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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
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
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.
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?
I write music for a living...I should only get paid for the first copy sold?
Depends. If you're any good, I'd like to see you paid for about 7 years after you wrote the work. Then I'd like to see your work go into the public domain to be used by others in any way they want, for free. Meanwhile, you're going to write other stuff, because you're good at what you do, aren't you? If not, fuck off and stack shelves for a living, like me.
The big problem at the moment is NOT that people are copying stuff, it's that artists (well, publishers really) are demanding payment for works for literally hundreds of years after they were first produced. That's wrong, and it must stop because without a public domain, you can forget about anyone producing any art at all.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Leeaavvee GAGAA AAAALONNEE!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.