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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.
The term "piracy" when it refers to making unauthorized duplications of a copyrighted work is actually in reference to how pirates used to board merchant ships and make exact copies of everything on board, leaving the crew and cargo unharmed, but devaluing the goods slightly.
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)
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