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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.
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?
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.
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?)
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. :)
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
YES - Frantic Freddie For the Commodore 64.
Everyone had a copy - pirated. I meet the makers and they made virtually nothing.
Or more likely the fact that they never seem to have anything good in.
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.
That's an interesting way to murder.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Leeaavvee GAGAA AAAALONNEE!!!
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?
http://xiaopang333.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/piracy-killed-the-dreamcastor-did-it/
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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
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.
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?
Speak for yourself there buddy, I love lady Gaga to death!
Sounds to me like a case of.... bad romance...
<Insert groans here>
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.
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.
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)
More like leave Britney alone. At least she had an interesting voice.
which is totally what she said
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!
Unfortunately, sales figures for Crysis are hard to come by. From a simple google, 50% of the historical press releases are showing how people aren't buying it because of the heavy system requirements, the other 50% (usually released later on) are saying that sales exceeded expectations, etc. It sold over a million copies worldwide between the November it was released and the following January, according to http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=612
That's a quarter of Counterstrike's *total* sales figures within three months. One fifth of Doom's. One tenth of Half-life / Half-life 2's lifetime sales. That's pretty astounding sales if that's true. Saying piracy harmed that? That's really a stretch. Maybe it wasn't profitable even with all those sales? That's much more a business issue and cost-analysis, but saying that it didn't sell, possibly due to piracy, is really a big stretch. Bear in mind that it was universally recognised as an extremely high cost development because it *WAS* so demanding on the hardware. The Wiki pages says 1Gb of textures, 1,000,000 lines of code and 85,000 shaders. That's WAY, WAY more than predecessor "big hits" ever required. If it wasn't "competitively" profitable, this is probably due to the wrong kind of time-money investment trade-off, which was plainly visible from day one and the reason that the "Can it run Crysis?" jokes are STILL around.
"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."
I call bullshit. Piracy gets little mention in comparison to other things, there are few effective counter-measures and actual prosecutions are rare if not damn-near non-existent. Or, by now, each vendor would have their own hand-rolled DRM instead of just licensing Securom, etc. Spending even 10% of a games budget on DRM would see seriously stringent and complex DRM far beyond what anyone has bundled into a modern game. As it is, we get half-baked, re-re-re-re-licensed standard libraries, like slapping on a sound engine, or something similar. I would hazard a guess that licensing a game engine costs MUCH more than licensing Securom. Even a physics engine would cost a lot more. And you probably find that in-house development is orders-of-magnitude more expensive, and that's the "secret sauce" of any games development shop. The rest is just licensed libraries to save people from reinventing the wheel each time. DRM is one of those. If people are spending more than 10% of their budget on anti-piracy measures and messages, I would be flabbergasted and I would be telling them to stop pissing money away.
Piracy costs money, no doubt. It will cost a few genuine buyers no matter what people say, but to say that it's a core business concern? I doubt it. Getting the sales to even have to *WORRY* about piracy would be the best sign that your games company is doing well. How many types of DRM are there in use in major games studios at the moment? How many hand-roll their own because the console-based ones are insufficient for their needs? So long as you stop "casual" copying (i.e. not a determined person trying to make a copy), that's as far as you can go and as far as it makes sense to go. Once you get a game to the distribution stage, the rest is mostly just licensing some library to save you having to code your own, putting out scary warnings in the press and maybe following up the odd prosecution or two - I should think any large software house pays more in patent-licensing on software patents (in countries that have them) than they ever would on anti-piracy measures.
Your measles analogy would work if it weren't for the fact that we have data pre-measles (and pre-DRM) and that we have modern data about non-immunised people (and non-protected games). The fact that they *aren't* trumpeted from the
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.
Okay, let's look at Crysis. You say that Crysis sold fewer copies than previous games "of its scope." You cherry pick one of the most successful games of all time, Doom 3, but the most direct comparison is the one previous game produced by Crytek: Far Cry. Far Cry sold 730,000 copies in its first 4 months (http://www.wiki4games.com/Far_Cry#cite_note-1).
Crysis exceeded sales expectations according to EA, selling 1 million copies in its first 3.5 months (http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=612&Itemid=2), eliminating your argument. This came despite the fact that Crysis could barely run even on enthusiast PCs for a year after release, while Far Cry was released to a much larger audience of computers that could run it acceptably.
We know that Crysis was a very popular target of pirates, and Crytek tells us that this is proof that their sales were hurt by piracy, but there's absolutely no evidence connecting the two. Of every 100 downloads, how many would have purchased the game if they hadn't pirated it? Of every 100 downloads, how many see the game, like it, and then buy it in order to play online or out of respect for the developers? People like you assume that the first number is vastly larger than the second, but there's never been any evidence to support that position. I suggest that it's just as likely that piracy increases game sales, and I believe that the automatic assumption that piracy is the scourge claimed by some within the industry is incredibly naive.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
...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.
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.
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.
It probably didn't help that Crysis required a supercomputer at the time to run at anywhere near what they claimed on the box. I can't blame people for downloading something like that to make sure that it even runs on their system before plunking down $60 on something that might not even work on their box.
God, I can't believe I'm about to comment on this. I am almost entirely unfamiliar with Lady Gaga and wouldn't know any of her songs if you sat me down and played them for me. That's just not the universe I live in.
However, it was your comparison to Marilyn Manson that got me thinking. I am not a Manson fan by any means, I don't like his music, I don't like his image, I don't like him. But! I can step back from that enough to realize that the music that he's performing isn't really his art. His image and the ways that he manipulates it and the ways that he manipulates public opinion around him are his art. And in that sense, he is an absolute unquestionable success. Eminem too, although obviously his music is part of his art and he takes it seriously (or maybe I just like him more), just looking at his musical achievements doesn't really tell the story.
From the little (very very little) I know of Lady Gaga, maybe she's up to the same sort of thing.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Britney has a shit voice. Leave her alone because she's been exploited all her life and has never had a chance to figure out what a normal life looks like, let alone feels like.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 !
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.
Well, I found her voice interesting. Having an interesting voice to me is more important than being amazingly technical (though being in tune is nice), depending on the type of music.
You found the post-processing interesting. You never get to hear Britney's voice on her albums.
I'm a huge music fan, I have a huge CD collection of 1300+ CDs because music is my number one hobby and I probably buy around 10 new CDs a month because I really don't consider £10 or so (here in the UK) as being a great amount to pay for a piece of music I have possibly enjoyed over and over again for 30 years or more. I don't support piracy although I can't say I'm particularly a fan of Japanese music, apart from one or two Japanese hard & progressive rock groups I've come across over the years.
However, whilst I sympathise with the effect piracy is having on your business, ultimately digital music distribution will die anyway - either due to piracy or because it destroys the music industry full stop.
An fan of painting or sculpture can go stand in front of a piece of art and just gaze at it for hours in order to get a full appreciation of what it is. That person doesn't need to get a paintbrush or a chisel out to make that piece of art into something he or she feels would have been better, it is appreciated as much for its flaws as for its aristry.
Music is no different. A well-made music album is long enough to give the listener, if he or she listens carefully enough, a good impression of what was going through the musicians minds when the album was made, and to appreciate a good piece of music requires a good attention span and full attention.
Digital music turns good music into "Pick & Mix sweeties" - i.e. "I only like certain tracks, I don't have the attention span to listen to a whole album and I want to mix things up in a way that is different to the concept that the original artist had in mind."
People who buy digital downloads are not music fans. They are the "I want it here and I want it my way now" Internet generation who get bored with everything as easily as they get rabid about it - they lack attention spans and, possibly, self esteem as they jump from fashion to fashion, desperate to stay "cool" and to impress their peers while not standing out from them.
True music fans appreciate music and are therefore prepared to pay for it - unfortunately, your target audience are fickle, faddy people.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.