist can't make a living off something, they won't have the means to keep doing it. I'm not sure why these basic economics escape most piracy supporters. I think it's the selfish gene at play, trying to justify getting something for free by removing any sense of culpability. People have invented this silly cultural war that they're a part of, where they're rebellious good guys in a war against the evil bad guys of the MPAA and RIAA, and visiting places like Pirate Bay is fighting the good fight. Meanwhile, the artists actually making the content that's getting pirated are either glossed over or never mentioned. I think it's because thinking about them reminds the pirates that they're not paying someone for their work, which decimates the whole glorified cultural war scenario they've concocted in their heads.
In other words, piracy is nothing more than selfish people being selfish and trying to justify it by portraying other things as bad guys. Rant about copyrights all you want, but not paying somebody for the time, effort, and expenses of recording an album in a studio or the years they spent developing a piece of software so they could feed their families is immoral and shitty of you.
I'm curious if this will get modded up, down, or a see-saw of both, with copious use of the Overrated modifier to avoid meta-moderation, as usual. Whatever.
...failed due to rampant piracy. as a DC owner, it wouldn't surprise me - as far as consoles go its the easiest machine to copy stuff for out there. no hardware hacks required, just a copy of discjuggler and you're away for the most part.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
DMCA
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
I'll put forth Starsiege Tribes as one game or a series of game that suffered from piracy. Sure the company that developed this game might not have been the best ran, but the number of people who paid for this game vs those who played was considerable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starsiege:_Tribes "Starsiege: Tribes sold a total of 210,000 copies, but due to its small size and complete lack of copy protection was frequently copied and distributed over the Internet. Actual users at the peak of popularity were over one million users." - meaning that the game had effectively ZERO DRM 800K Piraters vs 200K payers. Ask yourself what an appropriate ratio is? Long story short the game was very successful in terms of the number of gamers actively playing it. They were ran by a company that was not spending it on hookers on blow, but they did maybe have more employees than they should have. From what I hear part way through the sequel, tribes 2, they were becoming insolvent and released the game a few months too early. "Tribes 2 sold a total of 400,000 copies," but i remember it being filled with bugs and issues. The series died after this as the company went under, but for those who played both games, it was regarded as the best squad based FPS at the time. It was years ahead of battlefield, call of duty multi, and operation flashpoint. What could have saved the series and game, slightly better management for sure but what if they were able to sell another 100K copies of Tribes 1 which would not have been unreasonable. They could spent at least 6 more months working on Tribes 2 and all the issues they had would have been resolved and we'd be talking about tribes 8. When it comes to piracy I feel the ones that hurt the most are those who release better than average wares that aren't outstanding, but with a few more dollars it could have been.
".... claims from organizations like the RIAA that piracy [...] costs thousands of jobs. "
Such claims about job loses make no economic sense from the start anyways. If people pay less for something, they have more money to spend on other things. If the music busiess becomes unprofitable due to piracy, then the jobs will shift to more profitable activities, over time.
How many walk away because their product will not make a profit... based on how many in the past have failed, due to piracy?
You are missing the point once again. Most fail before they are recognized as failures. A majority of open source projects is are glaring examples of this. Programmers put a tremendous amount of effort into their work and they are expected to give it away for free in order to have the slighest chance of being considered for a job (because they couldn't possibly have the resources to start their own software company). Then, they get their desk job and they are treated practically as slaves by their managers (I would know because I've been in exactly such a position), expected to crank out huge amounts of code every day, so that people with entry-level skills can't even enter the field any more. I have many friends that graduated with me and are still looking for jobs in their field. Enormous downward pressure is put on price of software due to piracy, and the people who suffer (entry-level programmers) have little or no voice. These are very talented people who just want a break and I think they deserve it.
1. Shareholders.
2. Scapegoating.
Most of the big media/software companies the managements have to answer to the shareholders. If performance (earning) is down, they have to find a way to convince the shareholders that it's not them (the management) that is at fault, rather, it's something else (market, recession, piracy, etc).
That comes to the second item, scapegoating.
Piracy is a ready-made scapegoat for all the media/software companies. They have fine-tune the scapegoat campaign so much so that they can almost blame everything on piracy.
Instead of raising the value on the products their produce (software / music / movie) thus offering more incentive for the consumer to pay for their products, they blame piracy if an album doesn't sell well, for example.
Ask youself: How many of the singer / actor / movie / album / software on the shelf today are worth the price-tag?
The song sux.
The singing sux.
The music sux.
The acting sux.
The story sux.
Everything sux and yet they (the movie/music/software companies) expect us to pay and pay and pay through our nose for their wares.
Enough of this.
In my case, I haven't bought ONE SINGLE COPY OF MUSIC CD for the past 5 years. It's not that I do not like music, I do. But the music on the market, oh please !
And I have NOT downloaded any music (pay or pirated) either. Turn on the radio and you know what I mean --- same old shit, repackaged.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
My wife is a huge Twilight fan. Apparently, the author was writing a new Twilight novel from Edward's perspective that took place during the same time as the other books. An unfinished version of the story got leaked. Stephanie Meyer was so furious she refused to finished. However, since fans still wanted to read even the partial story, she published what she had on her website for anyone to download. From what my wife tells me, the new novel was fantastic and even better than the originals. She blames piracy for killing a new creative work.
It's the investors who are concerned with piracy, not the creators
Now let me tell you something: I don't give a flying fuck about investors.
You may be thinking "but death metal is such a niche, it won't happen." Happened already with other genres. Don't think the music of the '70s, or '50s, or '30s or whatever was actually as monolythic as you'd think. Back in the days of Glenn Miller -- just because that was used by the GGP as an example -- i.e., the 30's, fans of proper jaz as played by the likes of Benny Goodman and Count Basie sneered at the plebs who listened to the manufactured commercial gimmick music of Glenn Miller (or so they saw it), and viceversa. And fans of the newfangled ethnic or hillbilly music sneered at both, and viceversa. And then there were such manufactured superstars (at least in the eyes of those who didn't like them) as Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, and a lot of arguments went back and forth over _that_ topic.
It was rappers vs metalheads all over again.
Only nowadays they all gang up on the newfangled music of kids these days, and form some united front called "the music of the 30's."
So in 2070 you'll probably have grey fans of death metal and rappers turned grey and wizzened Britney Spears fans and grandmas who used to get all wet about the Backstreet Boys, acting like they were brothers in arms all along. And listening to them you'd think it was some uniform "music of the 90's" where everyone listened to all of that indiscriminately. And talking about how not only Meat Hook Sodomy was better than what kids listen to these days, but so were rap masterpieces like "I'm fucking you tonight", and so was anything Britney ever sung, and so on. Even if nowadays you couldn't get a fan of any of those, to have anything good to say about any of the others.
But nostalgia is a funny thing, and the enemy of my enemy...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The answer, of course, is "yes" and anyone who denies this has never tried to earn a living in a creative line of work.
Do you even begin to realize how crappy of an argument the above line of yours actually is? In other words: Did you make the above argument willfully, or ignorantly? Either way, it's worth nothing as an actual argument. Try again, and do better next time, please.
I am the president of a digital music store specializing in Japanese music called HearJapan. I see piracy destroy my sales on a constant basis. It's difficult getting high sales when most of your customer base are rabid internet users who got introduced to Japanese music through illegal downloads. I actually ran an interesting experiment two years ago that serves as a good example. This is a long message I wrote directed at the fans, but if you have the time please read it as it is very relevant. http://www.hearjapan.com/news/hearjapan_news/A_Message_To_The_Fans
ok,2011 because some new 'Robin Hood'came out recently and I havent seen it so no comment.Im thinking a REAL modern day 'Robin Hood'.A nerd/geek type who makes no money and struggles in 2011 times,but has the courage and determination to get movies,songs,books,and any copyrighted thoughts to anyone and everyone who cant afford it.Im talking about familys who are debating bar soap vs.shampoo and the expense incurred.This outlaw SOB manages to actually get a copy of toy story3,or maybe even shrek3.and without asking or charging money,HE SHOWS IT AND SOMETIMES EVEN GIVES THE KIDS A COPY!!!!!So the king realizing his coffer isnt as difficult to carry as before,orders his men to hunt down and/or discourage this,regardless of how much he has!The point being these children AND the SOB providing them should be in prison..makes sense 4 sure
kk\
The question asks "who is that person?" Please give a name for the love of god. You cannot possibly claim for travel insurance without at least a police report case number of that country in question.
I didn't know the Tweak Guides existed before you posted the link so thanks for that anyway - but the piracy document is an excellent read and pretty much the best and most convincing discussions on the subject I have ever read.
However, I'm surprised that the author didn't touch on some more fundamental issues around game piracy:
1. Games cracks are, more often than not, infected with viruses & malware meaning that whilst you may save on not paying for a game, you may lose out in the longer term if the malware that gets installed with the cracked game lets someone into your machine to steal a whole lot more.
2. For a few years between about 1999-2002, I used to download just about every game crack I could find, stick them on CDs with menus and give copies to friends and family. I don't defend what I did except to say that I only ever gave the stuff away freely to those people, I never profited from it and it actually cost me money buying blank CDs to hand out to them. However, the reasons I stopped doing it were as follows:
a. The amount of time I had to spend with those same people getting the games to work when they couldn't install them or get them to run, and,
b. I archived & catalogued every game I downloaded, I spent more time doing that than actually playing them and ending up hording a huge amount of games, most of which were not very good.
The fundamental issue with any piracy, not just games, is that if you've not had to hand over any money for something then your value and therefore appreciation of that item is a lot less, and so is your enjoyment of it.
As I've got older, I've lost some of my interest in PC gaming but I do now legally own every game that I do play - not because I feel particularly altruistic towards game companies (though I do have some admiration for developers of some of the great games I play) but mainly because going out and buying the game is much less hassle than messing around trying to find a virus-free cracked version that installs as easily as just throwing the legitimate CD or DVD in my PC optical drive.
Yes, I have a nice wedge of disposable income at my pleasure but I am also frugal and refuse to "lose my head" over anything - I don't pay more for anything than I believe it's worth so if I think a game I might like to play is too expensive on release day, then I just wait until it's down to a budget price before buying it.
What that ultimately means is that by researching everything I buy up front, I actually "look forward to it" more and enjoy it more when I actually have it my hands.
There's a musician I'm very fond of, goes by the name of Kattoo - www.kattoo.de - making very good electronic/idm/breakbeat sort of stuff. He used to be behind the band beefcake, if you know and love their stuff. Anyway, he's being going solo for 4 albums now and has done some great work.
He is very frank on his website about how many CDs he has sold, and the numbers are low (hundreds). This may be down to a number of factors (lack of promotion, scene around the music diminishing, change of band name etc), but he has long been an advocate of allowing his music to be purchased as a download, quite ahead of the curve with that. The numbers again haven't been huge.
However, he ran an experiment giving full access to anyone to all his back catalogue to download for a month or two, and the numbers became huge - tens of thousands of tracks downloaded, lots of good feedback. His music is also listed a lot on torrent/download sites and by all means he is still quite popular. So the music is popular, just people are less prepared to pay for it.
He is now quitting making music, at least in this format, because it is not worth the time and money invested - between equipment, mastering, publishing and all that lot, takes a lot of resources on his part, and paying other people as well. Between the last 2 albums, he had to take a 6 month break from music, to work more and make back the money the last album cost him to make.
Suffice to say, music can be free and work if:
1) It can be done in your own spare time (and you have enough of that to spare) - this implies a lower level of ability/focus than a professional musician.
2) You have all the equipment you need, including sequencers, instruments, studio recording space, mastering gear and so on.
3) You can do all the work yourself - composing, arranging, performing (on all instruments), editing, producing, mastering, packaging, release.
Not saying it's impossible, and many do, but you wouldn't expect Howard Shore to be sitting there playing Oboe or working on CD cover layouts would you? If people need to get paid, then there needs to be money involved.
Anyway, go listen to the guy's music at the URL above (Track 8 on Places is awesome to start with), buy/donate if you like it. Unfortunately there won't be any more, as a direct or indirect effect of piracy.
Nothing about that question is correct.
What on earth exactly is "proper rewards"? There is no such thing. Any estimation of such are based on presumptions by either the content creator or the distributor whom they license it to.
Let's say a photographer takes a picture. They offer it to media outlets for $100 a use. But only 10% of media outlets will pay it.
But if the photographer were to lower their price to $50 a use, perhaps 30% of media outlets would pay it. So despite lowering prices by half, their ROI becomes 50% greater.
The photog goes away griping that no one appreciates good photography anymore, etc. etc. But it is the photog themselves that is kicking themselves in the ass. Why? Because their notion of "proper rewards" is too rigid. While the photo might be $100 valuable to the originator, to everyone else it is likely worth, on average, less than that.
In the case of piracy, you have people who are unwilling to buy the work for the price stated. Instead, they take it for a lower price (free). But your loss is actually zero, because they wouldn't have bought it at your price anyway.
But most of this is irrelevant in the real world anyway, because the majority of artists (well, at least in music/movies/writing/etc) end up performing their work as "work for hire", and they are paid a flat price for their work that is unrelated to subsequent sales, usage, redistribution, even reimagining. In those cases, most artists don't get anything close to "proper rewards" either by their own standards or by that of a reasonable, uninvested third party.
This notion that piracy cuts into the artists proper rewards is the same argument that it cuts into the profits of record companies. You've just tried to make it folksy by taking out the corporate middleman. The applicable reasoning doesn't change.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
It's just a question of using the tools that are available - when they're available. More and more there are lots of electronic goodies that are available for people like us to use, if we can be bothered - and we can be bothered. It's all extensions of what coming out of our heads. You've got to have it inside your head to get it out all anyway. The equipment isn't thinking what to do any of the time. It couldn't control itself.
-David Gilmour
Let me guess, having people who use your product actually pay for it doesn't make a difference on how much is in your paycheck, right?
It's not that simple. If he had only fooled Bredius, I'd see your point, but a lot of others. There was a reason why he had to paint another Vermeer at his trial, to prove that yes, he did it. There were other critics who still refused to believe that they're not Vermeers. Or why they had to study the paint composition at the trial, and not just show them to a couple of critics with nothing to gain from it. Heck, a couple of his paintings were debated if they're forgeries or not until 1977.
It's stuff that you can't easily dismiss as the complicity of one crook to authenticate them as Vermeers. There were people who didn't make a cent out of it, and still thought they're authentic Vermeers and masterpieces.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Back in the 80's and early 90's, I owned some Atari computers and did some development work on them. I would use GEnie to communicate with other developers. Even before popularity of the platform really tanked (mostly Atari's fault and the major reason most developers left), I recall the occasional developer complaining about too much piracy and deciding to drop the platform. This included private developers and also larger companies that produced games and such. Also, when moving to the PC, they would complain about how the platform sucked, but that although the piracy rate was no better, the sheer volumes of sales made it profitable.
Ok, so no proof, because it's been more than 20 years, and I can't remember any of the names. But it happened more than a few times that somsone on GEnie or at a local user's group meeting would mention that so-and-so had quit developing for Ataris.
i'd think sharing creative work is better, rather. be in by piracy or the other more 'legal' way. sharing is learning. creative work gets a more larger ground to grow and products get a chance improve. what's the use of creativity and it's product if you can't show people what you got. i mean, i think sharing (what most people call piracy) brings things out into the limelight...
How many works haven't been created because the artist didn't have the funds available because of lower sales which resulted from piracy?
Bit of a mouthful but that's the question which should have been asked. Plus this one: Who cares?
I've resisted from posting and getting dragged into this poorly worded question (how can you prove what isn't?)
/. readers, who may have had little or no direct interaction and dealings with indie labels, which needless to say have historically been responsible for breaking out a lot of very innovative talent. Besides the old distribution and manufacturing duties, the primary functions of such a label are to help with the artist's image, promotion, publicity, airplay, guide their career with a choice of songs, producer, and many other things that most professional musicians do not have time, resources or the inclination to be doing when they are busy making music and performing it. Cue in the obligatory contrarian "I did it all myself" to negate this statement, but most successful creative people would prefer focusing on what they are good at instead of dealing with merchandising, filling out aggregator licensing agreements or dealing with graphic artists. That there are a few who are an exception to this doesn't make it any different for the majority of music professionals out there, whether artists, composers, etc... who really WANT someone by their side to partner with them in making their release a successful one, rather than merely just adding yet another entry into the dustbins of recorded music.
Not speaking about the four major music labels, but there appear to be some misconceptions about the role of record labels among many
But on the artistic side of things, there is no question that today, many artists are not able to spend the time necessary for crafting songs with the same kind of quality and loving care they once did. Again, those who think that having a copy of Garage Band or Cubase along with two microphones and a cheap Mackie board at home is enough to make fantastic music are in my opinion mostly deluded on thinking that they can come close or even beat teams of well-honed and dedicated professionals at the top of their craft, whether those be recording engineers, assistants, drum techs, roadies, as well as arrangers (who even remembers those?), or the dedicated studios and the maintenance technicians that provided the environment needed to comfortably record one-of-a-kind performance without any technical glitches, and so on.
What has happened is that the entire ecology that supported record-making has imploded, and while a few of those at the top of their trade still find work elsewhere or for wealthy artists, most of the people that were associated with recording studios and making music professionally have moved on to other related activities like audio for broadcasting, gaming, advertising or movies. The budgets just aren't there for the most part anymore, to put together full-fledged recording sessions with great professional players.
Yes, as many like to immediately point out it is possible to do most of this stuff very inexpensively on one's laptop... yet having access to the gear does not ensure that those who operate it have a modicum of taste, experience and knowledge to turn these simple tools into something that will make tantalizing, mind-blowing recordings, and that they will have the expertise to coax that special magically inspired performance out of an artist, and so on. Of course, it is possible to do everything by yourself, but the chances of the results of this being on the same level as Stevie Wonder and Prince are so infinitesimally small that one could easily wonder why it should even be mentioned at all, except as a straw man argument.
To deny the combined expertise, know-how and vast irreplaceable contributions to record-making that all of these side helpers have traditionally brought to the table has recently been a popular point of view harbored by those who feel they know better, which they are welcome to in a sense, because the sheer mediocrity, overall uninspired and depressingly bland results of such one-man-band recording sessions are right now cluttering more people's in-boxes that one co
The question posed by the /. articles author "Does anyone know of any creative works that were provably a financial failure due to piracy?" is kind of a misled question asked due to perspective. That perspective being outside the industry looking in. From inside the industry, if you will follow closely on this, bands are selected not so much for blinding talent as marketability. They need to reflect a modern style (set by the industry not popularity) .They need to be young and fairly good looking or at least be harmonious with modern youth (target audience) . They need to be stupid and cooperative with the legal dept.( No mavericks inserting their own conditions into the contract).
With this criteria the industry has raw material to work with. Nothing special to indicate piracy losses yet.
The industry begins pumping money into promotion. Interviews are bought as is ad space. Rumors are spread to create controversy and keep people talking.If the band is actually promoted more money will follow, if it doesn't catch the band quits receiving funding and are left to fullfill contract and fade away. Still no quantifiable proof.
Even should a band show enough profit by the third album to quit living in an industry owned home and driving industry owned cars and begin their own fortune, there is no proof that their "talent" will continue their popularity and profitability.
The industry might as well complain that the fans taking pictures of their race horse has stopped it from winning races.
Smoke and crap just to provide a base for the shysters to make a court filing with.
The king wears no clothes.( lookit his little dinky!)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
In a television network setting I'm sure the effects of piracy (if any) would come at the green lighting projects stage. If piracy was affecting the bottom line then the networks would simply green light fewer projects, tv pilots, movie scripts etc. That's for big budget things. People who can make their content on a home computer probably would only have their projects 'canceled' if they make less money on previous projects and simply don't have enough time or money to devote for one or more projects in the future. Either way it's hard to nail down which un-green lit projects would be canceled due to piracy as I'm sure there are heaps of scripts and pilots not getting produced all the time anyway. They seem to be making enough money, I don't see any empty slots on my television schedule and I'm pretty sure there's new movies opening every weekend. People still create songs by themselves and put them on itunes. If EVERYONE started pirating, there wouldn't be enough money to produce new stuff, but because of advertising deals and the fact that there is still a good chunk of people that pay for things I don't think they're hurting any time soon.
Aw, you should have seen the Xenix version! What a glorious experience! Graphics! Violence! Music! Command prompts! Destroyed by the torrent thieves and copyright violating miscreants.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Asking the creator if he had "proper rewards" for his creative work will always get diverse forms of "no".
Yes, there are losses by piracy (see the "Starsiege: Tribes" example). But I have tons of examples that the movie, music, etc I paid for wasn't worth the penny.
My child is, by far, the most beautiful in the world. No bias. I swear.
I first pirated Battlefield Bad Company 2 before buying it outright on steam. FOR FULL PRICE TOO! NOT ON SALE. There simply was no demo, and I do not believe in blindly making purchases. I also pirated Mass Effect 2 before buying it from steam when it was on sale. ME2 simply wasn't anything I'd normally buy. But I wanted to try it, and at the time there was NO DEMO. They have one NOW but its too late. I still bought it. If it wasn't for PIRACY I would not have made either of these purchases. SIMPLE PROOF right here. I don't think i'm the only one who does this. By using Pirated software you don't get patches/updates automatically like you do on steam and most of the time you get an early buggy version. Even though ME2 is still a bit buggy, I can at least get DLC when I'm finished the main part of the game. Remember this is PROOF that EA/DICE/Bioware received $75 from ME ALONE only because PIRACY EXISTS. On the other hand PIRACY also saved ME from making BAD purchases. Like the new AVP. I pirated that; DECIDED IT SUCKS and that was it. $50 in my pocket for not buying a PIECE OF CRAP.
And does anyone have proof of any good that piracy has done? Well, perhaps the billions of free programs and tunes acquired by hundreds of millions of people might be demonstrable. And isn't it wonderful that the most pirated material seems to also be the most lucrative for the sellers?
Think the other way around:
IF copying wasn't seen as "evil doing" by laws and property owners, does the world creative thinking would be harmed?
We can't simply put out piracy costs to point the evilness of it; it flashes the "circular reasoning alert". If piracy isn't evil, those who don't want to have their work copied all around would "protect" it, so to speak. In the end I suppose another "creative thinker" would create something that fills the same "gap" and release it. So on the bad side we have the delay. On the good side, no "prima donna" ego costs.
The social structure we actually live in like to have experts, the "leave it to the professionals" way of living. But is this the best way for creative work? In digital era, with Internet and interactive media in general, I think that's the problem that is arising.
Interesting. I wonder if the creators of Frantic Freddie paid the proper licensing fee to Queen for using their music in much of the game. Not many software creators back then did, so I highly doubt it.
"Pirate" Queen's music, people "pirate" your game. Seems fitting.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
In the late 80's I wrote a piece of software that drove a certain company's printer sharing hardware (back when that was how it was done). I released as shareware, but only made a few cents per hour and gave up on it. A few years later, I found out from an ex-employee of that company that the company's tech support people were sending out my software when customers called to complain about the crappy OEM software. He told me that the company never told people it was shareware and most thought it was company written. Had I known, I might have been able to make some money off of it. So yes, the work was a financial failure due to piracy, and I also quit writing commercial software at that time because it was a failure, so it impacted future work, too.
disrupts the computers operations subtracts form game play and may open your computr to vulnerability
and any game i wanted was 2 secs form downloading and it takes less time to download it then to
get dressed ( yes you can do this in bed )
walk outside , enter car
goto gas station pay for gas
goto store
wander around and hope they carry the game oh no they dont off to another store
then take game home
install and it sucks and doesn't work right or requires me to have a net connection i dont have say....
VS
open browser
goto p2p site
goto games section
read nfo
open p2p software
download
mount
install
copy crack to game dir
play
Paris by Night http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0711-paris-20100711,0,6607368.story/ The LA Times is running a story on a production show that relies on DVD sales. The show is a unquestionable hit, but DVD piracy might end the show.
Well, it's doubtful with almost a kiloposts that anyone'll read this, but...
You do realize that "financial failure" is not the correct yardstick when measuring the benefits of copyrights, et al. w.r.t. engendering creative work, don't you?
Just reducing profits (a separate issue, as I'm sure many here would be happy to pipe up about) would reduce the number of creative works, in accordance with supply and demand.
Now I know many people want to believe artists do it for the artistic integrity of it, the way doctors research cures for the integrity of it, and that money plays little or no part. (Or, more accurately, should play no part, in our fantasy world of other people working to benefit us for memetic reasons.)
But that air your starting to hyperventilate is part of what's known as the "real world". As in "You think that's air you're breathing? Humph."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I realize it's not your dream compensation, and piracy sucked for you, but $60k/year is a pretty respectable income for many people.
So it wasn't works of art per se, but there was that Email thin client in the late 90's early 2000 maybe it was .... oh man what was that thing called. They went out of business because they were selling at a loss and people hacked the boxes ( cause they were running linux underneath ) and didn't use the service, so they lost all their money.
I really felt sorry for the company actually
then your next project isn't going to be backed
( because the sales-curve is the same,
irregardless of the magnitude of it:
if it sells little in the first week,
it'll sell 1/n of that in 5 weeks.
if it sells lots in the first week,
it'll sell 1/n of THAT in 5 weeks )
Ask your favourite bands what happens if their masters are bootlegged & released before the discs.
You'll find that they just lost their backing,
though they're still on the hook for their contract.
Actually, if I'm to take longevity as any useful measure, I'd take longevity as in whether it will still appeal to new listeners, rather than merely because the same people remained stuck on it long after everyone else forgot it even exists. I mean, let's face it, medicine is getting better and better at keeping people alive longer. I was hearing recently that the number of people over 100 is expected to rise significantly. I can tell you that even in 2100 there'll be some grandmas in nursing homes listening to the music of their youth. If you apply longevity as in strictly it's being listened to by anyone at all, then you're pretty much guaranteed to end up concluding that the newer the music the better, and Back Street Boys beating Frank Sinatra. Just by virtue that the fans of the former will live longer than fans of the latter lived.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
if you were someone who lived in the http://www.provideocoalition.com/ type sites, you'd understand that paying a full crew, paying for permits & insurance, renting gear, NOT pulling a pay-cheque from anywhere else, having to re-do things due to unforseen circumstances, etc...
means you can consider $1-3 million to be bargain basement.
If you're wanting to work with a GOOD surgeon, you aren't going to find the cheapest & consider that good enough: your survival depends on the experience & judgement of the *team*.
If you're wanting to create a GOOD movie, you aren't going to do so with the cheapest people & means.
Actually read a few books on it, and discover why people with necessary-for-the-movie years-built-skills are worth more than minumum wage...
Or, for that matter, try living in NY, NY, and getting insurance on a site, ANY site, for 2 weeks filming... ...involving hot lights, extension cords, a crew, cameras...
Not if he was spending 80+ hours a week on it...
"We sold a few hundred thousand copies or so at retail across a 6 month period (#4 for sales for a couple months, but no one pays attention to jewel case games).
Here's the trick: the online version had an online high-score system. You could play the online copy for free, but you didn't get access to the shared high-score system unless you bought it. We sold less than 100 copies online, but saw several hundred thousand unique IP addresses hit the high score system every day (and this kept up for years, not just people "trying out the high score system")."
I'm sorry, but selling a few hundred thousand copies of an action puzzle game can hardly be called a failure due to piracy. Sounds like a failure due to a poor business decision (compensation).
"...because people who want to play a game don't care about making it possible for the creators to keep making games."
On the other hand, what kind of savvy creator charges more for one version of a game and provides less features? Some of those online players might have actually purchased the retail version.
$60k pa isn't enough to enable you to make games?
Or they'd declare that they'd changed the formula and hold back on the non-faulty ones for a while. Then start labeling the non-faulty ones as "coke classic" and once they'd finally sold out of the faulty cans just go back to calling the "classic" stuff "coke".
Chicane, a.k.a. Nick Bracegirdle, had an album, Easy to Assemble, pirated during editing and production. The songs became widely available on P2P networks and some Russian pirate sites were even selling CDs of it. This ultimately resulted in him being dropped from his record label, the album was never released, and he lost whatever money he would have made from it.
Considering used copied of his first album are selling on ebay & Amazon for over $25, 13 years after its original release, that probably was a significant chunk of lost income and exposure.
Hellgate London
It Failed because of a leak of a beta/alpha version, right before release.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellgate_London
Which reminds me of this:
If Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire 100 million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, without a second thought and irrespective of what that did to the year's profits. What do we do with a crappy movie? We double its advertising budget and hope for a big opening weekend.
Unless you're Bill Cosby, who actually had the integrity to go on the late-night talk show circuit saying "Guys.. just.. don't go see Leonard Part 6. It's a bad movie and it's not worth your money."
The guy actually bought the television rights for it just so it could never be shown on TV.
Sometimes it is claimed that P2P is anti-semitism at work, because movie moguls and music studio producers are predominantly (vast majority) ethnic jewish and its their money which Bittorrent steals.
On the other hand , while P2P does hurt the jews and US-sponsored judeo-culture, it is also a shield, which protects their markets from competition by japanese and korean pop-culture imports. By definition, everything of japanese media gets 100% pirated in the west (America-Europe), making it commercially impossible to enter the market beyond mom-and-pop sized manga import garage shops.
For the jewish entertainment tycoons, it is worth a few billion dollars of losses to keep americans away from the incredibly seductive anime-manga-jpop material, which could take away as much as 25-33% of the whole entertainment market. It is not Iran's tanks which threaten the well-being of Israel, the so-called Zionist Entity, but rather armies of miniskirt loli girls clutching Hello Kitty dolls for a sidearm.
yea
The only way that I could see a movie/album/song fail today BECAUSE of piracy is that it was terrible to begin with, and had REALLY good marketing before it was released. Such a movie might be able to make decent money on opening day despite being terrible, but if enough people see it before then, and it is no good then the word-of-mouth might kill it earlier than it would have been otherwise. I guess then what is still causing the movie to fail is not piracy even in this case, but that it is terrible. I've seen a few bootleg copies of movies before, and the only ones that I didn't see in theaters were ones that were either terrible, or ones that I had had no intention of see in theaters even before watching it.
One never knows when one might need a rotten tomato... - King's Quest IV: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow
Lady Gaga isn't manufactured. She's the real deal. Search for Stefani Germanotta on YouTube. She put in her time playing tiny clubs, she plays piano, she performed all through her high school years as well, written tons of hits for other folks. Her style happens to be glam meta-pop. If she wanted to do the Sarah MacLachlan thing she could. She has the pipes for it. Don't confuse popular/successful with manufactured. It paints you as pretentious.
The whole idea that some music is better than others because *you* don't get it asinine and asshole-ish. It's junior high school "you're fav band sux LOLLOLOLO!" or "my former fav band sold out when they went gold, QQ!" but with big words.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
In the past few years I have uploaded many of my own recordings to my website and made them freely available for download, primarily so that the other musicians I played with could hear our efforts without me needing to burn CDs and mail them out. The result of this is that some of these tracks have been downloaded many thousands of times and I don't have a penny to show for it. The countries downloading most are Russian Federation, China and Germany. Are these lost sales? No. Did the creative work fail? No. Would I like to have been paid for the downloads? Yes! But without a marketing department, I'm pretty much stuck with giving it away and hoping it points people to the music I do have for sale at iTunes, Amazon, CDBaby.com etc. You can't judge a creative work on it's financial success. As others have said, the most financially successful creative works are often (but not always) least artistically successful. If a creative person decides to not create because of fear of piracy then they must not have a particularly strong creative urge. I believe people create because they need to not because they think they will get rich from it. Just my two and sixpence...
http://www.acetonestudio.com
If mIRC can still make money, and come out with regular enhancements to boot, piracy is a non-issue.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Piracy may not have killed existing projects, but lack of revenue may have prevented the production of others.
Maybe. But that's not important. The fact is that the system can tolerate some amount of freeloading, just as every workplace does. That's not to imply that freeloading (piracy) should be either condoned or tolerated, but at the same time, it will continue to exist, and taking extraordinary measures to eradicate it (DRM, lawsuits, etc.), ironically, only allows it to further sap resources. Some people will never contribute, some will contribute occasionally, and others will always contribute. That's just the way it is.
At the same time, trying to validate piracy is also counter-productive, because you're sticking yourself out where someone *has to* respond. It's like not only playing solitaire at work, but inviting all your co-workers around to watch, and then telling the boss to fuck off when he comes around. It draws negative attention (people don't like freeloaders, regardless of whether or not there was actual harm), and it focuses that attention squarely on piracy. You're screwing the people you seek to protect by putting them in the cross-hairs.
If you're going to do it, fine, but at least STFU about it and realize that even if you are not causing direct harm, neither are you contributing, and if everyone did the same there *would* be the results you describe. That's why piracy (or even the choice of paying) can never be legitimized across the board. If people were openly (rather than implicitly or de facto) given the choice of paying for a work or not, they would not. Radiohead's "experiment" aside, decades of Shareware have overwhelmingly shown that you can't make a living on voluntary donations. It might work the first time, or when people know that donating will send a message, but there's been zero evidence that it's a reliable business model, and plenty of evidence to show that it is not.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It's a darn shame the studio has not made that available for purchase by any means at all. I'm told it's a rather good pilot and (based on the strength of the talents' other work) I would cheerfully pay five bucks to find out for myself. But it's as far as I know it is only available via piracy.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
I'm not sure we have any sort of consensus yet. If we do, it certainly isn't what you wrote there.
Ah crap, I guess you're right. There aren't enough people refering to my quote to outnumber the references to Lady Gaga in this thread. I forgot to take her into account when determining if there was a "consensus" or not. Damn you, Gaga. :|
You can't just dismiss the idea that some works don't get made as "unfounded fears" without any evidence.
Wait, you're putting the burden of proof on me to "found" the alleged fears of hypothetical investors for them?
Let me repeat TFS again: "Does anyone know of any creative works that were provably a financial failure due to piracy? The emphasis on 'provably' is important, as some form of evidence is necessary." If some project folded due to fear of piracy, then that is immaterial to this discussion unless the investors had some solid evidence that piracy would have forced the project to fold anyway, and if they did then that is the evidence very being requested. Stop begging the question.
The whole point of systems like copyright is to provide an incentive, so that someone is still creating works for us to enjoy the day after tomorrow. You are just dismissing this effect as if it is an incidental detail, but it is the whole point of the system.
While you are overinflating the importance of this "effect" and leaning back on your tired horse of "without copyright, in two days all creation will cease".
Of course the (original) point of market distorting systems like copyright (ie, subsidies and protectionist regulation) is to provide "an incentive". You are also mistaken if you believe that human beings will stop being creative as soon as the illicit carrot is removed from their field of view. Will demand to create go away? Will demand to see creative things go away? Will it suddenly become impossible to shove money at people I like the creative works of, in order to get them to make more?
I ANSWERED your question about business models, you even toyed with the implementational details yourself. But now you claim creativity is impossible unless ideas are first propertized.
Unless you know a lot of math, you might want to be careful throwing around terms like "statistically significant" in this company.
My apologies to the laypersons in the crowd, Here is a quick primer for the oft misused term. :|
Getting more specific, no-one has really addressed even the examples I mentioned in my original post
I felt skreeech hit the nail on the head with:
Previous to recent years one successful video game would pay for a lot of experimentation. It is only a recent development where an explosion in development cost had led to single games sinking studios. Even then some like GRIN had multiple catastrophic failures before going out of business.
In short, games got more expensive to produce and platforms have become less homogenious and reliable. I see what you mean about availability though, people sure aren't making many games now that so many get pirated, and you can even easily pirate console games. I pine for the early days of variety before the pirates ruined it for everybody. /scarass
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
Although I am not an expert about this issue, is good to remember that sometimes piracy can really hurt an industry. Back in the 80's, during the golden age of 8 bit computers (Commodore, MSX, ATARI...), there was a good and important software developers community in Spain. Commercial expansion of low cost home computers helped different groups of programming enthusiasts became game developers. And with great succes by the way, which positioned Spain as the second country in game development (I do not know if after Japan or any other country). This is when piracy gets into scene. Remember those old cassette/tapes and how it was possible to achieve functional copies if you had a double deck system. So, I still remember how we copied every new game and how "forum style" groups of each computer model were created in the schoolyard. Sales falled heavily and as a last attempt to cut out piracy (people held that they pirated games because they were very expensive) developers lowered the cost of videogames to a very low minimum (I was 12 and I could afford to buy games with such prices). Two years later there was only one company left. Until Commandos was launched, no new spanish videogame had succes in the world again.
Enjoy Avatar on a "Pirated" .AVI and on IMAX screen ?!?!?!?!
That is the difference. Jim Cameron does NOT complain, does he ?