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Piracy Is a Market Failure — Not a Legal One
Mr.Fork writes "Michael Geist, Canada's copyright law guru and law prof at the University of Ottawa, posted an interesting observation about the copyright issue of piracy. Canada's International Development Research Centre came to a conclusion that 'piracy is chiefly a product of a market failure, not a legal one' after a multi-year study of six relevant economies. 'Even in those jurisdictions where there are legal distribution channels, pricing renders many products unaffordable for the vast majority of the population. Foreign rights holders are often more concerned with preserving high prices in developed countries, rather than actively trying to engage the local population with reasonably-priced access. These strategies may maximize profits globally, but they also serve to facilitate pirate markets in many developed countries.'"
Let's hope that somebody who can actually achieve something in the marketplace actually listens to what Michael Geist has got to say.
"Who knew!"
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Are they sure the current strategy actually maximises profit?
If demand is below the price set by the seller, the buyer will acquire the item through alternate channels where available.
Piracy dropped like a stone when cheap downloads became available. If you want to kill it off entirely, stop charging the same price for media that are new and media that are 20 years old.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
... where affluent college kids spent many hours keeping their collections loaded with music, video games, movies, and books. Because they couldn't afford it? But they can usually afford to upgrade to the latest and greatest smart phones and gaming consoles. Funny how that works.
What about Penny Arcade's Indie fundraiser where you could name your own price right down to a penny, with proceeds going to children's charity that was still rampantly pirated? I don't doubt there's a lot of things people pirate because they simply can't afford it otherwise (the necessity of them getting it non-withstanding), but I think there's also a vast number of people that will pirate because they simply don't want to be bothered to pay anything no matter what the price-point.
This story is based on a Social Science Research Council report.
The said report has already been extensively debated on Slashdot here and here.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
'Even in those jurisdictions where there are legal distribution channels, pricing renders many products unaffordable for the vast majority of the population.
Most, if not all, Western nations completely invalidate such studies given that music is extremely affordable and reasonably priced - and much cheaper than capitalistic pricing would otherwise allow.
Its a societal failure, not an economic failure. Period.
They are claiming that a strategy which maximizes profit globally creates underserved markets which turn to illegal channels to recieve content they cannot purchase legally. In short - either sell it to people at a reasonable price or they'll pirate it from someone who can.
Nope! They are saying that they're trying to maximize profit globally, but are instead leaving money on the table in markets which differ too much from the main ones in which they make most of their money today.
Don't you know that taking a copy of something isn't stealing? Serious point: I've always wondered why more people simply don't walk right out of restaurants without paying. Food at a lot of big chain restaurants and trendy, expensive spots are way overpriced -- so why do people pay? It's not like there are doormen or video cameras. Why not just walk out the front the front door?
Valve has got an excellent method of dealing with piracy. While not perfect, it does tend to cut back on the "I can't afford it, so I'll just steal it" attitude. You really can't argue price points when you can purchase a 12-game bundle for $20US, even if only half of the games are ones you'd actually play.
They can afford to charge lower prices because they have a great content delivery method, which cuts out the whole packing/shipping process. There is virtually no extra cost for delivering one or one thousand extra copies, and therefore overhead is minimized = profits maximized.
I have to agree, at least in part, with TFA. Proliferate your business in a method economical and accessible to the consumer, and you're far more likely to cut down on piracy. After all, if everybody has your product at a price they're willing to afford, there is no reason for piracy.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
The flow my girlfriend went through recently when trying to watch a season of a TV show:
1. Checked to see if it was available digitally on standard channels like Netflix and Hulu (it wasn't).
2. Checked Amazon, where it was available digitally, but only per-episode, at a ridiculous price like $3/ep (making it over $100 for the season, more expensive than on DVD).
3. Downloaded torrent.
She was more than willing to buy it, but it has to be easy and reasonable or "other" methods of distribution win.
That is exactly my case. Let me use ebooks as an example. I always payed for my ebooks. From Amazon, Fictionwise and Ebooks.com. Then, one not-so-beautiful day, "export" restrictions started applying to ebooks. Most publishers would simply not allow those shops to sell me ebooks, because I was on a different country. I even talked to 2 of the authors, and both were aware of this, not happy, and trying to fight these measures, to no avail. As a corroborating note, these specific books were not available in my country, through any channels. Be it physical books, translated or not, or ebooks. Harper Collins is the leader of this "geographic restrictions", as far as I can tell. Well Mr. Publisher, I went out of my way to try getting these books legally. I contacted the shops, contact you and contacted the authors. For reference, everyone but YOU responded. Everyone pointed fingers at you.
Nope. He's saying that it's probably reasonable to expect people to copy a Ferrari, if they have the means to easily do so.
Unfortunately for most consumers, their download speeds aren't nearly high enough to successfully torrent a Ferrari.
No, they are claiming that a strategy which may maximize profits results in the creation of pirate markets. Basically, they are saying that if piracy of your intellectual property* is damaging your profits, it is your because your pricing strategy has failed. Or to state it another way, if a significant number of people are pirating your intellectual property* who would otherwise buy it, you are charging too much for your product.
*I know there are a lot of people who do not like this term, but I am not currently aware of any other term which brings together all of the various products that can be lumped together under "intellectual property".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Exactly! Piracy is a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That's what they said, and they are serious.
The article contends that a strategy to maximize profits in developed countries has two effects: maximizes profits globally, and fosters piracy in undeveloped countries. You seem to have focused on the first effect, and are wondered at how that could be bad thing for business... but you missed the second effect.
Their idea is that If the strategy fosters a thriving pirate market, then in the long run that market will grow large enough to hurt the legitimate market (even in developed countries)... which in the long run will cause the strategy to actual undermine profits, both locally and globally. So even though it will seem like a "success" during the short run, it will have to be abandoned at some point.
If the study is correct, I'd say the optimal path would in fact be a hybrid - start out targeting the developed market, but watch the pirate market, and do drastic price drops in that market before it gets established. That way, the company maximizes short-term profit in developed countries, but retains control of the world-wide market in the long run. And long-term market control is definitely more important, else competitors and piracy will drive your price below a sustainable level.
It's a failure if you consider the goal to have the media available to everyone who wants it.
ex:
(A) A DVD at $20 will be purchased by 1 million users, with the publisher taking $10 in profit per sale ($10 million profit), with 4 million pirates.
(B) Now, lets say at $5 it would be purchased by 4 million users, with the publisher taking $1 in profit per sale ($4 million profit), with 1 million pirates.
Each case is a success and a failure. From a pure capitalistic perspective, (A) is a success, maximizing the profit, but a failure at getting the media into the hands of all that want it. Conversely, (B) is a failure in the capitalistic perspective (does not maximize profit), but it is a success at minimizing piracy and getting the media into the hands of those who want it.
So, in the end, success and failure are determined by goals. Of course the media giants are motivated by profit - they don't do it out of the goodness of their black oozing hearts.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Serious point: I've always wondered why more people simply don't walk right out of restaurants without paying. Food at a lot of big chain restaurants and trendy, expensive spots are way overpriced -- so why do people pay? It's not like there are doormen or video cameras. Why not just walk out the front the front door?
Almost all the money comes from someone trying to impress someone else with how much they spent... Not being seen paying the bill would kind of defeat that purpose. Much like "why tip if you'll never see that waiter again?" So you can be seen tipping by your date, of course.
Places that actually focus on food filling a stomach, poor quality though it might be, know this, so McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc, require you to pay at the counter.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
And good riddance to R&D at Maranello....
In Eastern-European countries average salaries are around $600, but there's a highly educated youth, with cheap internet access (around $30 a month), and a lot of free time, and relaxed copyright laws (suing warez downloaders is not legally possible; you can only sue those who make a profit while pirating ).
At the university where I studied, teachers expected students to use pirated Matlab, as they didn't had an academic license program, so they provided intranet warez copies.
At the same time there's strong opensource culture as well.
Firefox usage:
Poland: 42%
Slovakia: 41.2%
Hungary: 40.3%
Estonia:37.3%
(And my guess is that in China hacker groups are government supported.)
"rather than actively trying to engage the local population with reasonably-priced access. "
You mean like high-school and college students without any income?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's a market triumph! What did you think markets were for?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
No price beats free
Wrong. See iTunes.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly! Piracy is a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
That is deeply profound...and funny...and true!
I download all the music and warez I can. It doesn't hurt anyone, it's not stuff I would have bought anyway.
So, you only buy stuff that you can't download? Is any of it stuff that you would have bought? How do you differentiate? My guess is that once you get yourself a good download habit it's hard to justify buying anything.
Don't you know that taking a copy of something isn't stealing?
That's something about my father I never understood. He taught me about not stealing and got pretty angry one time, as a teenager, that I stole a candy bar from a store (hanging around with other teens who were regular shop lifters).
But when it came to software he'd get upset that I wanted to buy it, "can't you copy it from somewhere?".
I guess it's the difference between taking a physical item and a non-physical one. And to a nontechie, it's clear stealing a candy bar means the store can't sell it to someone else. But copying software, the vendor can still sell it to customers willing to pay for it...
So it's right to steal a Ferrari?
It's wrong to make an identical copy of a Ferrari?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
"copyright or patent infringement", or since we're talking about "content" here, copyright infringement is all you need.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Long lineups at the checkout are a barrier; so I just stuff the things in my pockets and head for the door.
You're missing the point. A ferrari is a luxury item. A movie, or a video game, is not. There is no point in charging people more than they can afford for something that's not a luxury. In my country, videogames are twice as expensive as in the US. Very few people buy originals. But movie tickets are 1/3 to 1/4th the US price. Cinemas are always full.
Bottom line: price your stuff according to what people can afford.
*I know there are a lot of people who do not like this term, but I am not currently aware of any other term which brings together all of the various products that can be lumped together under "intellectual property".
That's because they're disparate constructs with completely different purposes that should not be lumped together.
Trademarks exist to protect the public so they know what they're buying.
Copyrights exist to provide incentive for creators to share their works through a guarantee of a monopoly on copies.
Patents exist to convince businesses to share valuable processes from which everyone can benefit.
If the means to steal a Ferrari were easy then people would do so. Although a dependency on local law enforcement is the most powerful deterrent against stealing a Ferrari.
If they removed strict law enforcement against car theft and thefts went up, it sounds like this dude would say it is the manufacturer's fault for having it be so expensive. Somewhat absurd if you ask me. Companies need to make reasonable protections for their own products (i.e. Don't sell something that is easily copied) but without private property productions from law enforcement - civilization crumbles. It isn't as simple as "the price is too high for my N-Sync CD so I *have* to steal it".
If you could take a copy of the Ferrari without degrading the original copy I would say that is *not* stealing. It might be something else illegal, but its not stealing. That's why it is such an unfair word for the *AAs to use.
Piracy evidences the unstoppable propagation of art and ideas within and across cultures. To characterize it as a "market failure" only acknowledges the failure of the economically powerful to co-opt and monetize this particular mode of circulation. Even if media prices plummeted to lows that media companies would consider unthinkable, piracy would continue because the impetus to subvert would remain, and the demand for alternative distribution methods, file formats, and content would survive.
Almost all the money comes from someone trying to impress someone else with how much they spent... Not being seen paying the bill would kind of defeat that purpose. Much like "why tip if you'll never see that waiter again?" So you can be seen tipping by your date, of course.
Places that actually focus on food filling a stomach, poor quality though it might be, know this, so McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc, require you to pay at the counter
Or....it could be that people interested in spending the time to go and sit down at a nice restaurant with excellent food are willing to pay for said excellent food because they respect the time and effort put into it by the chefs, restaurant owner, and wait staff. Plus you have to interact with your waiter who you would essentially be stealing from which makes it even more psychologically difficult then shoplifting.
On the other hand fast food restaurants aren't respected, their workers aren't respected, and you have very little interaction with them so it's much less psychological barrier to ripping them off.
The real problem is way more obvious. If you ever studied microeconomics, you probably know that the price equals to the marginal cost (at least on a "perfect" market). You learned something about Public Goods. The pure public goods are non-rival (meaning that the fact that I use it doesnt get in the way of you using it) and non-excludable (meaning you cannot exclude someone from using it). So if you look at the marginal cost of downloading a software on the internet has almost zero marginal cost. So its price should be zero. And if you look at it in therms of type of product, youll realise that its also a pure public good. If you take the market failures that those points bring, youll see why we are having so many problems on economic and legal aspects of software (and digitalized information in general). Turning a public good in a private one can be very difficult on the internet age.
The good professor's got a peculiar view of things.
The intellectual property owners have a legal monopoly and the market is inherently averse to monopolies rewarding everyone who figures out a way to undercut the monopolists. Far from being a market failure it illustrates the proper functioning of the market and the role of government in interfering with the proper functioning of the market.
The purpose of copyright, like the purpose of the patent, is to confer a temporary monopoly to encourage the development of worthwhile ideas. That purpose is undercut by endlessly extending copyright into the indeterminable future. It's hard to even guess what that sort of appropriation of the patent system would've resulted in but it would hardly have been to serve the end of encouraging new developments.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
But, when those markets are close, then they may not be able to segregate them, and the profit maximization come with losing one market.
ex.
Two markets are in effectively the same geographical location (i.e. same city). One group will pay a max of $20 for a DVD, and the other a max of $5, and lets say that the media co's profit scales exactly with the price (so 4x profit on the $20 DVD). Now, lets say that the reduction to $5 will only double the number of consumers. The company will have a lower profit margin selling at $5, so it is not in their best interest, because the people who will pay $20, would still rather pay $5, and would do so, if it were an available option.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
While this may be true in the poorest countries, it's not true in Sweden, Canada or the United States. The folks who are paying RapidShare, Pirate Bay or the USENET losers seem to be able to afford $20+ a month. They could spend that at legit stores like Amazon or iTunes, but they choose not to. But what can you expect from a tenured professor in a profession that's spawning such wonderful scamblogs like http://firsttiertoilet.blogspot.com/.
"...what sort of Liberal entitlement BS is this"
You missed the point. The study revealed that pricing above an affordable level for something that is easily and inexpensively copied results in piracy. It does not say piracy is right or wrong. It does not contain any sort of "liberal entitlement BS".
A market optimal model collects exactly as much from each person as he is willing to pay. So if there's an American willing to pay 10$, a Greek willing to pay 5$ and a Chinese willing to pay 1$, you find a way to collect all 16$. Obviously a single global price is a restriction on that, either you lose some customers or you lose some profit. What this study shows that not only do you lose customers, you turn them into pirates. No real surprise there.
What I don't like is the idea where it's going, this is where region codes comes from. Split the market, tailor the price and maximize the profit. It's the one way globalism again, they can shop anywhere for cheap labor but I can't do the same for their products. I have to get the expensive European version, now with the added excuse that it's to combat piracy. And maximize their profits, but they don't like to mention that loud.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I agree with your over all point in generic economics but it also glosses over some very serious issues. Larger sales can also mean higher overhead in support and distribution as well as liability. So while the raw numbers may make sense, once the final numbers are tabulated, lower market penetration at high market price can frequently yield best profit potential (more profit for less work; thusly allow for more expansion and growth and higher paid jobs). Furthermore, this in turn typically has the effect of creating multi-tiered markets whereby they will come in at a lower price point; thusly expanding the market and encouraging yet additional competition.
In this case, pirates very successfully erode the primary markets and all but destroyed the second and especially third tier markets. Which further underscores, this absolutely is not an economic failure. This is a societal failure, which BTW, many studies have long, long shown, in that lots of people now believe crime is not criminal so long as they can convince themselves, true or otherwise, no one is hurt. And that if they want something, regardless of the cost and the size of their blinders, they'll steal it because, while they've done nothing to earn it, they deserve it. Literally, we now have the self-entitled generation.
This is, of course, why you see so many pirates constantly parroting the same completely false propaganda over and over again. Its because they continue to reassure themselves and attempt to recruit others, which in turn acts as a form of self re-assurance, they are not criminals. This is very important to sustain the delusion else it means admitting that yes, in fact you are a criminal. And most people simply don't want to admit they are, in fact, criminals. Which brings us back around again - its a societal failure - not an economic failure.
I think it's because most people understand, even if it's only on a subconscious level, that if people only follow the rules of society when they are being watched or forced to then that society won't last for very long.
Either way, the argument that piracy is damaging companies is a bunch of hooey. This theory (if you believe it) shows that you can either get everyone to buy media by reducing prices and this have less to no piracy, or you can make the same amount of money selling it to less people and have pirate markets. This basically means that the piracy litigation frenzy happening now is not to protect potential profits being lost, its to make additional profits from people that would never have bought it in the first place unless you changed your strategy. As far as I knew, courts were not meant to be a way to make money or open new markets based solely on lawsuits, its a way to have your rights protected, have justice, and maintain order.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Digital distribution makes it impossible for you to realize the kind of price control you are talking about. That's really the beginning and the end of it. Be outraged if you want, but it's about as helpful as getting mad at the door you just slammed your little toe into. The door just sits there...
While this article is relating to physical and for-profit piracy in poorer foreign countries, most of the points apply to internet-based piracy in First-world countries.
I, myself, pirated video games when I was younger. However, with the rise of digital distribution services, such as Steam, I don't need to. The amount disposable income hasn't changed much, but the value of legally purchasing games via dealing with the challenges of piracy has.
This has nothing to do with new DRM techniques, in fact, those harm my desire to purchase legally. If I purchase a game via Steam, I can install it any number of times as long as Valve is still in business (which is it's own issue). The Steam client provide other benefits for me, automatic patching (which is a great, but under appreciated, bonus), many useful community/friends support, and easy access to new and/or independent games.
What do I get if I buy a heavily DRM'ed game from $RETAILSTORE? A longer install process, annoying patch process or multiple background patching programs, obtrusive DRM (ubisoft, i'm looking at you), and no replacement if the physical media is damaged or lost.
Steam is far from perfect, but is far superior to the normal retail mess that is the mainstream game market. Hell, they even foster innovation in the independent game market, as they provide indie games exposure when they normally cannot get any reasonable physical distribution or marketing. I've spent far more money on games since the rise of Steam than the entire time before it, and I play far fewer games than before.
Why can't someone do this for Movies and TV shows? The few that do, such as Apple or Amazon, have high prices or annoying restrictions. When a game is released at retail stores, it's released at the same time on Steam. Why do I have to wait a week to see it on the Apple store? Why is one episode worth $2, when the entire season is $20 for 26 episodes?
If I can pirate the Movie or TV show, I bypass all of these annoyances for free. There aren't as many problems pirating video content as the chance of virus infection is greatly reduced, and any DRM methods can be easily bypassed by the 'Scene'. If anything, nasty consumer-level DRM (HDCP) is a foolish waste, as less intrusive DRM methods would prevent casual copying while not punishing those who legitimately attempt to purchase your items.
Fix the release delays, and one-download-only approach, and reduce the price discrepancies. Then you will have a healthy market again.
They are claiming that a strategy which maximizes profit globally creates underserved markets which turn to illegal channels to recieve content they cannot purchase legally. In short - either sell it to people at a reasonable price or they'll pirate it from someone who can.
In which case piracy is a bed the rights holders made, and now they should just sleep in it and stop using governments as their attack dogs.
Look, It might be reasonable for a Music CD to cost $12 to $17 bucks in the US, but even in developed countries like Argentina or Brazil that is a lot of money. It would seem to me that no real studies have been done to prove that profitability requires high prices. The people who set the prices on music and video do not live in Chile or Uganda, and worry only that lower prices there would lead to smuggling into higher priced markets.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Not so. Glancing up at my games shelf, I count five titles that I bought after having downloaded the pirate version. In some cases, I continue to run the pirate version, since it isn't burdened with cumbersome DRM that requires you to dig up the CD and insert it in your computer before you can play.
Theft is depriving someone of something they would otherwise have had. So piracy can be a form of contingent theft, when you would otherwise have bought the pirated item. Warez I try and like, I buy. There are some cases where I do commit theft, simply because the software is much too expensive for the three or four times a year that I use it. I feel that in those cases I am stealing the value delivered, rather than the full price of the package. If there were a pay-per-use model for these expensive programs, I would gladly pay for the value I actually receive.
We are all cultivators of the economic garden. The things we fertilize with our money are the things that flourish. I like to think most people realize that.
Because in the market, sellers can choose the price they wish to charge, even if most other people think it is too high. After all, many more people want Ferraris than can afford them. That doesn't mean auto theft is a "market failure."
Piracy provides copies of content for free; there is no way the content creator can compete with that and make money. So it is necessary to create legal remedies, which create a "price" for pirated content against which the content creators can legitimately compete.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
THANK YOU :) MOD UP! Because something is expensive doesn't give you the right to steal it, people try to validate their actions with whatever lame excuse is relevant, I'm poor, I wouldn't buy it anyways, I'm not going to support fat cats selling it, its costs zero to anyone to steal it, blah blah blah, you're excuses are bullshit, you are a thief plain and simple if you pirate anything. Furthermore and worse, you are marginally destroying the art/market/artist of the thing you are pirating, the problem is the effect is so tiny its imperceptible on a case by case basis, but the overall effects are real.
When you have to start changing laws and restricting the rights of others tell sell your product, you are no longer selling the product for what it can sell for. It also makes you the less ethical person in this situation. You have no right to make profit, you have a right to do business. If that business fails to make money because of how they do business(pricing,customer relations, etc) or makes a profit but not "enough", then you must change your business.
And exactly how do you determine where a pirate market is located? Last I saw here in the US there is a huge market for pirate materials.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I wonder if keeping multiple formats will actually make it feasible to cater to financially distinct -- yet geographically similar -- markets. For example, sell the DVD for $5, but sell the Blu-ray for $20.
Considering it requires massive legal constructs and the loss of some fairly basic democratic principles to maintain monopolies that don't naturally exist and still fails to efficiently get goods to a massive percentage of the market, yeah I'd call that a failure, but mostly on the part of the legislators.
Sam "to lazy to register" Look
Yeup. The argument may or may not be correct. Also, maybe nobody knows how to solve this market issue without introducing other problems. That doesn't mean it's not the argument being presented.
And if someone realised that it would cost a lot less than $20K to simply duplicate your design for their own back yard? Particularly if everyone and their dog walked around all day with automatic birdhouse design duplicators?
Of course, if you charged $99 for that same birdhouse, people might be more inclined to buy them off you so they didn't have to physically build their own copy.
But when everyone have automatic birdhouse _physical_ duplicators, requiring next to no effort on their part, you might not get too many sales at prices over 99 cents, let alone dollars. Of course, the flip side is that now you could sell to every person on the planet, not just in your local town.
So what makes more sense? Selling at a price the market finds attractive, or standing on the beach threatening to sue the tide if it comes in?
If it comes down to ethics, a lot more people are going to say overpriced profit-grabbing middle-managing last-century-fossil shady backroom-dealing fatcat business practices are unethical than are going to say sharing is unethical. Especially when it's the people with all the money and influence who are trying to prop up their dissolving profit margins by legislating them back into existence.
this country is increasingly ruled by corporations. Its only natural that the
people start adopting the ethics of corporations. This is to maximize profits
at the cost of everything else.
and by not spending money when they dont have to people are doing exactly
what ethics tells them to do...
If I could walk that way I wouldnt need cologne.
If enough people do that, then there will be doormen and video cameras.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
they're trying to maximize profit globally, but are instead leaving money on the table
You phrase that as if it leaving money on the table were an accidental consequence. Its not. It is a deliberate choice.
Because media giants can not effectively control traffic of LEGALLY purchased media, they choose not to sell it at all in poor countries, or sell media at ridiculously high prices, in order not to fuel international markets, undercutting US/EU prices. If you could safely order LEGAL CDs from third world countries for pennies on the dollar, why would you buy at Downtown USA prices?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You don't simply have a right to help yourself to something just because it is priced out of your range. Doing is is a legal problem, and not a marketing problem. Furthermore, pirates are accustomed to paying nothing at all, which is demonstrably less than what many of them can actually afford.
why not buy the DVDs?
More likely she wanted it *now* and decided that piracy was a permanent solution rather than the temporary 3-5 day solution while her shiny DVDs shipped from Amazon.
Piracy is just the new socially acceptable temper tantrum. Individual consumers (as opposed to collective market forces) have decided *they* get to decide the price and medium and if they don't get their way, they'll just take it for free.
Fine, pirate it, right after you process your order with Amazon. That way you don't have wait to enjoy what you now legally own. Or, why don't you write a check for a price you're willing to pay per episode and send it to the company as a donation?
I'm guessing you and your girlfriend are perfectly content not paying anything ever because the company dared to not have it your way right now.
Work Safe Porn
No, they're claiming that profit and piracy are separate metrics, and that that a strategy which is (presumably) optimal when looking at the profit metric is not so optimal when measuring piracy.
Free and illegal has legal and financial risks associated with it. Now, even with the efforts of the RIAA and others, the risk of those risks actually coming to fruition is quite small but the costs associated with those risks are massive. That is what the RIAA lawsuits are about. They aren't about recouping lost sales, they are about raising the 'cost of free' by increasing the risk people associate with it. (Of course, they largely neglect to realize the PR damage these lawsuits are doing to their members).
What they are hoping to achieve is this:
$0 + (perceived risk of being sued) * (perceived average judgement) + (guilt over not paying for something) > $1 per song + (guilt over supporting the bastards who sue innocent grandmas)
Because that is the point at which you will pay for the song rather than pirate it.
Actually, there's a theory in economics that, while it mostly talks about tax rate vs. revenue, can be applied to price versus profit. The short version is that Price v. Profit follows an inverted parabolic line. There's a sweet spot where revenues are maximized, and it most emphatically is not at the highest possible rate in the graph. The same applies to sales (and in fact, it was in that context that my HS Economics teacher presented it): as you raise the price beyond a butter zone, your profits actually drop because fewer people can afford to buy your product, and either buy the products from the competition or steal it.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Laffer_curve is a good starting point, though that's the theory as it applies specifically to taxation.
Having a rock bottom price is not going to help if people don't think its worth paying your app. I have no idea what your app is, what its perceived value/quality level is, or what % of an average apps users are pirates, but from my vantage point you need better marketing, or a better app.
I agree pirates are always going to pirate, but having an app that appears to give users a lot of value for their $ would certainly decrease the % of pirates vs. legit customers.
You are going to continue to lose money with this attitude and that is not in the best interest of your shareholders. By making things more difficult you will drive away customers that want to compensate you for your product. The economics of music distribution are changing, and you can change with them or wither away trying to fight them, so dont get angry, use that passion to move the industry forward with new brilliant strategies and technologies. also you talk about shareholder, but do not mention artists. I hope you realize that this shows your true feeling towards the people who make you who you are. btw, are you really suggesting the judicial system should put your legal cases before those that are for the health, wellbeing and safety of the community?
Imagine my shock when I saw that these books were priced at 10 to 15 times the price of Indian versions! Now my daughter's text book bill from a US Univ is exceeding the annual pay I drew as a gazetted officer (Sr Scientific Officer II) in the service of Government of India.
I really would like these gurus to get respectable reward for their excellent scholarship, and to attract more talented people to continue to author such excellent books. But I wonder if the policy of maintaining huge margins on low volumes of sales is really maximizing the profits. Despite rampant piracy and the complete evisceration of their overseas markets, Bollywood is thriving. A R Rahman's music is being played in more music players in South Asia than the entire population of USA+Canada+Europe. He is not getting a single dime for it. He gets one time payment for composition, and it is almost public domain for all intents and purposes on the day the movie is released! The Superstar Rajnikant's movie The Robot shows up as 1$ DVD in Toronto two days after it was released in India. Still they thrive. It is high time the western music industry learn to be agile and learn to live in modern markets.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Or in the case of eurobeat cd's 40-80 dollars in the US. Which to me is alot of money for a cd.
If I make something
I agree that one should have the right to set the price for things they *make*. So if you *make* software you should be able to charge whatever you want for *making* software. But if all you're doing is *making copies* of the software (i.e. it's already been written), then all you should get paid for are copying costs.
If you could duplicate bird houses at no cost, then I would also say that you should only get paid for the first bird house you created because that's the only one that cost you any effort to build. I'll admit that there currently doesn't exist a good business model for products that have very high up-front costs but are very cheap to reproduce but just because we haven't come up with a good business model for such products yet doesn't mean we should shoehorn informational products with physical ones. They're simply different and the analogies don't apply.
I really am not concerned with the price of a CD as it is not vital to own such things. But I am concerned when works can not be purchased and are still not available for free on the net. Not only the finished product but sheet music is often impossible to acquire at any price. Laws that cause us to suffer loss of materials of our cultural heritage can not be legal. I believe that Lincoln made remarks similar to that, along the lines that an unjust law is not law and God will judge those that place unjust laws into place.
Your argument is invalid. Assume you can instantly make millions of copies of your birdhouse for absolutely nothing. You can hold onto your birdhouse and ask whatever you want for it but that doesn't change the fact that your birdhouse can be replicated instantly with minimal effort. Why would I pay $50,000 for something that can be so easily replicated?
More importantly, if I live in a developing country, your birdhouse may not even be for sale there or have the heafty price tag of $500,000,000 due to currency differences. I simply cannot afford your asking price. And it's not that people don't want your birdhouse, it's that you're charging an unreasonable amount for it; after all, everything is worth what a purchaser is willing to pay for it.
In the end, I don't view it as a matter of ethics but rather the digital age undermining the value of packaged goods. I don't need a physical package to enjoy music, movies or a video game and seeing as the production costs of a digital item is non-existant, I expect to pay less. Entertainment as physical product will be a luxury item in 10 years.
The driving force behind piracy has always been, and will always be, "because we can". People have made unlicensed copies of things since the technology existed not because the original was too expensive, but because piracy was cheaper. Too many middle-class Americans do it for me to believe it has that much to do with cost.
Even if a factor behind piracy is the high price of content, it's self-defeating. Companies have lost the incentive to lower the price of content when sales slow down. People not willing to pay $20 for a DVD can wait for it to come down to $5. But they don't, they pirate, and now the company doesn't stand to sell as many units at $5 than they might have, so they're less likely to reduce the price. One might argue that piracy hurts the tendency to lower prices by removing demand for low-priced content.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
What TV show has 30+ episodes in a season ($100/$3)? TV seasons are usually fewer than 25 episodes.
Why not order the DVD? Because she wanted to watch it now? Why not order 1 episode for $3 to watch now and order the DVDs to arrive in a day or two?
Why not go to the store and buy the DVDs now?
This is always the smoke screen that pirates use. I would have bought it. You want $x ? I would have bought it for $x/2 or $x/3. That goes for all reasonable values of x.
Now that she downloaded it, what's keeping her from buying the DVDs right now? She's "more than willing to buy it", right?
Copying something that is digital is not stealing. Its violating copyright. You do not deprive the person of any property, so it cannot be stealing. Thats like saying that if I transcribe, by hand, a poem out of a book on a piece of paper to remember later then I stole the book. Or even worse, say I memorize a poem, take it home and write it down later, then I stole the book. Even photocopying an entire book and then leaving it at the book store is not stealing the book. Its violating copyright. Copyright law violations actually have worse punishments than shoplifting something of the same value. You don't get fined millions of dollars for stealing a CD, you get community service and a few hundred to a thousand in fines at worst (and maybe a week or so of jail time). Your almost better off stealing a CD from a store than downloading it from a torrent. You cannot tell me that this isn't ridiculous and retain any credibility at all.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
And here I was paying for food because I ordered it. To think of all the people I missed out on impressing because I treated paying for a service as a matter of fact thing. And tipping, I could've saved a lot by not tipping when I've gone out to eat without a date. Why didn't you tell the world this sooner?
You're missing my point.
I can't speak for countries with people living on less than a dollar a day, walking hours to get water, and where the only electricity they know is the one that powers the headlamps on a government's Land Rover which comes from time to time to drop some food and medications, if any.
In my country (Argentina) we do have utilities, industry, exports. We have a middle class (sort of). We have DVD players, HDTV, and yes, BD players too. We have broadband, laptop computers, we have lots of things. And yes, of course, we have cars. Most of us don't have luxury cars like Ferraris, but we have, say, Volkswagen Gols and Chevrolet Corsas. And driving a Gol or a Corsa is not a luxury, by any means.
So if we have all that, why can't we have a game console? Sony sells its PS3 here for ARS 3200 (USD 800), while it costs $200 in the USA. $200 for a system like that makes it very affordable for a lot of people (Sony, for example, sells the PS2 for about that money - while they used to sell it for $800. Guess what? People buy PS2. They're expensive, but not unaffordable). Same goes with games. Any PS3 game is over USD 100, even more if it's new. Why? What's the point in trying to sell something for a price that people will certainly not be ABLE to pay for? Why display it in the SonyStyle store, behind glass doors as if it was something so exclusive you have to call the store manager to let you take a look a it? I take it you're american: The PS3/XBOX 360 cost $200. Two hundred fucking dollars. I'm certain an american family of 4 spends more than that every week in food alone. Is that a luxury item? No. Why try to sell it as that in other markets?
People do buy if the price is affordable. I have a comic book store. I sell comic books, even though you can download them for free from the internet, without having to wait 6-12 months before the original release date in the US or Japan. Very few people "like" being pirates.
Another example: I download movies. I tried video clubs (this is what we call "video rental shops"), but I'm still waiting for them to carry Blu-Ray discs. What's the point of having an HDTV if I don't have HD material to watch? I hate waiting 2-3 days for a movie to download, and I'd gladly pay, say, 10 pesos (US$ 2,50) if I could go to the video club and rent it. I pirate because I don't have an option, not because I want to. There is a BD rental shop in town, and it's not far away from here... but they don't have a big selection. Most movie posters I see now have this: "Available in DVD now and soon in BLURAY!". Why soon? Why not now?
No it doesn't. Getting something "early" has extra value, so companies charge more.
If getting it early does not have extra value, then she would obviously be content to wait until the DVDs are available.
Go into any retailer and you will see just that today.
And maximize their profits, but they don't like to mention that loud.
That's probably because it's a given. They're not in business for any other reason than to make money; that's often the nature of a business.
Copyrights and patents are for similar purposes -- to provide incentive for creativity. The difference is in the types of creativity -- "artistic" versus industrial.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
This has nothing to do with taxation.
This is simply a supply/demand curve where one side has managed to control the price point via monopolistic means enforced by government. (If they had to pay for their own enforcement apparatus they would quickly lower prices).
As it stands, there is no reason to believe they are selling anywhere near the "butter zone" (what ever the hell that is). There is no evidence they have ever tested lowering prices in selective markets, or lowering price even in developed markets. Not on any meaningful scale. Apple/Amazon proved that 99 cents per song works. But that market was mostly US/EU. World wide, its estimated that 50 cents per song or even 30 cents could make just as much total revenue.
The only people getting raped harder than the consumers are the Artists. Estimates are that the artist makes 9 cents of that 99 cents.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You misunderstand what it means to have a government. Your argument can easily be extended to the concept that there are no natural rights at all. The state owns you from the moment you are born (or conceived even) and that any rights and freedoms you have are a charitable concession made by the state so that you may be more productive.
This is a fallacy. The collective state consists of individuals, and the rules are established because individuals recognize each other's natural rights.
It's because the creator has a natural right to his creation that we have established copyright.
The part about it being for the common good is just some twaddle that had to be added to sell the idea to liberals, collectivists and other good for nothings.
... about once a week. Basically everyone is going to discuss the difference between "theft" and "copyright infringement", about how piracy does or doesn't really hurt developers, and so on.
This article does provide a refreshing source of empirical evidence of what many slashdotters frequently state in such debates:
Even in those jurisdictions where there are legal distribution channels, pricing renders many products unaffordable for the vast majority of the population.
There are also frequent arguments from slashdotters that piracy doesn't hurt developers, which this article doesn't actually support (and nor do I in most circumstances). Instead, it discusses how the frequently stated effects of piracy (organized crime, lol!) are not true. The same thing happened when iTunes became popular: the music industry said people wouldn't buy MP3s and would only steal them. Actually, people will purchase them if it is cheap enough, and also readily and easily available.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
"Piracy is a market failure - not a legal one" Who is the author trying to rebut? Are people on the "other side" really saying "Piracy is a legal failure, not a market one."? I've never heard anyone make the claim that piracy exists because the laws are inadequate. Seems like he's searching for an opponent that doesn't exist. Many of us here would agree that using/abusing the legal system to respond to the problem of piracy doesn't seem like an effective solution. But that's hardly making the case in finding the source of piracy.
I think this ill-conceived narrative of the piracy debate comes from we consumers being unable to accept that there are people among us who are the problem -- "it's not people like us, it's the system". Perhaps it is neither "the market" nor the "legal system" that is at fault in the continued proliferation of piracy (they're piecemeal responses) -- perhaps piracy stems from a moral failure of the individual who chooses to pirate. Can we ever accept that?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
putting a credit card number in to a form is a (very low) barrier
To use a credit card number, you first have to have a credit card. As I understand it, a lot of the developing markets discussed in the article still use cash most often.
I do not pay for music from big record companies.
When you shop in a grocery store that plays music owned by big record companies over its speaker system, you pay for the groceries, and some of the price of the groceries goes to license the music.
No, he seems to be saying that current strategies do NOT maximize profits. See, you have this unique widget, that no one else can supply, legally. You charge ten bucks, or a hundred bucks, or whatever - but not a lot of people can afford it, or else they just don't think it's worth your asking price. So - they steal it, or reverse engineer it, or whatever. In the end, you've made x million dollars, and spent y percent of that on enforcement.
Had you sold your widget at a price that almost all people thought was reasonable, you would have sold a gazillion more units, and made about 10x million dollars, and spent none of it on enforcement.
Current strategies are totally screwed up. In fact, they've been screwed up since the '70's when a cassette or a vinyl disk either one cost an appreciable part of a young serviceman's pay.
"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
Exactly! Piracy is a victimless crime, like trying to punch someone in the dark only to find there's nobody there.
FTFY. If you punch someone in the dark, the punchee is certainly a victim. If you copy something which you never had the intention to buy, no one is the worse for it.
Because some people want to have unilateral possession of content, not subject to the decisions of others. What is available for streaming now may not be in the future, for many possible reasons. Ownership matters. I've put a lot of movies on my Netflix Instant Queue, which are now not available either via streaming, or at all.
Example: I want a full collection of Looney Tunes, the same ones I grew up with as a kid. Can't get 'em now because many episodes are "politically incorrect". Ditto Disney's "Song of the South".
It's why people buy books instead of relying entirely on the public library. Borrowing (which streaming amounts to) is fine for most content, but sometimes you want to own a copy not subject to whether the library has it available or not, either for your own convenient access or to satisfy "I own a copy."
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Of course, you also get to hide the bird house until after someones bought it? If someone asks to see it first and you say 'no' and they walk away, is that a lost sale (and thus a '$20,000 loss')? How about if they go look at one someone else has bought from you ('sharing') and decided they don't like it. That's cost you a sale, and is that a loss? Oh, and it's your RIGHT to stop anyone showing anyone else it, using the law as and when needed, because your LOSS is so significant? Thats the state of play we're dealing with here. Most of the 'loss' claims, are estimates, based on what they projected they'd get, vs. what they actually got. In other words, "It's not that I valued my own work too highly, but that piracy meant I couldn't make the money from it I felt I should".
Almost all the money comes from someone trying to impress someone else with how much they spent... Not being seen paying the bill would kind of defeat that purpose.
You've never been to a fine restaurant, have you. (Note: that wasn't phrased as a question.) There's a restaurant I always try to visit when I'm in town because the food is absolutely amazing. From the best salad dressing in the known universe, to the steak that I could cut with a fork, to a chocolate souffle soaked with thick cream, the entire meal is brilliantly executed. It's not even particularly expensive, although certainly more than McDonald's. Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass who does or doesn't see me eating there. I'd be perfectly happy to have the place to myself, although that'll never happen.
Much like "why tip if you'll never see that waiter again?" So you can be seen tipping by your date, of course.
Because regardless of how screwed up I think the idea is, that waiter depends on my tip as part of his paycheck, and the local custom is to pay waiters on the side for their services. I've never stiffed a waiter (except for 2-3 times when one really deserved it) whether I was eating alone, on a date, or with my family, regardless of whether I ever planned to visit that restaurant again.
The fact that you believe people only act civilly because they don't want to be embarrassed says a lot more about you than it does society.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
DVD, WTF is that and why do we still have them.
Because it's hard to fit multiple hours of movie over a connection with a 5 to 10 GB per month cap.
If all the studios would back [Netflix and Hulu] and make their entire libraries, minus the standard theatrical release window, available through services like these there would be no need for DVDs, cable, satellite
How would a model like that of Netflix and Hulu work for live news, live sporting events, live concerts, etc.? And how will the Internet connection get to your house without cable?
Digital media is an infinitely reproducible good
Sure, copies 2 to infinity can be produced at near zero cost, but who puts up the money for the first copy?
Mr. Copyright Holder goes to see Mr. Lawyer that is protecting his rights.
- Mr. Copyright Holder: "How's the fight against piracy going Mr. Laywer?"
- Mr. Laywer: "Not good. People are committing more piracy than ever..."
- Mr. Copyright Holder: "Well you see, I've been doing some thinking about this; if we reduce our prices significantly and focus on the quality of our products and remind consumers that when they legally buy our product they also get legal warranty, we should be able in the long run to change the general culture of consumers towards a situation where piracy is met by the general population with disgust rather than with ambivalence. Also, that way we would not have to fork out so much money on litigation."
- Mr. Laywer: "That'll never work. Oh, and by the way; we need more money for litigation."
- roll credits -
"I'm taking this loop off." - Jack O'Neill
We're not talking FOOD here people or shelter or even lifesaving drugs. What's being debated is not a need but a want.
Warning..car analogy....
I can't afford a Porsche, but does that mean I have a right to take one?
If people stop buying something because it's too expensive, the maker either figures out how to make it cheaper or they go out of business. I'm not in love with the RIAA or MIAA because they're idiots who wasted time trying to shut down a perfectly good opportunity for years. TV Cable is now doing the same thing: Instead of realizing there is a market to see individual channels without all the crap ones, they're running around trying to shut down pirate signals.
But to turn around and blame the creator or those marketing the creation as being their fault that people are pirating is just BS. I mean lets just call it as it is. People want something for free, they justify it in their minds that it's not really stealing or hurting anyone, or that they deserve it, and they take it. Doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, from a developing nation or the richest one. I suspect a LOT of those practicing this are not the poorest people...after all they have a computer to run it on.
Steal or don't steal, but don't try to clean it up or blame the company you're taking it from.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
And while most politicians are well aware of how extending patent terms would hurt the entire industry and economy, they would be more than happy to extend copyright terms perpetually at the same time. They probably think that copyright balance isn't important, that culture doesn't matter for the economy. But they're terribly wrong. Copyright is no longer just about culture (which IS important whether they like it or not), it's also a huge hinderance to the entire IT sector which grows in importance every day.
If you copy something which you never had the intention to buy, no one is the worse for it.
You can drop the qualifiers: no one is ever worse off for the making of a copy, whether or not you might have bought it if that wasn't an option.
(On the other hand, you are worse off if you could have made a copy, but someone used force—e.g. copyright—to stop you. Not because you were entitled to the copy, mind, but because force was used or threatened against you, depriving you of your natural rights of self-ownership.)
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Yes. If they don't punish non-commercial copying with insane damages, then BT, Gnutella, and direct downloads will become significantly more popular, and therefore robust, and end up taking ALL of their profits. Even if price of Netflix was zero, what would be the point of filling up forms and watching ads, when you can get better quality from some torrent or DD site?
what sort of Liberal entitlement BS is this...
The very same liberal entitlement BS of a business plan that made Valve software a stupid amount of money with a comfortable monopoly on the video game online distribution market. I know it's against conventional business logic, but it is possible to make money and not be a petty sociopath.
If I make something, it's MY right to set a price for how it sells. If I want to set a low price and go for volume, my decision. If I want to set a high price and go that way, still, my decision. The point is, I GET TO SET THE PRICE FOR WHAT I MAKE.
You're absolutely right, it is completely your decision. Just as it is the decision of the rest of the internet to decide if your terms are reasonable. If the consensus is no, hive-mind behavior will kick in, and the internet will provide your widget at a more reasonable cost. Trying to claim some higher moral ground won't shame the process to a halt.
If I made bird houses and charged $20,000 for each one, but you decided that's too high and you stole one... Guess what. YOU FREAKIN STOLE IT. I don't care what country you came from, and what the poverty level is there.
Also, your analogy doesn't work. If you made a $20k birdhouse and someone stole it, that's not a pirate, that's a thief. A pirate looks at a birdhouse that someone bought from you and recreates it with their own materials. You're not actually out any raw materials or labor, only a hypothetical sale. That's kind of a big difference.
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
Ask an engineer, and they will tell you how it is a technical one.
Information is viral, intangible, and free. All ownership and constraints on anything to do with information/data is held in place by law only. Markets cannot contain it. Technology cannot contain it. And if there were zero legal consequences, even if you had the money, you'd be an idiot to pay for it.
...lots of people now believe crime is not criminal so long as they can convince themselves, true or otherwise, no one is hurt.
You've got that backwards. If no one is hurt by an action then that action is not legitimately a crime, even if those in power wrongfully criminalize it. The only actions which are rightfully crimes (i.e. legitimately incurring a debt of restitution, and possible retribution/punishment if deliberate) are those which harm others—and making a copy of something, by itself, does no harm to anyone. Unlike copyright, which consists of the use of government-backed force to secure a commercial distribution monopoly, doing obvious harm to a massive number of people on a continuing basis.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
> That's because they're disparate constructs with completely different purposes that should not be lumped together.
They are ALL imaginary property, aka "artificially restricted rights based on GREED."
Trademarks = somebody has an exclusive on a word to prevent competitors from profiting from it
Copyright = somebody wants to restrict the public distribution of information, entertainment, etc.
Patents = somebody wants compensation for implementing an idea
When you have a system were colors and flags can be copyright ( http://www.yalelawtech.org/trusted-computing-drm/46-dc-ea-d3-17-fe-45-d8-09-23-eb-97-e4-95-64-10-d4-cd-b2-c2/ ), when 2 prime numbers can be patented ( http://books.google.com/books?id=1MTcYrbTdsUC&pg=PA168 ) you know the _underlying_ philosophy is entirely fucked up.
I am not saying people shouldn't be compensated for their time, knowledge, and skill, but honestly, this artificial notion of property is archaic and insane. "Yes, kids, you are supposed to share you toys, you selfish bastard. Yes, Johnny when you become an adult in the Real World (TM) you sue everybody who decides to shares "your" imaginary property. Who brainwashed you with this "sharing is caring" hippie bullshit? Don't you know people are "stealing" "derived income" from you! Yeah, unfortunately you can't patent the wheel due to prior art."
No wonder society have a fucked up contradictory schizophrenia view of "property." Every time we want our kids to have a certain behaviour, we turn around and teach them the exact opposite as adults.
My degree is in Economics sonny. You, on the other hand seem to have no clue.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The collective state consists of individuals, and the rules are established because individuals recognize each other's natural rights.
Do individuals have a natural right to own other individuals? Before the 1860s, they had that right under law in the United States. Has the set of natural rights changed, or do rights under law not necessarily reflect natural rights?
It's because the creator has a natural right to his creation that we have established copyright.
An author has a natural right not to publish his work. Copyright exists to let the author have his cake and eat it too by restricting a work even after it has been published. Say I write my own song. Do I have a natural right to publish it?
...piracy is chiefly a product of a market failure, not a legal one...
Darn. I wasn't able to decide what the even meant without further study. A quick look at Wikipedia yields the definition of market failure to be "...a concept within economic theory wherein the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not efficient. That is, there exists another conceivable outcome where market participants' overall gains from that outcome would outweigh their losses (even if some participants lose under the new arrangement)." Well there's yer problem. It ain't a free market. Look at it this way. There's a relatively free market in paving stones. Now, we don't see widespread piracy in paving stones. Why is that? Is it because the PSAA (Paving Stone Association of America) is so efficient at stamping it out? No. It's because there's no profit in it. If Pirate Peninsula of Sweden were to start delivering paving stones at one-tenth of the price of PSAA's paving stones, then PPoS would quickly go broke. That's because the cost of producing additional paving stones is about equal to the price. For each paving stone that PPoS delivered they would lose about 90%. That immediately suggests why copyright piracy exists--it's because the price of copies is much higher than the cost of producing an additional copy. But then, the question remains...why is the price of copies so much higher than the cost of producing an additional copy? The answer to that question, too, is quick. It's because government have granted the copyright owner a monopoly on the production of the copies. I tell you what...you let government grant PSAA a monopoly on the production of paving stones and overnight you would see pirates spring up.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Theft is depriving someone of something they would otherwise have had.
You may want to rethink your definition; among other things, it would apply equally well to competition, or a boycott, or even just self-control. Merely depriving someone of potential, unrealized future income is not theft, no matter how far you stretch the concept.
Theft is depriving someone of the use of property they already have.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Yeah, this is a bizarre argument. Ferrari has no obligation to sell its cars for $15,000, no matter the fact that most people can't afford them at $400,000, or that they're stolen frequently. Nor does Ferrari have an obligation to sell its cars in Botswana for $15,000 while charging US customers $600,000.
And you're not going to talk someone who has no obligation to engage in software-welfare to lower prices by demonizing them. People need to realize that just because they want something cheap or free, they're not entitled to it. Who is greedier, people who demand to be paid for their work, or people who demand to never have to pay for others' work?
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
I'm a democratic socialist through and through, pink and then red on the inside (the deeper you go, like a nice steak), but we actually could find a lot to agree on disregarding some economic issues--which probably earned me being marked as a foe. I am in 100% agreement with your conception of crime, for example.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Seeing that I live in a developing country and see all this about piracy I have to say one thing:
Please do not lower price on movies, music or even software even if it is proven to lower piracy. The problem I see with this is that more money will then be leaving the country and head of to Hollywood land. I prefer the money stay here and be used for other things like education, hell even if the pirates use it to buy sweets its better than sending it off to some 1st world country.
I will even give you an excuse not to do it. If you lower the price for us to be able to afford things legally you will have to drop the price back home as well. What will stop someone from USA to go buy his software/movies from India, Brazil, Africa or even Russia. Instead raise the prices, that way I can maybe get more companies onto Linux as well.
Trademarks exist to protect the public so they know what they're buying.
Copyrights exist to provide incentive for creators to share their works through a guarantee of a monopoly on copies.
Patents exist to convince businesses to share valuable processes from which everyone can benefit.
And all of them are supposed to promote the public good.
Patents and copyrights only occassionaly do that, when it suits the holder's interests.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Your argument can easily be extended to the concept that there are no natural rights at all.
This sentence is unfortunately true. Without law enforced by some type of societal gov't, whether Washington D.C. or a group of tribal elders, there is nothing in nature that prevents one man from taking advantage of another by greater force.
The state owns you from the moment you are born (or conceived even) and that any rights and freedoms you have are a charitable concession made by the state so that you may be more productive.
This, however does not follow are all. To be a part of society does not mean you must be "owned by the state" in everything you do. The philosophy of a pure socialism may subscribe to this, but all western democracies make clear that the role of gov't is peoples' live is part of a contract made with the gov't in question.
This is a fallacy. The collective state consists of individuals, and the rules are established because individuals recognize each other's natural rights.
It's because the creator has a natural right to his creation that we have established copyright.
The part about it being for the common good is just some twaddle that had to be added to sell the idea to liberals, collectivists and other good for nothings.
Well, it depends on where you live. In the U.S. copyright is not listed as a natural right, but a conditional one. From the constitution
Congress shall have the Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
And this isn't just about pricing policy. It's also about simple availability. We live in the age of Internet. There's no reason to set different release dates in different parts of the world but the content industry still does that, sometimes even weeks or months apart (or even not at all). The demand for optical discs also decreases because the technology is dead. It was dead long before BluRay even entered the market. Yet the content industry still sees optical discs as the main distribution channel. I live in a European country where the only official supply is on optical discs. We've been part of European Union for almost a decade now but we don't even have iTunes store available like the rest of EU because Apple has decided to wait until we adopt Euro while our retarded politicians decided to back off from the adoption process (which was nearly complete BTW) and stick to national currency until some unspecified point in the future.
While my app doesn't appeal to jailbreakers only, I would say that the kind of people who are capable of jailbreaking their devices is my main demographic. When it comes to tech support, I always ask if the device is jailbroken. The majority of the respondents say yes.
Not my app, but this source claims that 96% of the downloads were priated. This article claims a 75% iPhone app piracy rate.
In the most basic sense, yes, I agree with you. But the "because we can" is by the NATURE of the type of content folks are trying to sell. The ability to replicate/duplicate the original product perfectly without reducing the quantity of the original that's available is just a reality of "intellectual property".
Therefore, I truly believe it needs to be factored into the equation as just part of doing that type of business, rather than endlessly trying to "squeeze the sand in one's fist more tightly, to prevent it from slipping through one's fingers".
Whether it's DRM, or "copy protection" schemes, or getting government to act as "bill collector" for your industry -- all these methods of "controlling/stopping piracy" are flawed and doomed to fail.
In anything resembling a "free market", people are going to gravitate towards whatever they perceive as the "best value". So sure, when you see so many "middle-class Americans" making unlicensed copies of things, that's not always because they can't afford the asking prices - but rather, the value proposition of "free" sounds even better.
So how do you stop that from happening? You don't, but you greatly REDUCE it by adding value to BUYING the content that's simply not there with a free copy. Essentially, you change your business model so people aren't simply asked to pay to obtain the work in question. But by paying for said work, receive other benefits bundled with it!
Remember: There's a certain "inconvenience factor" always present with "pirating" a given work. If I want to get a free copy of a new music CD, for example? I've got to provide my own storage space for it in some fashion. That might be as inexpensive as a 15 cent recordable CDR disc, but it's still a cost. More importantly, my TIME is a factor since downloading all the songs or taking the time to borrow someone's CD and duplicate it takes a little bit of time and effort. Then there's still the fact that I'm probably left with an end result that isn't as well "labeled" as the original. (If I just duplicate a bought music CD, I don't have the list of song titles or their run-times, or any of the other liner notes the original has....) If I download from unknown sources on the Internet, the quality of the music is often sub-par (might have a skip or pops in the audio, or heck - I might even get a trojan-horse virus in the process of downloading it?) too.
For these reasons, a lot of people have been driven to paying the 99 cents per track or so for music they want. They view it as a fair value proposition vs. the downsides of seeking out the free alternatives.
For software titles, even more is offered - like technical support and free software updates, if you purchase it rather than copy it. But all in all? Too many people are finding they get a FAR better value by obtaining the unlicensed copies than paying, and that is nothing but a MARKETING failure. I certainly don't have all the solutions but I can think of plenty of things that COULD be a start, in various situations.
For example, since so many computer games are already based on movies? Why not make it a "bundle" somehow, so the only way to obtain the game is to pay for a "premium movie ticket" that gives you the game at the same time you go see the film? (The opposite idea has been done before, where buying the game gives you some sort of coupon for a movie pass or two -- but I think that's backwards. People interested in the game have probably already SEEN the movie first. The movie generated the interest in owning the game so the sale needs to be made when the MOVIE is paid for.)
they are claiming that a strategy which maximizes profit globally is a failure? Are these people serious?
No.... they are not conceding that it "maximizes profit globally" that might or might not be true.
They are saying "piracy" is a result of failure of the market to provide people a price they can afford for the goods.
Just because something is an economic success to one entity, does not mean that the practice is good for the economy, or serves the public interest.
The public interest is better served when affordable products are available to the public, rather, than when, a foreign corporation's profits are maximized.
I build an end-user application. The application is substantially free (i.e. most of its functionality is available without charge or restrictions). A small subset of functionality requires payment, in amount about equal to two (2) movie tickets (may be less, I haven't been to the movies in a while). Other software with substantially similar functionality may cost hundreds of dollars.
You'd think, then, that my product should be virtually immune to piracy. After all, there is hardly a way to price it any less (making it completely free is probably the only other option, at which point I'll have to find another project to pay my bills and stop working on this one).
Well, I think it goes without saying that there is a crack out there for my application and that it is being distributed illegally. Market failure? Perhaps, if the only available market is "distribute it for free".
In which case piracy is a bed the rights holders made, and now they should just sleep in it and stop using governments as their attack dogs.
I agree. Also, when someone makes the argument maximizes profit globally... piracy and unintended/negative consequences have to be part of that equation.
If they did not consider it, this is totally a result of their negligence they can fix, without help from the public (whose interest is not best served lashing at pirates on their behalf), and they should be left on their own to fairly correct the situation.
Or (2) if they did consider piracy when proceeding with a policy based on the idea of maximizing profit globally..... then it's all intentional, and it's not in the public interest to reward their greed by consuming resources to try to fight piracy generated by their under-served markets.
Justify? Maybe they just say WHY they do it and don't give a flying fuck whether it is justification to anybody.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Theft is depriving someone of the use of property they already have.
That definition seems incorrect too, ie I could deprive you of the use of your car by refusing to sell you fuel.
Theft is the possession of someone else's property without consent.
And yet again your are AC # 2 ^ googolplex to fail at analogies - comparing theft of physical property and duplication of data.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Even if price of Netflix was zero, what would be the point of filling up forms and watching ads, when you can get better quality from some torrent or DD site?
Most people have a conscience. There is a threshold level of social responsibility that, if not overcome by unreasonable terms, will cause people to suffer a level of inconvenience for the sake of legitimacy. I don't know anybody who downloads anything from The Pirate Bay which is also available on Hulu, for example.
Of course, as long as movie studios are screwing us over with high prices, bought-and-paid-for legislation and draconian DRM, people will fail to feel sorry for them when they download movies without paying for them.
I am sure the big media companies have economists to tell them about that and help them play with the price/demand curves to maximize their profits.
I am sure they also know mathematically that piracy is already baked into the calculations, mostly, and not a huge issue.
I suspect they view piracy as "untapped revenue streams" or "money left on the table", since they few every copy a pirate makes as a lost opportunity to have sold that copy to the pirate for the full inflated retail price; and efforts for stronger legislation, lawsuits, scare tactics, etc, are all about getting as much of that money off the table as possible, or tapping into the "lucrative" piracy revenue stream, by getting pirates (who thought they were getting it for free) to instead be forced into paying amounts they can't afford off the top; and, by reducing the piracy to capture that 1% or so extra sales from pirates who WILL buy the thing, as a result of their efforts.
In other words... all the pain and farces are just efforts to capture a small percentage of the 'piracy' into sales, and to get extra revenue/"compensation" by any means possible.
Pure greed. Nothing about 'protecting themselves', the economy, innovation, or other similar scare tactics they make things out to be.
As their sales are falling for reasons that have naught to do with piracy, and they need all the sources of revenue they can get.
Look, It might be reasonable for a Music CD to cost $12 to $17 bucks in the US
Let's be honest - it's not reasonable to charge that much for a CD anywhere.
Actually, local law enforcement isn't much of a deterrent against stealing a Ferrari - prestige cars (driveway jewelry) are often stolen by professionals, from tow truck to shipping container to whatever country where the purchaser of the stolen car (who may be the local law) lives. Ferrari puts serious engineering effort into theft deterrence because law enforcement is concerned with more common kinds of car theft. (Tow a Ferrari without first entering the PIN and it will not start again until parts that Ferrari keeps strict control of are replaced.)
Of course, the (wealthy) people who pay to have prestige cars stolen probably do say "it is the manufacturer's fault for having it be so expensive" - there's always a rationalization.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That's the oldest excuse in the book, BUT:
1) Even in international markets, the price won't be "pennies", It will probably be half to 1/3rd. I'd be amazed to see the price drop to 1/4th of the US/EU price.
2) "Most People" won't bother ordering from overseas. Shipping costs are high, and times are a bitch (1 month is not uncommon).
3) In the case of software: I don't see how an american would bother buying a Windows copy from Latin America (where you can keep the price roughly the same for all countries), where it will be available in spanish only.
4) Region locking: Average Joe doesn't know how to region-unlock his DVD/BD player. He will buy 1 DVD from overseas, and get the region lock sign. He probably won't order a dvd again.
And, reality check: if the problem is that big, just tax CD/DVD/BD/Whatever imports SO HIGH that it makes it unaffordable.
It's not wrong, but it's most definitely illegal. Gotta love those patent and trademark laws, huh? though copyright may also play a part, relating to its aesthetic design.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
It's a deliberate choice because the companies are either unable to think of or afraid to attempt alternate mechanisms that could extract some of that money. Offering the same media for a significantly lower price isn't the only option available to them.
It's not wrong, but it's most definitely illegal. Gotta love those patent and trademark laws, huh? though copyright may also play a part, relating to its aesthetic design.
No, it's not. You're thinking of somebody cloning the cars and selling htem.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it does, the universe is an uncaring place, rights as with morality are a human construct.
Have you looked at games prices in Thailand where they actually do drop the price to combat it? It used to be quite a popular thing for people to buy keys for games in Thailand and the company there would just toss the box and email you the key.
Many games were extremely cheap, and completely legit. Some companies turned around and region locked keys though. They never said what they'd do if someone legitimately bought the game in Thailand and actually moved to another country or something, as well a lot of thai companies started requiring that the the game be sent to a thai address, etc. and prices have gone up, last I checked. but at one point you could get some games for much less than 1/4 of their price.
Even at 1/4 of the price, That's $15 for a $60 game. $45 a game is worth a short wait to some people.
Over 10 games you could pay for your console/PC upgrade with that kind of money
As far as I'm aware, patent law doesn't require commercialization to be liable, and I'm sure trademark law does not so no, you're still screwed even if you don't sell it.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Maybe it's more like. It maximizes short term profits at the expense of alienating future markets.
Or maybe. it maximizes short term profits at the expense of over all global satisfaction, which is relevant if you really think the purpose of copyrights is the public good.
Or maybe. it maximizes short term profits at the expense of individual freedom and reasonable government powers. Which is my primary concern. If protecting their profits requires the deployment of a police state, a hostile anti-user legal environment and regular witch hunts in a bizarre era of neo-McCarthyism. it *seems* to me that we have lost much more than a few episodes of Seinfeld.
But... the future refused to change.
Most people will not have to. Other companies will buy all the media overseas, import it in bulk and undercut the current price that the media company sells it for to make a profit. Then the media company will either raise the prices overseas so such a process is no longer profitable, or lower the price of what they sell here to reduce the profit margin for the importers to force them out of business.
Opportunity cost. There is a threshold of how much people are willing to give up to acquire a certain product. If we are talking about buying a $40 DVD, that means that one will have to forgo everything else that that $40 might buy, and spend it on a DVD. For many people, that is a high price to pay, especially when it will provide only a limited amount of entertainment that might not be worth the $40 in the first place.
Piracy offers products that people want at a lower opportunity cost. Many countries sell pirated content (shoes, purses, software), and suing those people for buying that would have no effect on the original product sales. It would only mean that people would get the money and spend on things they find are more important.
Essentially, piracy exists because prices are set above the consumer valuation of the product. If that generates greater profit for companies, good for them, but suing people and expect people buy their products out of fear will get them nowhere.
As far as I'm aware, patent law doesn't require commercialization to be liable...
Yeah, actually it pretty much does. If you go into your garage and build a clone of an engine with patented parts, you're not going to get in trouble for it until you attempt to do something commercial with it.
...and I'm sure trademark law does....
Not for personal use, no. This is already something that's going on today. You can make big prints of movie posters, for example, hang them all up in your house, and you'll never see a problem from that. Take them to a convention and try to sell them, though, and you's busted.
I have no doubt, though, that we'll see changes in the laws when things like 3D printers become main stream.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
All the bullshit you just said would be right if the world was actually ruled by an imaginary 20/80 rule: If 20% of the population make up for 80% of profits, then why bother reaching the other 80% if profits would be just 20% higher?
The problem is that this is just true in an 80 year old shareholder sitting at the table. Reality might be different... but it would be a risk to try, so its easier to just not do it.
I'm a democratic socialist through and through, pink and then red on the inside (the deeper you go, like a nice steak).
And now I am hungry.
Mmmmmmm, politicious.
Patents exist to encourage publication... otherwise, the oft-overlooked 4th branch of intellectual property - trade secrets - can come into play. Non-transferable, there are mechanisms in the law for their preservation. However, there are no protections from independent discovery. Of course, some trade secrets can retain their value long after a patent has expired.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
That doesn't make any sense at all. Clearly people are willing to pay for the service, or Netflix wouldn't be in business. That doesn't mean that current prices are optimal.
Why don't we import products made in China directly from China, instead of paying a retail middle man?
You do realize that a Ferrari is a physical thing that must be built and incurs heavy cost for each car vs a movie or MP3 that can be copied endlessly for far less than the original cost to build right? Digital bits aren't quite the same thing as physical property.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
2) "Most People" won't bother ordering from overseas. Shipping costs are high, and times are a bitch (1 month is not uncommon).
So buy a crate of CDs at $3 and import them to the US, then resell at $10. Why would this not work?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Example One.
John Doe is an amateur (non student) photographer and graphical artist who wants to use professional level tools. John decides to grab Adobe Creative Suite Master Edition. He has several choices:
1. The legitimate route that will cost Joe $1600 plus all the activation B.S. from Adobe's licensing and activation department.
=== or ===
2. The sketchy quasi-legitimate route that will cost Joe $200 plus grief from Adobe's activation department since he did not buy from an "authorized retailer."
=== or ===
3. The illegitimate route that costs a day and a half of time (and no money) to download, configure, and install.
All things being equal, most Joes will probably pick Option 3. A day and a half of time costs less to Joe than the $200+grief or $1600. Nothing was lost to the economy because Joe values the software at $150 and had no way to acquire it except through illegitimate means which cost Joe about $50 in lost time. In Economics classrooms, this whole concept is referred to as "Opportunity Cost" and "Price Elasticity of Demand."
-Valen
Exclusivity is property. That's why tresspassing is forbidden, the owner has exclusive use of that land. It's not like I'm taking anything, and after I leave it looks exactly the same.
That is ridiculous. The problem is that copyright is civil. If it were criminal, they would have non-fine options, like community service.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Exclusivity is property. That's why tresspassing is forbidden, the owner has exclusive use of that land. It's not like I'm taking anything, and after I leave it looks exactly the same.
Except that trespassing is not property theft. Exclusivity is not property since its not owned anymore than you own the right to breath air.
That is ridiculous. The problem is that copyright is civil. If it were criminal, they would have non-fine options, like community service.
Credibility lost. Why is there criminal penalties for copyright infringement (i.e. up 250,000 fine and 5 years in prison per violation) if its only civil? You get a double whammy when they sue your ass in civil court for ridiculous sums of money that are hundreds of thousands of times in excess of the actual damages.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Bluay's for $20? No way! It's one thing to differentiate, it's another to overprice...
And I still buy games from US, because it's 25% cheaper than doing doing so in EU. So that "problem" affects not only rich to poor countries sales, but rich to rich country sales.
Ah... So that is how we got to business process patents,like outsourcing patent by IBM, and software patents. I was pretty sure, that patents were to cover inventor's rights to their inventions. And in effect make sure that the companies don't hoard their knowledge and keep it secret(the disclosure part of patent).
Creativity brings its own reward. The purpose of copyrights and patents is to encourage making information available to the public. Don't leave "public" out of "publishing". Prior to copyright, readers often subscribed to private printings of limited editions, where resale value encouraged keeping books private. Copyright rewards making books available to the public under a temporary monopoly, with the books eventually entering the public domain.
Writing a book does not "promote the general Welfare", to use the words of the US Constitution. Growing the public domain does. Publishing, making it available to the public rather than private collectors, also serves that public purpose. That's what the incentive rewards.
Joel Spolsky pointed out the problem with this a few years back: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html When your unit production cost is small, you're better off (as much as possible) to adjust the price based on the ability of the consumers to pay and get something out of the poorer ones instead of nothing.
You're missing three VERY important concepts, and that is "impulse buy" and "laziness". I bought a good half a dozen games this week, could I have pirated them? yep, it would have been no problem I'm sure. But like most people I'm a sucker for a sale and frankly at cheap prices it quickly becomes too much of a hassle to pirate and THAT is the point.
The key as in TFA is to hit that "sweet spot" where most will simply consider it cheaper and easier to buy then pirate. the stick NEVER works, because frankly the pirates are smarter than the *.A.As and always will be. it is the classic "smart cow" problem, where all it takes is a single one to figure out how to get through the fence and the rest will follow.
So instead they should be following the Walmart approach, make it cheap, make it easy. For me if the game is under $20 or the movie is under $10 frankly going through the trouble of pirating it simply isn't worth my time. With Amazon, Steam, and GOG I can have a game instantly or at the max 3 days from the time I click to the time the movie or game is dropped at my door, I get all the extras like multiplayer and access to DLC, so why bother?
But the "lets crank the price til it hurts!" model frankly encourages piracy because nobody likes feeling screwed. $50+ for a four hour game? or $30+ for a movie I'd watch maybe once? I just skip them but I can see why a bunch of people would just download them as they simply aren't worth whats being charged and THAT, that right there, is the crux of the matter. Charging the absolute max the market can bear may be business school 101 crap but IRL it rarely makes for maximum profit. look at what Valve found out with L4D, when they found the sweet spot they sold 1100%! more than they did at release!
So in this case it is simply greed cutting off their nose to spite their face. By ignoring there is a sweet spot they are pricing themselves right out of many markets in both the first and third world, and yet again making piracy the better option. Stupid is as stupid does I suppose.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I think the above poster makes an excellent point, and I think this is what posters are missing here in the discussion. There's piracy in the developed, western countries that is well known here on Slashdot, where people who can probably afford the price of the media (they might not be able to buy a 6 pack that weekend or something, but it's within their budget) choose to pirate instead.
On the other hand, as the OP notes, in developing countries, piracy IS the market. I lived in Syria, and honestly I don't know where I'd buy a legitimate version of something. The markets are dominated by pirated goods, because if you do eventually find the one fancy mall* that has a legitimate outlet, the goods will be priced at the same price as in the US or Europe. I wanted to get a DVD in Jordan, and at the Virgin Megastore, it was priced HIGHER than most DVDs in the US - few Jordanians could afford such a thing, and so they turn to piracy.
There was interestingly, while I was in Syria, an independent record label that managed to distribute a fair number of CDs actually managed to control piracy a little bit by distributing to the same places that sold pirated CDs, and working out agreements with the owners of the shops not to pirate the CDs. However, sales of CDs at $4 each still had trouble finding a market, versus $.50 pirated CDs in a country where $.75 could buy you a takeaway lunch ($4 could get you a pretty nice lunch at a good restaurant). If you think of that in terms of a $6 sub sandwich in the US, it was the equivalent of pricing a CD at about $32 US. If a US company tried to charge $15 for a CD, it would be like charging $80 for a CD in terms of buying power.
*Actually, in one mall, they had a store that LOOKED like Best Buy or something, but all of their DVDs were indeed pirated.
Uhhh...then how in the hell can you not have heard of the butter zone? hell I had a grand total of two economics classes and even I know what that is! To put it simply the butter zone is the price where the market will continue to buy your product at its maximum, after that people will switch to substitutes in ever increasing numbers, margarine in the butter example or piracy in this one.
The butter zone and the fact that curves such as the Laffer curve can be applied to items outside taxation are Econ 101, at least I always thought so. It isn't like the guy was pulling some magic numbers out of his ass here, this is pretty much 101 stuff.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I disagree slightly, people will be willing to pay for legitimacy, but they are far less likely to suffer inconvenience for legitimacy. If pirating something is easier than buying it people are much more likely to pirate it than they would be otherwise. This is one of the biggest problems with most DRM schemes and a big part of why Steam is so successful.
Sure it is, just not for the CDs they're selling. A full CD by a decent artist could easily be worth that much.
I agree 100% with your point about digital copies being preferable, but as long as we're still buying media on discs, this may be the best $17 I have ever spent:
http://www.amazon.com/SkipDr-Manual-Disc-Repair-System/dp/B0015ACUKC/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1301969120&sr=8-3
Knowledge != Intelligence
So buy a crate of CDs at $3 and import them to the US, then resell at $10. Why would this not work?
Idiotic imaginary property laws, mostly. First sale is getting stomped by scummy trademark and copyright claims and the like now.
Actually, the new high-THC Cannabis strains have been shown to cause psychosis.
Actually, you're full of shit.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I feel like DRM is a special-case inconvenience which is worse than others because the buyer understands that it has no purpose. They know that they are not a pirate because there is a hole in their wallet where the money they paid used to be, but then they get treated like a criminal and are prevented from doing things they have every right to do. Whereas with ads, people understand that there is a reason for it -- it's how they got to watch legitimately without paying.
Of course, what smart people do is find a way to make sure the creator gets an ad impression and is paid by advertisers but without the user actually having to watch the ad. Then everybody wins. (Except the marketing trolls, but ever since they invented astroturf they're officially not people so nobody cares about them -- I'm actually pretty sure that "tivo" is what primitive cultures used to say when they impaled a marketing troll with a spear.)
are you saying that If I make a piece of software, and it takes me $20k in development man hours, then I should be able to charge once, for $25k and make a profit, but after that I only get to charge $1 for duplication costs?
If that's the case, there would be a lot less software out there.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I think you're overly optimistic. Most politicians haven't even considered the matter of balance, since the lobbyists they talk to haven't brought it up. All they know is that the lobbyists' industries are being ripped off, and we'll lose tons of jobs if this goes on. What possible balance is involved? This is private property we're talking about!
Most politicians are completely unaware of the purpose of copyright and patents. They believe that it's to "protect" the "property" of the recording and movie industries. Because that's what they've been told.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Clearly people are willing to pay for the service, or Netflix wouldn't be in business.
Of course. This is because using P2P can get one in a financial trouble, so a lot of people don't bother. I am saying, if it was known that non-commercial sharing is safe, then, first of all, more people would start sharing GiBs of data that they have, and so availability and quality would shoot WAY up from where it's now (and it's not too shabby now). P2P would very fast overtake the entire market because it is cheaper, faster, more robust, more private, all Free software solution, has one client for ALL media, and provides a better product.
Sure it is, just not for the CDs they're selling. A full CD by a decent artist could easily be worth that much.
Sure, if you're a casual music fan - CDs are priced for you. $12-17 per CD doesn't sound ridiculous when you only spend it a few times a year.
If you have a real interest in and passion for music (especially once you start exploring back through the decades) and aren't filthy rich, you'll likely take a different perspective. You'll have an epiphany and realize that there's no reasonable, rational, affordable way to pursue your legitimate interest without torrents and filesharing websites.
Just my two cents, off the top of my head:
If I could pick up my 1,000 favorite albums in 256k or better, no-DRM, for $1,000 total, I would do it in a heartbeat. At $10 each, I have bought exactly one album so far.
The cool thing about digital distribution is that the marginal cost of production (the cost to create one additional item for purchase) is maybe a couple cents. Marketing (ie: iTunes) costs $0.30 per dollar.
Sell one album each to one million people for $10, that's $10m minus $3.5m for marginal production costs -- net $6.5m. Sell one album to 10 million people for $1, that's $10m minus $3.5m marginal production costs -- net $6.5m.
Would lowering the price by 90% increase sales by a factor of 10? Tough to say -- but at $1, most people will buy just about anything -- just look at the crap that sells in the App Store. :)
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Nice post -- well said. Some minor tweaks could make it a touch better, perhaps, but very well done. Thanks!
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Why for a digital download should the price not be equal. Surely our content hosting is not 50% more expensive. And its not just because the AUD has risen. Back when we were far from parity we were still paying well above the converted price.
US Price 320USD
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/en_US/pd/productID.216647200/categoryID.50726100/list.true
Aus Price 470AUD
http://www.microsoftstore.com.au/shop/en-AU/Microsoft/Windows-7-Ultimate-Full
Better pass a bunch of poorly written laws with over-reaching and unforeseen ramifications and egregious penalties anyway. You know, just to be safe.
or else!
The thing about price gouging and piracy is that it's like bad management and unions. Once you let piracy and unions out of Pandora's Box, it's awfully hard to stuff them back in.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
There seems to be some confusion over what is meant by "market failure" in this context.
An economist takes a bird's-eye view of the economy, and looks at what is good or bad for society as a whole. From this perspective, a market serves a purpose both for the seller (who receives payment for their goods) and for the buyer (who receives goods at an affordable price).
If prices rise far above production costs, and become so high most people can't afford them, the market has failed to provide the goods. This can happen, for example, if there is a monopoly, or if the state regulates the price or quality of goods very strictly.
Likewise, if prices are reduced to become very close to or below production costs, it is no longer profitable to produce them, and once again the market has failed to provide the goods.
In the case of copyrighted goods, the production cost can be made close to zero. The producer could, in theory, sell the same music CD to middle-aged middle-class for $20.00, and to teenage school kids for $5.00, and make a profit on both markets. In practice, this is not possible, since the middle-aged and the school kids have access to the same stores and everybody would buy at the lower price. So the producer compromises and sets the price somewhere in between, where he/she believes it will maximise profits.
This leads to 1) reduced profits for the producer, since he/she charges a lower price, and 2) not everyone will get access to the goods, since the price is too high for some. I.e, a market failure.
The problem is much worse in the case of pharmaceutics. The pharmaceutical companies sell drugs at a high price in Europe and North America to recover their development costs. They could sell the same drugs to third-world countries at a very low price and still make a profit, but they're afraid the cheap drugs would be imported back to Europe and North America and cut into their profits there. It's a gigantic market failure which leads to millions of people not getting the drugs they need, despite the very low manufacturing costs.
Incidentally, both of the above market failures are due to government regulation. Copyright prevents the sale of cheap copies to school kids, and patents prevent the sale of cheap generic drugs to third-world countries. Both copyrights and patents are time-limited monopolies granted by the government to the creator of a work/invention, in the hopes of stimulating the production of new works/inventions. You can argue that the government regulation is necessary, at least in the case of patents, but it's impossible to deny that there are detrimental side effects.
Let me see if I understand...they are claiming that a strategy which maximizes profit globally is a failure? Are these people serious?
It's not the strategy which has failed, it's the market. The strategy is optimal given the market conditions the companies have to operate on. But they could make a higher profit if the market allowed for segmentation, i.e if they could sell the same goods at a high price to rich westerners and at a lower price to second- and third-world countries. The market fails since it's providing them a disincentive to do that.
You need to understand the terms involved.
Actually, it's much, much better for the artist if you download their music illegally and then make a cash donation to them. Artists usually receive less than ten percent of the sales price of music downloaded from sites like iTunes, a little more than ten percent for CD sales. Only the superstars get close to 20 percent.
Even if you pirate and then only donate half of what you would have paid for the music, the artist is far better off than if you buy the music legally.
But the "lets crank the price til it hurts!" model frankly encourages piracy [...].
Not to mention the fact that, when you do buy that expensive movie or game, you are still treated like a criminal with all the unskippable "do not pirate this movie" clips in the beginning.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
I suspect a large part of the 25% price difference is because you don't pay the sales tax in your own country. Am I right? :)
It's a failure if you consider the goal to have the media available to everyone who wants it.
ex:
(A) A DVD at $20 will be purchased by 1 million users, with the publisher taking $10 in profit per sale ($10 million profit), with 4 million pirates.
(B) Now, lets say at $5 it would be purchased by 4 million users, with the publisher taking $1 in profit per sale ($4 million profit), with 1 million pirates.
Each case is a success and a failure. From a pure capitalistic perspective, (A) is a success, maximizing the profit, but a failure at getting the media into the hands of all that want it.
Actually, (A) is a failure too from a capitalistic perspective. If the market allowed for segmentation, the producer could sell the DVD for $20 to the 1 million users who could afford it, AND for $5 to the other 4 million, creating an even higher total profit.
This is not a capitalist vs. consumer thing. The market failure hurts both consumers and producers in this case.
If a DVD i just bought starts with an unskippable video which accuses me of being a criminal, threatening me with up to x years of jail time it doesn't exactly help their case.
How much did the major games like COD/Crysis 2 cost 49$/59$?
Sure, somebody will buy these in USA, but in a developing country like India? No way. 59*47= 2700 INR.
So will I buy these games on steam? Nope.
But will I pirate them? No again. I will walk into a store and buy a DVD for 800rs (999 is retail around 15% discount is common).
EA has learnt this so have many other game companies. If they want to sell a game in India, or developing country, they have to price is reasonably.
Even MS does this to some extent.
Now come to RIAA etc., When the record lables used to sell CDs, they used to price them at around $10 for a CD. I think international prices were 15$ approx. Still it was quite high when you take into account Purchasing power Parity.
Local labels got the drift, and sell CDs for 2$-3$ and piracy is not common.
But $1 a song in a third world country, its going to be a tough sell.
But then its the age of the internet. If they started selling cheaper games via online channels, people will start buying from local sites unless some kind of DRM is in place. For example EA has a india site offering same games for much cheaper as digital downloads!
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Have to agree with you. The last time I paid the full price for a game instead of waiting until it had dropped 30 bucks was back in 2004. And with today's technology where a well-made (rare thing, nowadays) 2009 game still doesn't look bad next to a 2011 game I certainly don't see any problem with that.
You're totally missing the point. This isn't about fairness or natural rights, it's about economic efficiency.
Since the production cost for copyrighted goods is close to zero, it could be provided to second- and third-world countries at a very low cost, and still make a profit for the producer. However, the current system doesn't allow for that - producers are unwilling to sell cheaply in second- and third-world countries, since the goods could be imported back into Europe and North America and undercut the prices there.
There are two (obvious) solutions to this problem:
1. Segment the market by letting the producer control all import and export of their product, even after they have sold it on. This has the risk of promoting smuggling and black markets.
-or-
2. Abolish copyright. This will allow cheap copies to be sold anywhere in the world, but could significantly reduce the profit on some goods, and cause those goods to stop being produced.
Piracy stems from us not buying the whole "I own this piece of information", or "I own this idea" thing. It's something that we reject deeply, perhaps even unconsciously.
If piracy and idea "theft" was punishable by death then our species would become extinct. Everybody's crime is nobody's crime.
Trademarks are GOOD. Otherwise, you'd barely be able to know who you're buying from.
Copyright should be very limited, but the idea is, you get a limited monopoly on that content, to promote making the content in the first place. (Emphasis on LIMITED. Not the crap we have now.)
Patents should also be very limited. The idea there is actually even better that copyright - you get a limited monopoly on the invention, in exchange for telling the world how the patented invention works. So, you can release something, and not ever tell anyone how it works, but if someone reverse-engineers it and makes millions of cheap slave-assembled (or, nowadays, Chinese-assembled) clones, too bad so sad. Or, the idea was, you can patent it, and you're guaranteed to be the only one allowed to produce it (or authorize others to produce it), but in exchange, once that time is up, anyone can reproduce it easily.
If no one pays for entertainment..
So given this, you agree that piracy is harmless?
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Unfortunately, although the artist would certainly love you for that. The record label they are associated with will not, and its the record label that has the legal resources to still do you in.
Have a nice day!
True. Fortunately, the damages for copyright infringement are still relatively sane here in Sweden (even if the measures to track pirates are not). We traditionally have low statutory damages, and almost no punitive ones.
It's also safe, so far, to use BitTorrent, since the courts are strict in interpreting the evidence and require proof that someone has actually completed a download. The pirate hunters usually only have time and resources to go after large Direct Connect hubs and FTP sites.
And then there are the encrypted networks which the pirate hunters haven't even started to penetrate.
I pirate most of my media, but I still buy them from time to time if the price is low and it's convenient. For example, I buy a lot of digital comic books directly on my iPhone due to the low price, speed and convenience, even though it's trivial to download them off DC and BitTorrent. I also buy physical copies of titles which are especially good and worth re-reading.
My point is that politicians seem to understand quite well how important balance is for patents while they don't even realize that there is a balance to consider for copyright. If a bunch of big corporations came to lobby for patent terms extension, they'd most likely get thrown out through closed door. Because patent term extension would hurt the rest of industry. But when content industry goes to lobby for copyright term extension and harsher enforcement, they get pretty much anything they ask for. Because politicians don't bother to check whether their claims are bogus or not. Because politicians don't even realize that there's some "rest of the industry" apart from those lobbyists that they should listen to and think about.
There's also a third explanation to the RIAA lawsuits: that they're a lucrative business in themselves, regardless of any lost sales, and regardless of the deterring effect.
If the RIAA comes to you and says, "We can sue people who download your songs for you, and you'll get a cut of the damages. You don't have to do anything but sign these papers", it must be hard for a record company executive to turn down.
So it's right to steal a Ferrari?
No, but I would download one if I could.
Individual consumers (as opposed to collective market forces) have decided
What does collective market forces mean if not the aggregate (e.g. sum) of individual forces? (Likewise for decisions).
So, what you're saying is that you lament the fact that there weren't enough piracy? 'Cause if there were, that would be a collective market force, right? Or maybe you are against the state-protected temporary monopoly called copyright because it (like any other monopoly) prevents the market forces from doing their thing?
Or did you mean a political (rather than market) force, i.e. the masses should (at great transaction and information costs to each individual, more than what it is worth to most) get together and counter-lobby the politician, fighting back the "copyright industry"? Sadly, widely dispersed small interests tend to not defeat the concentrated, big interests.
TL;DR: I call your bluff. Collective just means many individuals.
It had some value to you otherwise you wouldn't have spent the time downloading it, installing it and playing it
Some value, yes, but I would never buy it at the asked price. It's not worth that much to me.
The "Play4Free" version of BattleField recently came out. EA said this game cost ~10% as much to create as a big name game, yet with-in a month of release, it already paid itself off.
Isn't it amazing how a free game paid itself off with in a month?
But we shall all bow down to your logic and repeat "Piracy is because P2P is cheaper".
You might want to talk to EA and ask them how they get people to pay for a free game.
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They are not mutually exclusive. The fact such obvious statements of facts are constantly required to be thrown at piracy morons only continues to underscore the general idiocy and lack of education and knowledge of the pro-piracy crowd.
The simple fact is, you can look around everywhere and see real harm and damage done to companies and individuals from piracy. Period. End of discussion. The simple fact is, hundreds of years of economics prove studies like this are full of shit. The simple fact is, pirates latch on to any propaganda, regardless of who un-authoritative it is, and how un-vetted the material, and promote it as fact because it props up their lies and propaganda, all the while painfully going out of their way to ignore hundreds of years of study and even newer studies which validate they are full of shit. But you don't hear things like facts and reality being discussed. You only ever hear lies and propaganda as shaped by pirates on sites like slashdot.
The simply fact is, I've never met a pirate who wasn't a lying, hypocritical, idiotic, person. Literally. Zero exceptions to date. Worse, they almost always delude themselves into believing their own irrational, fictional, bullshit. Which ultimately means, you can't fix stupid. Welcome to the self-entitled generation.
Valve CHOSE to sell that way. And a good decision it was.
If I choose NOT to do what valve did, that doesn't give the rest of the world permission to steal my wares because they don't like my price. At what point to we get to steal a Ferrari because they priced it too high?
If the consensus is no, hive-mind behavior will kick in, and the internet will provide your widget at a more reasonable cost.
So true, that will always be the outcome. Does that make it any more legal? No. Does it make it right? No. Just because the masses think my product is overpriced does not give them the RIGHT to steal it. Even more so when the product is a luxury, not a necessity. Software, video, music... none of that is a necessity. Now If I was selling WATER at a high price and people where dying, that's a different story.
True, the analogy doesn't apply, comparing virtual to physical goods. But what about artwork, particularly photography. I know there are some people getting paid high dollar for photography. Duplication cost is negligible, but not zero, for this stuff.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I think you're the only one that noticed that I didn't RTFA :)
Thanks, i'll go read it now.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I got to say, I agree 1000% with this...if the industry stopped making a big deal about it, and invested in making a better version to avoid piracy, that would solve the problem there.
If a door maker, makes cheap doors that people can just punch and break, does that mean that the problem is people punching and breaking doors down, and robbing you of your house and possessions....or really is it the door manufacturer's fault for making flimsy doors....i never once heard a door maker say...
>"god dang, that's another one this week, ...if only people would not punch doors and break them, we would have a more stable product securing people's houses."
So why is it ok for all these other companies to always blame others....I am not saying it is right for someone to steal....but the definition of stealing is bound to physical objects...when everything we talk about is virtual it becomes a big grey area.....
so fix the problem by coming out with a steel door, instead of balsa wood....add deadbolts to your door, instead of just changing the small door lock....why cant they come up with a better system for music, movies, software, instead of blaming the people that are doing what comes naturally, finding a way to save money.....if they can, they will.....
You are free to hire somebody to paint a copy of a Masterati for you.
Rethinking email
I'm struggling to find anything in your post that isn't an empty assertion with the word "fact" tacked on either end of it.
The simple fact is, you can look around everywhere and see real harm and damage done to companies and individuals from piracy.
No you can't. Unless you were trying to attract my attention to your waving hands.
Period. End of discussion.
So you admit your mind is riveted closed.
Your opinion seems to be based on truthiness as opposed to any objective evidence whatsoever.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I don't think any of your conditions truly apply.
1: Maybe, but I skip commercials with my DVR.
2: Unless I'm mistaken, usually the shows are broadcast before they hit the torrent sites.
3: Higher quality than broadcast HD?
Yet you feel you're entitled to play it which has a negative effect on an honest consumer like myself.
All owning something is is being able to keep people off. Owning land means nothing more then you are not tresspassing and other people are.
Because under some circumstances, it is criminal. Under others, it is only civil. See 17 USC 506 for more details.
IANAL, so you should read the code and consult a lawyer for a better answer.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Given the increase of DRM because of piracy and its effect on those of us who are honest and the changes happening to laws which again ruin it for those of who are honest then no I would not say it's harmless at all and no I shouldn't have to pirate stuff and risk viruses or anything else to try and avoid DRM on software.
And you can't tax a company like that out of busines, because?
It's not like things don't go through customs, where they have to be checked.
Media companies use DRM to control paying customers. They don't use it to control piracy, as it has zero effect on piracy. Pirates might make a convenient scapegoat/excuse for this practice, but that hardly makes it their fault. The media companies are the people you should be directing your ire at.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Sorry but you're living in imaginary land. Many PC gaming went years without DRM. Why would they change it all of the sudden and pay for third party DRM to add to the cost of their software and piss off their customers?
For instance Starsiege: Tribes didn't have much if anything in the way of DRM and was subjected to rampant piracy. They then increased control over Tribes 2 and that was due to nothing but the piracy of the first title. There wasn't some guy sitting there and thinking Tribes 1 was too nice to people and decided to just fuck them for the sequel.
- Mr. Copyright Holder to his Copyright Lawyer: "Well you see, I've come up with this great idea that is so crazy it might work but no executive or lawyer could ever understand!"
- Mr. Copyright Lawyer: "That'll never work. Pay me more money." The End