Slashdot Mirror
You Will Never Kill Piracy
scottbomb writes "This is perhaps the best op-ed I've read about the whole SOPA/PIPA controversy. The author challenges Hollywood to re-think their entire business model. It will undoubtedly fall on deaf ears, for now. But sooner or later, they will have no choice but to adapt. From the article: 'Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it's worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won. It can't, is the short answer, and one these companies do not want to hear as they put their fingers in their ears and start yelling.'"
Just like modding me down won't kill goatse, you'll never stop piracy. You may sink their ships but we will just equip better cannons on our new ones.
http://takedownpiracy.com/2012/01/another-one-bites-the-dust/
The guy has made it his job to DOS sites with DMCA takedown notices till they shut down
If more people like this start infiltrating private torrent sites, it could cause a major issue
The world has changed but they hasn't and they ain't gonna change because they are still raking in shitloads of $$$ doing what they had been doing for the past century
I'd wager that it'd be like a repeat of what is happening to Kodak - by the time Hollywood decides to change, it'd be way too late
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Studios live on a strong distribution model where they control the vast majority of the content and the distribution channels. Any tool that is viable for "piracy" is also viable by independent distributors as well. While I don't condone copyright infringement I think studios are more interested in their long term viability than to protect their content from "piracy". I expect similar behavior from the major publishing houses in the next couple of years as ebooks break their hold on the distribution channels.
We have been saying this from within the industry for 5 years. Why are we paying truck drivers to haul blu-rays to store shelves when we could be using the internet to deliver the movies for 1/100th the cost? Not only is putting a blu-ray on a store shelf inherently risky (essentially a master copy of the movie) but it costs MONEY to produce, deliver, and manage, Make the movies cheap, remove DRM, use the technology to help figure out where the movies are going so that you can optimally sell merchandise... seems like a winner to me and to many others but apparently not to the people in charge.
He also rationalizes that downloading is okay because it's not like you actually stole a physical object - so it's not really stealing, right?
One of these things is not like the other:
Which is why we charge people with theft, rather than copyright infringement. Calling it "theft" is meant to shut down an argument against the copyright system, by equating a copyright with a form of property ownership. Copyright has never been a type of property, it exists only to benefit the public, and at this point it is not clear that copyright is the best way to ensure the public's access to art and science.
People are not going to stop using their computers to copy things; we need to accept that and move on. If we really want to save copyright as a system, then we need to punish violations the same way we punish parking violations: a small but annoying fine for each violation. Gone are the days when only people with specialized industrial equipment could possibly commit copyright infringement; the law was not designed to deal with mass numbers of people having copying equipment in their homes. If we are not talking about updating the law, then we are having the wrong conversation.
Personally, I think the whole copyright system should be scrapped, and the industries that were built on copyrights should either adapt to the new world and its new technology or die like other out of date industries. We should be using the Internet to ensure that creative work is never lost, that it never goes out of print, that it is never buried as part of an effort to maintain a corporate image, etc. A lot of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists; why are we not giving any of them any consideration?
Palm trees and 8
Better yet who owns and controls those channels?
Can I bum a sig?
If it's possible to make a movie and sell it cheaply online, with no DRM, and still make a profit as the article suggests why hasn't anyone done that successfully?
It's the distribution channel, my friend
Tell me, currently what are the distribution channel for movies, and how do they distribute them?
The distribution channel for physical goods was sailing ships, and in the early days of sailing ships (1400-1850ish) piracy was in its glory years, now pirates are marginalized by the power and pervasiveness of modern warships, and air pirates are almost non-existent.
The fiber just got laid 10-15 years ago, we've barely managed to start rolling out IPv6 (I'd equate IPv4 to square rigging...), piracy will be around for quite awhile, but it will eventually be marginalized just Jean Lafitte and his like have been.
In the meanwhile, expect brutal but ineffective attempts to stop it by the commercial interests who perceive it as a threat (see: Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean movies for a fictionalized depiction of the basic human responses at work...)
I'll give you a third reason: to stay relevant. The RIAA and the MPAA know and have known for a long time that the Internet and the widespread availability of computers are a death sentence for their industries. Copyrights just do not work when consumer electronics can make large numbers of perfect copies of any data, and without copyrights the RIAA and MPAA have no business model at all.
What they want is for computers to be consumption-only devices, and for the Internet to be a fancy broadcasting system. Everything they have been pushing for over the past 15 years is designed to chip away at the P2P nature of Internet communications and to put consumers back in their place. There is a grand strategy at work: kill the Internet, rebuild it as a fancy cable TV system.
That is the nature of the enemy here.
Palm trees and 8
Piracy rose to popularity because the sailor who did all the actual work were treated worse than unskilled farm laborers, and they could be pressed into the navy before they even got paid from their merchant ship tour, or just cheated out of their pay by the merchant captain. Serving a privateer promised at least a share of the plunder, but it was one share for the sailor compared to 14 or more for the captain. The famous pirates you hear about ran in democratic packs, electing their captains who only got one additional share, and voting on all important decisions. For many a life of piracy was better than the legal alternative. At least for a while.
Except it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. The only thing 'stolen' is an idea, i.e., 'intellectual property'. You know, an intangible. You can't see it, touch it, taste it, or piss on it. People have been selling intangibles for thousands of years. Just ask the Catholic Church. And they've made tons of money on them. Again, just ask the Catholic Church.
The cool thing about an intangible is, you don't need to produce anything to have it. The 'labor' and 'goods' come from the derivatives, like holy books, lunch boxes, posters, etc.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Comedian Louis C.K. confronts piracy head on with digital experiment
This. Piracy is an indicator of a broken system and pissed off people. The only way to quell the piracy is to give the people what they want -- a good product at a fair price and at least the impression they are being treated fairly and are important customers. And since that's unlikely to happen, I don't see anything changing anytime soon.
Yes and no.
Piracy is an economic problem. If people are stealing your shit then you are missing out on markets where they could be paying you for it(up until a point at any rate).
In Somlia Piracy started working because you could get a hostage of ship and crew and be paid millions of dollars for 6 months of work. As long as insurance companies keep paying the pirate problem there won't go away.
For media companies(music, video, news, books). the answer is simple people want to consume such stuff at a time, place and manner that they choose. The icon image of a woman jogging with a SONY Walkman, is hilarious when you stop and think something like 90% of joggers where listening to custom mix tapes that they dubbed off of other tapes, cd's, or from the Radio. People are very used to sharing music and video with their friends and neighbors. DRM is an attempt to stop that sharing. Piracy in many cases is doing just that.
The RIAA completely misunderstood Napster. they saw money being lost not a chance at making more money. It took 6 years and one billion itunes downloads before they realized just how badly they fucked up.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Mathematically speaking, for every $100 decline in physical music sales over the past ten years there has been an $18 increase in digital music sales.
Never mind the fact that people stopped buying the $15-$20 CD for just the one song that they can now get for $1-$2.
The "Music industry"? The "Music industry" is doing great -- better than ever. You seem to be confusing it with the comparatively tiny "Recording industry".
No, if we seriously take that attitude, then if everyone pirated everything, creators would not be in a position to create entertainment for you.
Except that, as evidenced by the fact that movies available as DVD rips on The Pirate Bay subsequently make a non-zero number of DVD sales, that isn't what actually happens.
It's possible for people who have no money to get media for free and yet still have people who can afford to do so pay money to support the creation of new works. It is, in fact, what is happening today: A great many people pay, even though they have the option not to, because they support providing that incentive for artists to create future works.
As long as those people are providing a sufficient incentive, there is no problem. If it ever comes to pass that so few people are paying that artists decide to stop making new works, the pirates won't have enough material to pirate and the market will sort itself out: Either enough of the pirates who could afford to pay realize what is going on and decide to pay more so that more works are produced and the problem goes away, or artists will start demanding to be paid in advance and use crowd-sourced funding methods to raise money.
In theory you could have a market failure where not enough people pay to create new works (through any means) and new works then stop being created, but until that is what is actually happening there is no reason to implement extremely expensive countermeasures to fight a purely theoretical problem.
http://www.popmatters.com/images/news_art/t/the-day-recorded-music-revenue-per-capita-feb-2011.jpg
I'd much more blame the "indestructible" CD then piracy. A LOT of the industry's revenue, especially the boom that came with CDs, was people re-buying music they already owned on yet-another-format.
Vinyl wasn't useful in cars (boom of 8 track), 8 track wasn't that useful walking around and self-destructed over time (boom of cassette tape and Sony's Walkman), all of them wore out over time and/or broke easily from being dropped.
Enter the CD... Never wares out, much more durable, as portable as most anyone would ever need, and for 99% of people sounds better then anything that came before. BOOM, there's a HUGE spike in CD sales as everyone is re-buying everything they ever wanted to keep on CD (along with new music sales, of course).
Enter digital...
It's everything the CD was and then some. But there's a problem... Unlike every other format change in the history of recorded music, no one is going to re-buy music they already have on CD as digital. They're just going to rip their own CDs. As a result the industry is left with only new music sales...
It isn't about piracy - It's about the Music Industry losing the ability to re-sell you the same music over, and over, and over. It's about the Music Industry's ever expanding back catalog no longer translating to automatic ever-expanding re-sales. The Music Industry spent a hell of a lot of money to make copyright effectively never-ending, explicitly to protect that re-selling revenue stream...and now the carpet has been yanked out from under them.
---
That huge drop in sales? That's called market saturation. Most everyone that wanted a Beatles or Stones recording already owns it...on a format they will effectively never replace again.
It's about the Music Industry thinking, wrongly, that they were in the business of selling toothpaste. Then waking up one day to realize they really are selling cast iron frying pans. You'll always need to buy more toothpaste...but you'll never need to buy another cast iron frying pan.
My