Slashdot Mirror
Piracy Rates Plummet As Legal Alternatives Come To Norway
jones_supa writes "Entertainment industry groups in Norway have spent years lobbying for tougher anti-piracy laws, finally getting their way earlier this month. But with fines and site-blocking now on the agenda, an interesting trend has been developing. According to a new report published by Ipsos, between 2008 and 2012 piracy of movies and TV shows collapsed in Norway, along with music seeing a massive drop to less than one fifth of the original level. Olav Torvund, former law professor at the University of Oslo, attributes this to good legal alternatives which are available today (Google translation of Norwegian original). Of those questioned for the survey, 47% (representing around 1.7 million people) said they use a streaming music service such as Spotify. And of those, just over half said that they pay for the premium option."
The industry will still try and spin this off as being a side effect of their anti-piracy push.
If I want to rent a movie, I have to either:
1. Use my favorite torrent site, or
2. Check netflix (doesn't have it), check Amazon Instant video (maybe has it), check vudu (maybe has it), find a local Blockbuster store that hasn't shut down (unlikely), Find a redbox (probably doesn't have it), buy it at Walmart (don't want to), return to step 1.
Piracy is an Illegal act of violence, detention, or plunder committed for private ends (illicit profit) by the crew of a private ship against another ship on the high seas. It has been expanded logically to air piracy. Period. Any appropriation to utterly unrelated acts is illiteracy committed by stupid people with an axe to grind.
Get the fuck over it. You got a problem with copyright circumvention, start by calling it what it is. Don't demonize it. 99% of what is called piracy in this context involves no personal gain by anybody.
Quite a few people have been saying exactly this will happen, and I think that this is what the recording industry was most afraid of all along. The recording industry must have mistakenly thought that they could beat the free market.
I see this trend continuing. Personally I get all my new Music from Magnatune.com, where I paid for the premium access as well, and to be honest, the music is just as good, and much more varied than what is piped in through main media these days.
If you want to rent a particular movie, that particular movie has a website which almost certainly tells you where it is available.
Tell me, oh great one, where is the website for The Green Mile? For Jaws? For Singing in the Rain? For Gold Rush? I honestly doubt that there is a single movie website anywhere that tells you where it is available for rent.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I think companies are finally starting to learn. They are still stuck on the old format pricing tho for some reason. Charging the 60.00 dollars for a digital download of a game is insane seeing as they dont have any manufacturing, processing or logistics costs on said item. That being said i recently picked up Far Cry 3 on XBLA for 20 dollars. A game i would have never otherwise bought, and certainly not bought new.
I pay for Netflix + DVD, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime + rental, and will rent from Xbox Video. I am left with basic cable, as I do not have ownership of my that contract for where I live. If I want to watch the new season of Game of Thrones I will have to wait 1 year. This leaves me with illegal is the only way because of HBO.
If music/movie execs owned WalMart, they would have a big board level meeting to try and control shoplifting by:
- Put everything in locked glass cabinets.
- Ask for photo ID before entering stores.
- Strip search everyone on exit.
Then they would be scratching their heads as to why they were going broke, blaming it on the dishonest consumer.
99% of people don't want to steal, they just want convenience at a fair price.
They could have agregated all their contect, with music 10c/track, movies $2, no DRM, problem solved.
46137
1$ a song is ridiculous. i dont pirate songs because i have pandora, where i can listen to all the songs i want whenever i want for 20$ a year. that being said, movies are a different story... 12$ for 2 hrs of entertainment is absurd. i hope at some point the MPAA realizes that piracy isnt the cause for their lack of sales... piracy is the answer to their ridiculous pricing and they dont seem to understand this. any intelligent business would realize that ppl are pirating because they dont want to pay the absurd prices and find some way to decrease the cost so that people would be less inclined to pirate. if there was a system like pandora but for movies, im sure ppl would be willing to pay it. (dont say netflix....netflix also has ridiculous prices, and their online system has almost no good movies)
iTunes and amazon don't have these issues
Why did you ever buy from emusic?
> "Olav Torvund, former law professor at the University of Oslo, attributes this to good legal alternatives which are available today"
Or possibly the people who would pirate music already have most of what they want, and the remainder they can get from friends via a USB drive. Modern hard drives are absurdly large compared to music files. Once someone has downloaded what they want, why would they need to download again, unless they hear about a new group? If a friend has some new music, a 32 GB USB drive can carry around 10,000 songs, so it's trivial to hand copy. Thus I would *expect* piracy to drop off after a while, and what's left is just residual new music downloads.
IMDb. All but Gold Rush (apparently since it just came out in 2013) have links to watch.
Is that... is that your justification for pirating?
What makes you think one is needed?
Dilbert RSS feed
Why are so many insistent on free exchange of copyrighted material? Content creators don't like the idea, they'd like to earn a living. Publishers hate it even more, they want monopolies to extract every bit of value from their 'properties' as possible. The only people who like it are consumers who must go through the walled gardens publishers have set up. And therein lies the problem, publishers seek to extract perpetual rents, coddling a slim number of creators while sucking up value created for free by the general populace.
Jaron Lanier recently came out with a book, Who Owns the Future?, where he argues that digital networking has had a decimating effect on the middle classes of the world. In this Nieman Journalism Lab interview at the Harvard School for Journalism, Lanier outlines a micropayment solution whereby the general public would be paid back for information collection and content creation directly in a distributed manner, thereby cutting out the centralized collection and distribution points that content monopolies have created.
The point is that people are doing a tremendous amount of work for free all across the 'net, often in ways that don't resemble pure craft work yet represent tremendous value for large companies like Google, Microsoft, Sony, Facebook, and the other big players. Yet those companies want every cent in perpetual rent for the work they perform in creating and distributing their goods. He is not arguing 'income inequality' in the sense of wealth redistribution - say, using government taxation to collect revenue and provide welfare payments to an underclass - but instead to distribute payments to every value add created.
For example, were you to translate a document from one language to the next, and google uses it as part of for statistical analysis in their language translation engine, then every time your work is referenced you should get paid for that effort. If you use a camera to document and tag a new pothole in the street, and Google Streetview uses that as part of a pothole map, you should be paid for that effort every time this is referenced (until the data becomes defuncts). This is similar to copyright in that for content creators, many of whom craft and distribute work for free instead of receiving payment for the work.
It's as if whole populations have decided that because content monopolies are taking all the work out on the net for free they can get to monetize, while demanding enforcement of intellectual property rights in an unequal exchange, that people are justified in taking what they want for free. Yet even if this were the case, the trade is still pretty bad for the people doing so much free work. You can't eat a pirated song or movie. And yet every step we take on the internet is used by the big players to aggregate vast wealth at our expense.
I can see some problems with Lanier's approach. For example, he's like to do away with monopolies and move to a distributed payment system. Yet how is one to handle those payments without a banking monopoly? Bitcoin? How do governments tax those transactions? (Yes, I know many people would prefer they didn't - but that doesn't mean such a system is viable given political realities). How do governments control and track criminal trade? (Yes, I know many people would prefer they didn't - but that doesn't mean such a system is viable given law enforcement realities).
Still, I think Lanier has put his finger on the central problem of inequality between people and these companies. It's not income inequality per se, but that the system provides no payment for value add to the vast majority of people while at the same time monetizing that very value to sell back to us. All while IT systems automate labor that used to be paid work, and companies outsource across national lines to the lowest bidder. People ar
Sure, but I don't have $30 billion to pay for all of those service's monthly fees. If everything was on Netflix, I'd get netflix. NOTHING is on netflix. However, everything is on the pirate bay, and its put up immediately, takes 20 minutes to download, I can put the file on any device I have for playback. Once again, its not a problem of price, but a problem of the paying service providing an inferior service
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Gold Rush came out in 1925, and IMDb is not a website for a particular movie, and IMDb's watch list may let you watch the movie, but it doesn't tell you where you can rent it. So wrong on all three points, Motard!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
www.canistream.it Will tell you if it's available for streaming across multiple platforms, available for on-demand rental, available for on-demand sale, or available for DVD or blu-ray sale. Works for folks in the US.
Ah, then you mean 'The Gold Rush' with Charlie Chaplain? It's there. And there're a direct links to watch it now or to buy it on DVD.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015864/?ref_=sr_1
No, IMDb is not a website for a particular movie. It's far better than that. So, I'm correct on two points, and the other one is moot.
I'm curious,... is Amazon Live available in your country? Or is it an advertising deal between IMDb and Amazon? If you go to Amazon and search for "Singing In The Rain", do you get an option to stream?
> Why are so many insistent on free exchange of copyrighted material?
Such a long, articulate article, to be starting from an incorrect presumption. Oh, I'm sure there are some people who would argue such, but the great majority of us, I think, are insistent on convenient access for a reasonable price. I believe TFA is making the point that when you provide a reasonable product at a reasonable price, piracy plummets. The business model has unrealistic expectations on how much the product is worth, and what hoops the consumer will willingly jump through in order to access the product. This is true in a lot of areas, not just media.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"I believe TFA is making the point that when you provide a reasonable product at a reasonable price, piracy plummets."
Yes, it does. But piracy won't go away. And further, as incomes continue to plummet from the hollowing out of available work, the ability for people to pay for content will diminish as well. Ultimately, it's a race to the bottom for incomes that will lead to lost sales as well. The 'velocity of money' slows as the economy contracts, hitting the bottom line of these content monopolies. As well as everyone else setting up shop on the Main Street economy.
I am curious as to why he is a FORMER professor?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
> Yes, it does. But piracy won't go away.
True, but we don't need piracy to go away. We just need it to reduce to the point where it's not significant. To have zero occurrences amongst 6.9 billion people is not a reasonable goal. To have it shrink to the point where it's no more significant than, say, damage in shipment, is doable, I think, and should be sufficient.
Inconveniencing people who want the product is clearly the wrong path.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"We just need it to reduce to the point where it's not significant."
You can't. You'll get decreasing returns as the economy declines due to income decimation. Piracy is not the problem, it's a symptom of a much greater problem that Lanier addresses.
Furthermore, by stating "we need" you're taking a position as a stakeholder in the matter. One that many others disagree with. I'm sure you'll find many on /. who agree with Kim DotCom and others who provide the means for distribution of pirated content as an expression of free speech. You can't wish this matter away by ratcheting up enforcement ad infinitum. At least, you can't and maintain a free society at the same time. As we've all seen with the drug war, among others. Ultimately, it's a self-reinforcing game that not only destroys free expression, but also destroys value in content creation as well. Why do you think so much content distributed through monopolies lacks any sense of creativity? Because the value-add doesn't trickle back to creators in this system.
IMDB doesn't tell me jack where I can buy / rent the interesting indy film:
Wheat (2009)
a 2009 Chinese historical drama film, that opened at the Shanghai International Film Festival.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1388901/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_(film)
And that movie is only 4 years old !
Come to Canada and get 1/2 the netflix service for the full netflix price.
Sorry, the only one I can give you is the Gold Rush one (although, the titles I listed were all getting older, so why you'd jump on a not yet released movie is beyond me). IMDb does not have a direct link to watch it now (but you can add it to a watch later list). There is a direct link to watch a trailer, and a link to purchase from Amazon, but nothing about rental.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I wish Netflix Canada was half of Netflix USA, that would be a 1000% upgrade.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Just over half of the people PAY for the premium spotify option. How many people are USING the premium spotify... I know from friends the numbers are not the same.
But still, overall I agree if people have a way to pay they generally will.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why not? You have no idea what is going to happen with the current flavor of the month. It might disappear next month or go on for years and years.
How do you know today what services will still be around in 10 years?
You don't.
Really the best option is to avoid them all entirely and stick to real purchases where you are in complete control of the product you've bought.
My oldest MP3s predate ALL music services.
My oldest MKVs predate ALL video services.
I suspect that I will still be able to use my media horde long after the current flavors of the month are long gone.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I have a watch it now for every single one. I don't know what your problem is.
Um, I think we might be in violent agreement here. The only real difference I see here is that I see ways in which content creators can make an adequate living (in some cases more than adequate) without the involvement of huge marketing and distribution corporations that don't actually create content themselves. That the existence of these corporations is an anomaly created by a certain set of circumstances that no longer applies, and the artificial prices and distribution methods they've created will change, regardless of their best efforts to cling to business models that no longer work. I see a time where content creators, instead of seeing a tiny fraction of a large number of sales, sees the majority of what might be a smaller but still significant number of sales. Of a time where word of mouth plays a greater part than marketing dollars in the gauge of an artist's popularity. You see it already -- reel big fish, nine inch nails, radiohead, cherry poppin daddies, groups that are getting out of their contracts and turning to self-production and alternate means of distribution. The world is changing, and ultimately, I believe the changes will benefit the artist.
There will always be annoying individuals, usually anonymous, who want uncontrolled distribution of pirated content. But I think the majority only really want reasonable access at a reasonable price. When I buy content, I should be able to view it on any of my devices at any time without being an alpha geek.
And so, this isn't a race to the bottom, it's a huge market correction that's been a long time coming. A whole bunch of middlemen will have to find some other source of revenue, and artists will become more directly connected to their customers. Prices will necessarily fall, but the percentage going to the content creator will increase significantly.
The wrecking ball may swing back and forth a few times before finally coming to rest in a new position, but it's all self-correcting. If it doesn't pay to create content, less quality content will be created. Some consumers will be willing to pay for higher quality content, which will stimulate the creation of same. The market adjusts.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I have a watch it now for every single one. I don't know what your problem is.
Too rich. Too good looking. Supermodel girlfriends fighting over me. Don't live in a cultural backwater that still uses feet and inches. I've got problems out the wazoo.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
He's been saying all along that piracy is a distribution problem. And was using STEAM to fix that (and make a boatload of money too!) Turns out he was right.
We both seem to agree that content monopolists cull too much cream off the income stream that creatives are responsible for making. And we probably both agree that piracy is counterproductive long-term for creators as well, though it does serve to cut income from monopolists in the process. So, from that perspective, it's at least understandable.
But I'm not sure we agree on Lanier's approach to solving the problem. In fact, it doesn't appear that we've discussed it in this thread at all. If you have time, give his interview a read through and I'll gladly discuss any issues you see with the proposal.
When the subject line read "Piracy down in Norway" naturally I though of longships before it occurred to me they were talking about downloading movies. How the mighty have fallen!
He already answered that. As far as I can tell most countries do not have access to it. That was sort of the point with the main post. Most legal options are only available in the states. I, for example, live in Austria. At this time I can legally access a couple of music streaming sites, iTunes music and films (but not TV Series) and a bunch of services selling Austrian and German productions.
Amazon MP3 purchase is not an option. Netflix, Hulu, and Pandora are blocked. Last.FM has been crippled.
iTunes is really the only option for films, but the selection is limited. It also changes. Movies I had saved to my favorites were no longer available when I decided to rent them. May that are available to purchase are not available to rent.
I know that my problem is that I don't live in the U.S.
Most of the useful legal services are really only available there.
I used to buy because it was the first legal service available in my country, it was DRM free and they had an all you can eat offering that was amazing. They also had the best selection of non-mainstream artists and a lot of back catalogs.
That slowly changed, first they killed the all you can eat, then they started regional licensing (so albums I had purchased or bookmarked in the past were no longer available to me in my region) and then they started losing artists and labels as those labels went to other services.
If I could find something now that was equivalent to what they offered when I signed up I would do it immediately.
I quite like being called a pirate. It is glamorous and dangerous and a bit rebbelious. It is certainly more attractive then being called what I am, a sad fat old man on slashdot.
If it was labelled as copyright infringer it would be far less attractive. Just look at the piratebay. It is COOL, nice logo and all. Copyrightinfringementbay.org would be far less attractive.
The copyright industry seems to NOT only insist on making it easier, cheaper and a better experience to pirate, they also seem determined to make it more sexy.
Why not go all out and call us copyright infringers Ninjas! That will teach us!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If they only made their products far more accessible, most people wouldn't have to resort to piracy. I remember borrowing bootlegged discs of games from my friends just to play the latest titles. Now though, I can get all the games I want through steam and based on my purchasing history, I've already purchased thousands of dollars worth of games; all because these games are easily accessed through a click of the mouse.
As a Norwegian I know that many still watch illegal content even using Netflix, HBO and similar. Because much of the newest content is "not yet available in your region" we use proxies and vpn to fake beeing from the US of A. So we pay for one service and then hack it to get more content than we pay for. Much like you can hack your cable provider to get more channels for free.
Unfortunately Netflix and such aren't available in my country. I do have a Spotify premium account and I like it a lot.
It all comes down to being able to watch/listen where, when and how I want without limitations.
Spotify allows me to download my playlists to my phone or my laptop and listen to it everywhere.
I had cases where I had legitimately bought the Blu-Ray, but the system crapped out when I tried to run it and it needed a software update. After messing with it for over an hour, I just downloaded a ripped version and watched that, it was easier than trying to get the Blu-Ray disk to work. (Avatar if you're interested, there were a lot of people with problems with that one).
I also might want to watch some episodes of a TV series I have on my phone or tablet. But this is a pain as well.
I hardly download anything. Nowadays if I can't easily watch/listen to it legally in the way I want, I just don't buy it. (I haven't bought a Blu-Ray disk since the pain I had with the Avatar disk, even though I did get it to run after messing with the software update some more on a later date).
If it's harder to use the legal medium than it is to use the illegal medium, then they need t fix things.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
We generally work 37.5 hour weeks in Norway. We have 30 min lunch breaks, but those are unpaid and not included in the 37.5 hours (40 h total).
You know that a significant minority of people pirated the Humble-Indie-Bundle, right? That was "pay what you want", and they still argued that the public has a right to free copies of everything.
I'd like to see some data to backup your claim about "incomes plummeting because of the hollowing out of available work", because I don't believe for a second that the average person is any worse off in their ability to earn an income than they were ten or twenty or thirty years ago.
Star Trek: TNG ended decades ago and has long ago recovered the cost of production for the original run. The reason that copyrights were created was to encourage new and original work. How many $125 sets do you think they will need to sell before they start production on a new season?
> Content creators don't like the idea, they'd like to earn a living
This is contradicted by the existence of open source software, Wikipedia, and the books that I write and give away. I am not the only one who does this, http://www.intechopen.com/ hosts many journals and books that are open. Lady Gaga has given away literally billions of plays of her music videos.
There are other ways to get value than by selling the content itself. In a world where anything digital can be copied at minimal cost, trying to make a living from restricting an item that isn't scarce is asking to fail.
Cables are nautical units. You go 600 nautical miles out in a horseless carriage, you're likely to be going several cables down as well. Hogsheads of what, by the way? Different liquids have different hogsheads. This is why the rest of us switched. A length is a length, a volume is a volume, and a mass is a mass. It shouldn't matter what you're measuring.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I think incomes will plummet in the middleman area, but I think the artists will get more. I will always buy from the artist directly if I can. If I can't, I bet they get more per song from iTunes than from a CD. Maybe they need to setup a donation box on artists sites, I would give them money directly if I could and they can't sell me the song because of exclusive agreements. I'd just download it from TPB and give them a donation.