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US Survey Shows Piracy Common and Accepted
bs0d3 writes "A new U.S. survey sponsored by the American Assembly has revealed that piracy is both common and accepted. The surveys findings show that 46% of adults and 75% of young people have bought, copied, or downloaded some copyright infringing material. 70% of those surveyed said it's reasonable to share music files (PDF) with friends and family. Support for internet blocking schemes was at 16%."
It's too bad they're too busy downloading and sharing music to call their congressmen, threaten not to vote for them if they vote for SOPA/PIPA, and actually follow through on that threat on election day.
I wonder what percentage of people are directly hostile to the notion of copyrights? I know I am
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The last sentence in the summary -- "Support for internet blocking schemes was at 16%." -- is not accurate. Check page 8 of the PDF. There is a particularly harshly worded prompt which drew only 36% support, but in every other question there was higher support for internet filtering -- in some scenarios a majority support filters.
Wishing don't make it so.
A few years back there was an absolutely amazing music torrent called oink.me which offered unprecedented selection and quality, all assembled by dedicated contributors. Naturally, it was shut down. I, and everyone I knew, would have gladly switched to a subscription model, and it could have been a gold mine for the recording industry, because it offered quality, selection, and organization unmet anywhere else. But of course like many dying industries, they decided they were more interested in control than profit, and arrogant enough to think they could maintain that control.
Forgive me if I don't shed any tears watching them crash and burn. I feel bad for the artists and other content creators, but I suspect they'll survive the transition better than the parasites.
This looks bad for the US economy, long term. Software (in the broad sense, including movies, music, books, and games) is what we do best, compared with the rest of the world.
Not really, what the US does best is promotion of said things, there is plenty of high quality of the stuff from other countries. (Some of it finds it's way into the US if it's translated but a lot of high quality movies/music/books never gets translated into english.)
What I can agree on is that Software is what we do best compared with other things we do.
The problem is that software only has virtual scarcity, don't expect people to be willing to pay for it and it is foolish to try to base an economy on it.
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002
Eh? I guess you're too young to remember casette tapes and taping songs from the radio, or using dual tape machines to copy a buddy's tapes. It was pretty mainstream in the 1960's and 70's too. Not everything has happened in recent history, young man.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You can in China...
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
One major exception: People don't mind paying their Netflix subscription fee to get better service than piracy. But selection is still a big problem.
This is really the key, and the media companies don't seem to get it. People are willing to pay for content, if it is provided at a reasonable price and reasonably easily obtained. If they want to "defeat piracy" they need to make it easier (and cheap) to get the content legally. As a business, "cheap" money coming in is far better than nothing. Add that doing this (providing content easily and cheaply) would improve public opinion of them...
- AMW
Well when they can get played on the radio or heard by the masses without selling everything they will ever create to the leeches they can make a decent living. For all those musicians out there that want to make some extra scratch at your next gig? let old hairyfeet show you how to market and build a damned loyal fanbase, ready?
Now I'm gonna assume you have the usual swag, T-shirts, your album/albums, hats, the usual stuff correct? how would you like to triple or even quadruple your sales? How? think RAFFLE buddy! You go to the local pawnshop of whatever place you are playing in, buy some $100 pawnshop special guitar or bass. If you want to stand out you can do like I did and when we found a bass I'd get some stickers or temp tats and some glitter fingernail polish and decorate. if there was a knob missing? A Dremel and some dice become cool knobs. Then at the gig you tell the audience everyone that buys some swag gets their name put in the drawing at the end of the show, first prize is this one of a kind instrument customized and signed by the band! Then at the end of the thing you pick some pretty young thing out of the audience to draw the names, third is a shirt, second an album, and finally first prize the autographed guitar or bass they got to see you play for a couple of songs that night.
My last band we had fans follow us across states because they had won or one of their friends won an instrument. It makes them feel closer to the band and to help foster that feeling anybody that won we allowed to sit in the wives and GFs section and hang out with the band. It made for some extremely loyal fans and built a hell of a buzz. As an added bonus if you keep one or two old junkers around if you find a sweetheart in the pawnshop you can substitute the clunker and keep the sweetie. I have a great 82 Washburn that I decorated with 40s Pinup girls that played so well I let the audience have a late 80s Kramer bass I didn't care for and kept the Washburn. to this day I've had guys try to buy that bass off me wherever i play. It may not be nearly as fancy as my Fender 4 and 5 P Basses but its got style.
So I give this idea freely under GPL to my fellow musicians, who knows, maybe one day you'll open for us or we'll open for you. I'll be easy to spot because i always have that Washburn with dice knobs and girlie stickers and my Squire Korean 5 string, those two I NEVER leave home without, the Fender P basses are optional. So if you see a kinda fuzzy bass player playing a Wahsburn with girlie stickers come say hi, and let me know how it went for you! I can tell you that little trick we were making triple what we were getting before even after taking out the cost of the guitar or bass. Its easy and fun, try it at your next gig!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The problem is that software only has virtual scarcity, don't expect people to be willing to pay for it and it is foolish to try to base an economy on it.
Yes, the real value of software to an economy is the production that is increased or made possible by it's use, not the sale of copies of it. Productive software is capital to the user. As such, I see FOSS and commodity hardware as the expansion of capitalist opportunity to everyone, even though not everyone will choose to be productive with software, some will only consume.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
MOST people will pay a reasonable price for something they want.
Louis CK just made a standup comedy special himself. Paid for the production of a 1 hour commercial-quality standup video (about $250,000), and put it up on the internet asking $5 to download it. It did have that $5 paygate, to prevent the casual downloading freeloader, but it is totally drm-free, and available in HD.
The response has been so overwhelming that once he paid for production, he capped his own income from the exercise at $220,000. He paid his production people a bonus of $250,000 and still has money left over, so is donating all excess to a number of charities. He's *already* given them $280,000.
An extraordinary success powered by creativity and (significantly) a lack of greed on his part. Win win win.
It's almost like we don't need the middlemen. Hm.
-Styopa
Those of the older generation are likely somewhat short. I wonder how many of those that said "No" traded tapes or sneakernetted when they were younger and such.
I've noticed this myself. My father was a professional musician for a lot of years, and by virtue of the fact that he made his living playing music he obviously feels very strongly about music piracy. Many a night have I listened to him and his friends from the industry rail against the pirates "stealing from artists."
But, even back in the days before the internet, I remember watching movies he had taped off of television, in some cases over a decade earlier. He had countless cassette tapes he had recorded off the radio or copied from LPs and later CDs, concerts he had recorded...he even had stuff he had copied onto reel-to-reel; it was so old it predated the cassette. Pointing this out to him when he gets on his rants about piracy yields little, as he seems to think it's different somehow. The fact that, in his youth, he was the dirty pirate just doesn't compute.
It's funny to me how, to people like my father, the justification for piracy has more to do with how difficult it is to do, or the quality of the copy, and not the act of pirating in itself, like it's okay as long as the copy is shitty and making it is time consuming. It wasn't until the internet came around and people started downloading that he really started having a problem with it, which is a little ridiculous to me, and a little hypocritical as well, but seems to be a mindset shared by many of his peers.
Copyright is a form of stealing.
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