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."
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.
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.
And I work in residential construction. I have apprenticed and studied for years to gain the skills I employ but I don't get to collect a royalty check every time someone uses a door I installed...
I support the artists I listen to by buying branded merchandise and by paying to see them perform. I don't pay them for the recordings I keep on my mp3 player.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
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)
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.
MS-DOS's immense success had little - if anything - to do with piracy. In its very early years IBM wouldn't sell you a PC without either PC-DOS or CP/M, and CP/M was more expensive, so most buyers opted for the other one. Later, most large-scale vendors of PC-compatibles pre-installed a licensed copy of MS-DOS on the hard drive, and included it in the price. By the time MS-DOS upgrades became a stand-alone user purchase subject to large-scale piracy, the OS was heavily entrenched, and didn't benefit from the networking effects that piracy can offer.
There are software products out there that became successful from the promotional aspect of piracy. (MS-Windows is arguably one.) MS-DOS did not.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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 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
Bullshit. The Dreamcast was the last Sega console because of a number of missteps by the company, and because developers were scared of it turning into a SegaCD or 32x or Saturn, so didn't want to commit the resources to developing titles. It had nothing to do with piracy.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1572800/why_the_dreamcast_failed.html
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
You missed GP's point. Today, he has money to waste on entertainment. He just PAYS FOR IT, because it really is faster, and easier. The pirate who wants to play Super Duper Mario Brothers Meet the Exterminator and Predator has to find a download, find a crack, apply the crack, etc ad nauseum. Then, he probably can't play the online version, which includes the "value added" appearance of Alien.
Piracy is work, in case you hadn't noticed. People who are willing to spend no money, no time, and no effort to get their games/music/entertainment have to do without.
I agree, companies need to fight piracy, but following a mindless nazi doctrine that all pirates are evil and should be exterminated is as stupid as stupid gets.
Jim Baen, over at Baen Books came to understand that. He fought piracy by giving away books. http://www.baen.com/library/ Somewhere on their site, is a rather long discourse, in which Baen Books proves that every time they give away a book, especially an older, out of print book, not only does Baen realize a profit, but so does the author whose books was released for free.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Cooperating with the pirates can be lucrative.
Game producers could take a hint, and release a "pirated" version of their game, put it up on the torrent sites, sit back and allow the wider community to pay for distribution - then wait for a lot of pirates to come back and pay for the "value added" version that includes Alien.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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 !