Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
All the projects that couldn't get funding because piracy would reduce their profitability below the required threshold. Piracy can be chilling effect.
At least by Hollywood accounting practices.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
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?)
This is not quite what the poster had in mind I think; While definitely copyright violation, this is more in line with the CRIA and their "Pending" lists, with willful violation for profit.
I think the poster was more asking about the impact of not-for-profit copyright violation. (EG, Torrenting and pals.)
none of the other halo titles were released on Mac and one of the reasons cited...
...was that Mac is rarely the primary platform for game developers? Most mac games are ported from the PC or co-developed. Piracy has been blamed for everything from the terrorism to low birth rate. Also, while on the topic of 'citing' -- citation needed. When discussing piracy, the level of hysteria surrounding the issue thanks to corporate interests makes it imperative that you list your sources and facts, not just a vague conclusion.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I'm sure Bungie selling out to Microsoft had nothing to do with it either.
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.
Actually, it was piracy in Defoe's original use of it wrt copying. What it wasn't was copyright infringement (in the US) (at the time).
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
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
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.
I like Mickey Spillane's books; he is a wonderful author in my opinion. His opinion of himself, though, is: "I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book."
Also, "I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends."
So you can see where he's coming from. Writing for him was just a job. According to Wikipedia, "In 1980, Spillane was responsible for seven of the top 15 all-time best-selling fiction titles in the U.S."
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
LOL, of course you're just playing Robinhood, bootlegging Twilight films to get revenge on successful businesses that you personally determined are "too rich." Wonder if you'll feel the same way when someone decides that YOU'RE too rich.
And the problem with capitalists is that when they run out of other people's money they expect the socialists to bail them out.
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!
A good example of the absurdity of the "we wouldn't have bought it anyway argument." If Slashdotters weren't in denial because of their addiction to mass media content and aversion to paying a fair price for it (what rational person thinks 0 is a fair price for something they want?), they'd be able to see that some fraction of those 220k+ people would have bought the game in the absense of piracy. Maybe 5%, maybe 75%. Either way, infringement hurts producers of intellectual property and causes the market to produce and inefficiently low amount of it.
Just because the MPAA and RIAA are a bunch of thugs engaged in legal extortion, doesn't excuse the fact that illegal copies destroys the financial lives of artists. Do you expect that people who do art must be forced to have a day job to do their art? If you code for a living do you think that you should be forced to work at low end job so you can code in your spare time? If you read a lot of the posts here it is clear the Slashdot Pundits expect that others should work for free to provide them with online entertainment.
Why is Snark Required?
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?
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.
So he was dumb. Assume there will be sharing. Plan for it. Set the system up so you will get paid. This is how it works in magazine publishing. I sell ads in my magazine. The advertisers HOPE that the copies of my magazine will get read by as many people as possible. I do NOT expect that every person who reads it will have bought it. Doctors, dentists, liers, etc have them in their office for customers to read. People share them with family and friends. That is reality and it works fine. Dynamix's failure to setup a money making stream is their failure. Stop blaming the customer and reality. Utilize the way people WILL behave to your benefit.
...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.
Study finds pirates 10 times more likely to buy music
People who listen to music are more likely to buy it, in other words?
Hopefully nobody in your neighborhood leaves their doors unlocked when they go out since by your logic you should then be allowed to just go in and take their stuff.
Chances are, some people also will not.
So what? It's not like anyone's losing any money in that case, because the money wasn't there in the first place. Those that wouldn't have bought it wouldn't have bought it.
I don't see how this is any different from making copies of cassette tapes when I was 10. That was also rampant at the time, everyone did it, they even put out specially designed tape decks that would play through the cassette at double speed specifically so you could make copies of it without having to sit there all day. And yet the record labels are still making music today.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Ok I am seeing what you meant now. It is unfair for the ethical people to support the content for the unethical, regardless of finance.
If everyone freeloaded bad stuff would happen to the existing model of buying bytes. Free advertising would not work for discs or downloads because by definition none would be bought.
[20:36] wwwdot/.dotorg
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.
WTF? Are you nuts? Business isn't a zero sum game. I've been told by plenty of old business greyhairs that it doesn't matter how much money your business partners etc... make off the back of your efforts, it just matters what YOU make. Plenty of people shoot themselves in the foot because of jealousy. If it's a choice between making 5 billion for $EVIL_COMPANY and making another $200,000 yourself, or keeping the status quo you GO FOR THE DOLLARS!
I would NEVER buy mysterious noname software sight unseen. Even trial versions often don't give you enough time for the mysterious bugs to bubble to the surface. If it's pirated hard you can guarantee that some of those pirates will be recommending your software to the boss if they've thrashed it for months and it does indeed perform better. Would you walk away from a business just because you had to pay for advertising?
Yeash. Your post demonstrates a terrible understanding of economics. (What is it with pirates claiming that they understand economics when they clearly do not?)
The reason those people pay what they do is because they value the product that highly.
People pay because they have two options: (1) Pay and get the product, (2) don't pay and don't get the product. When people decide that the product is worth more to them than the money they're paying, then they buy. Piracy is the third option: don't pay and get the product. You can't reasonably argue that people are going to choose option #1 over option #3 because they "value the product".
The thing you overlook is that most pirates would not consume the product at all if they had to pay for it (in those cases where price rather than something else is the deciding factor in the decision to pirate).
No, we're well aware of that. When games like Demigod are seeing 85% of the people showing up on their servers are pirating it, and 85-90% of the people playing World of Goo pirated it, then you start to get an understanding that - if even a fraction of the pirates paid for it, it would cause a big increase in sales. For example, if 10% of the people pirating Demigod paid for it, then sales would be up by over 50%. Saying "the majority of pirates wouldn't have paid, therefore you're wrong about piracy hurting anybody" is a complete non-sequitur. It doesn't even make sense when I use the generous assumption that 90% of the pirates wouldn't have paid. Don't tell us that we don't know anything about economics.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Everything sux and yet they (the movie/music/software companies) expect us to pay and pay and pay through our nose for their wares.
If it sux so much, why are so many downloading it. Hell they are making a lot of money still, so many people are paying for it too.
So really you are saying that you think it sux and its not worth it. But a lot of folks clearly disagree with this opinion.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
From a producer's perspective, I believe that piracy is generally a net positive. There have been several studies that have demonstrated that on average those who pirate buy more legitimate copies of the product class being studied than the general populace.
And I disagree with those studies. For one thing, there's the correlation-causation problem. In other words, let's say that piracy has no effect on sales. Let's also say that people who love music are more likely to pirate music and buy music. Based on these facts, you'd find that people who pirate are more likely to buy. However, in our example, we've already said that piracy has no effect on sales. This would be correlation, and it would mean that piracy did not increase sales (even though some people might interpret it that way). In fact, it's entirely possible for piracy to decrease sales and you'd still see a positive correlation between people who pirate and sales to those same people. This could happen if you have two groups of people: Group A loves music - they pirate and the buy music. Group B isn't a big music fan - they don't pirate or buy much music. Even if piracy caused a decline in purchases among Group A, they might still have higher purchase rates than Group B. This would lead to a correlation between piracy and purchasing - which could erroneously be interpreted as "piracy increases sales".
I also don't believe those studies are accurate. I can think of quite a few reasons why those statistic would be inaccurate - the most obvious being that pirates lie about the amount of material they purchase. I think there's evidence to suggest that those numbers are inaccurate. For example, a number of industries have gotten hit within the last decade with declining sales. The music industry sales are down 50% since 10 years ago. Domestic box office revenue is down 15% when adjusted for inflation and population growth. DVD sales are down (http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/avatar-dvd-sales-are-out-of-this-world-is-it-the-last-hurrah/19455023/). The porn industry is taking a big hit. It's hard for me to believe that those industries are seeing declining sales given that "piracy is generally a net positive" and piracy has been on the increase over that same period. I remember seeing one statistic that said pirates buy 12x as much music as non-pirates. Assuming that piracy caused people to buy 12x as much music, then how does one explain the 50% decline in music sales? Are we supposed to believe that, if piracy didn't exist, that music sales would've seen an 80% decline in sales? It seems unbelievable that music sales would've naturally fallen off by 80% in 10 years - as if people just stopped listening to music.
Not all 70s (or 60s, 50s, 80s, 90s) music is widely listened too. The good stuff is widely listened to. If you look at the percentage of what is still listened to vs. all music produced, it is probably the same across all genres and decades. The percentage might be declining these days, but only because there is a greater quantitiy of music being released, not less "good" music.
But you hit the nail on the head with the term "culture". Music that gave rise to a culture will always be remembered by the people who are influenced by that culture.
Plenty of sales have been lost to piracy
[citation needed], and not one commissioned by liars and thieves (RIAA/MPAA).
Whenever a person decides to be legal and goes out to buy a DVD and from a convincingly legit-looking bootlegger selling copies
That's not piracy, that's counterfeiting. Yes, sales are lost due to counterfeiting, sales are also lost from shoplifting, but neither one is piracy.
Free Martian Whores!