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More Evidence That Piracy Can Increase Sales
Socguy writes "The London School of Economics has published a new study (PDF) which shows that the claims about digital downloading killing music and movies are overblown. In fact, there is new evidence to indicate that it actually generates more income in certain cases. 'While it acknowledges that sales have stagnated in recent years, the report points out that the overall revenue of the music industry in 2011 was almost $60 billion US, and in 2012, worldwide sales of recorded music increased for the first time since 1999, with 34 per cent of revenues for that year coming from digital channels such as streaming and downloads. "The music industry may be stagnating, but the drastic decline in revenues warned of by the lobby associations of record labels is not in evidence," the report says. ... The growing use of streaming, cloud computing, so-called digital lockers that facilitate the sharing of content and sites that offer a mix of free and paid methods of getting content will, the study predicts, spur the entertainment industries to shift their focus from pursuing illegal downloading to creating more legal avenues for getting content online.'"
I'm more interested in how well the artists are getting paid, any study on that?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
How is physically and emotionally harming someone a comparison to copying music?
hes saying that whether or not it actually increases revenue is irrelevant, it is illegal. until the government updates the laws to a more modern set of laws, it will always be illegal, regardless of everything else.
Artificial scarcity. One of the oldest games ever invented by man.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
5 out of 6 ppl love gang rape.
fair price, and offer your product/service in convenient ways, people will buy rather than steal, for the most part.
I will openly admit to downloading and streaming new music for free. If it worth anything, I will then go pay for it. Otherwise I am not going to continue to listen, and it is undeserving of my hard earned money.
There are those that will steal regardless, but that will always be the case. However, iTunes, Amazon, et. al. are proving that an easy to use and accessible digital distribution method can work.
And then you have the networks, cable companies, and Hollywood, who still seem to want to lock you into agreements and systems that make you pay for things you do not want, and force you to use them in ways that are inconvenient. As an example, just about the only things I want to watch on cable are Game of Thrones and NASCAR (sue me). I refuse to pay for all the shit I do not want to see. I am fine with local OTA channels (I hardly even watch them except for maybe news and PBS). The majority of the content on cable is not compelling, and I do not want to pay for, subsidize, or promote them. If I was given the option, I could stream the programs I enjoy, for a lower amount, and watch them in places I could not as easily do with cable, for instance on my tablet while riding the bus/train to work. As a result, HBO, who I would be willing to pay a fair amount to (even through a third party like netflix), refuses to provide what I desire and take my willingly offered money. And then they bemoan the fact that people steal from them. Boo fucking hoo.
Silence is a state of mime.
> But whether it increases sales is irrelevant.
Sticking your head in the sand over facts is not "irrelevant." There are 5 categories of fans:
1) Will pay for it, will never pirate it
2) Will pay for it, but might ALSO pirate it so they don't have to transcode it
3) Might pay for it, might pirate it
4) Will never pay for it, and pirate it
5) Will never pay for it, and go without
The goal is to _understand_ how those in (3) move to the other categories.
In this day and age consumers are EXTREMELY sensitive to pricing. I don't need to remind you that Valve saw over 2000% (yes, 2000%) increase in Steam sales when they lowered the prices of L4D.
However even if the the product is FREE it doesn't mean people want it such as group (1). Conversely, there ARE some countries where downloading isn't a crime, so stop with your rhetoric that piracy == stealing.
At the end of the day its all bits. Claiming pseudo-ownership over a certain order/representation of them is insane but it is the current system we have, for better, or worse.
Understanding the value of something AND its relationship to money is extremely important as we move towards free energy.
Also see this excellent related TED talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html
... which means that they can provide the "straight dope" on piracy, without trying to please rightwing conservatives who constantly scream that "piracy is theft". This report tells us what many of us already knew/suspected. Still, kudos to the LSE for making the effort! +1
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I got that for Christmas once, but there were never enough pieces for everyone to play.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The bottom line is that claiming piracy hurts sales of licensed media through endorsed channels. Did you know grey market imports are often called piracy? Since the excuse of diminished sales is used to justify taking away peoples rights it needs to be examined for validity.
It's very relevant when piracy is used to justify an assault on peoples rights online and off. The list of examples and problems from DRM, all in the name of fighting piracy could easily fill a book. However if I were to take said book as an ebook and loan it to someone I would be accused of piracy, meanwhile for centuries society has thrived in no small part because of a concept we call the library.
For example I like Top Gear, however for many years there was no authorized means why which I could watch it the US. When it was released for some strange reason the first 5 seasons weren't released on iTunes. I have no legal way to watch those episodes without a flight overseas. Even then the authorized episodes released to the US are not the same as the originals.
To simply imply that piracy is wrong is to be willfully ignorant of reality. I'm not talking about counterfeiters, the people that profit off of others work, those are a wholly different set of people.
Piracy-driven sales are up? Then I demand an even harsher war against those filthy pirates who hurt the main business of the copyright industry. http://kingofgng.com/eng/2013/10/03/the-dirty-war-against-file-sharing/
It's also rather duplicitous. This study shows a graph that clearly indicates a bloodbath in recorded music sales, and then says "the drastic decline of revenues warned of by the lobby associations of record labels is not in evidence". The reason for this conclusion is that concert revenues went up. But perhaps those revenues would have gone up even in the absence of widespread music piracy. Regardless, it is irrelevant - the record labels (which are remember fairly small companies whose clients are actual artists) predicted a drastic decline in the thing that suddenly became easy to steal, which is exactly what happened. It does not change the brutal fact that income from recorded music halved once mass piracy became easy thanks to fast internet and MP3.
Does anyone believe the world consumes half the amount of recorded music as it did in 1999? No.
The debate on piracy is important because although music felt the sharp edge of the sword first, ultimately all creative industries have to suffer from it. OK, so parts of the music business that happen to put on good concerts might have been able to replace losses from piracy by travelling more. But TV shows don't put on concerts. Movies don't put on concerts. Video games certainly don't.
Trying to make an argument about piracy and copyright based purely on the fact that (parts of!) the music business found ways to replace lost revenue is pointless - it ignores all the other industries that rely on working copyright.
Sure, but while it may be irrelevant to whether piracy is illegal or not, profits are extremely relevant to the question of whether it is immoral or not and whether or not it should be illegal. Therefore, the fact it increases sales is quite relevant to any discussion of piracy and the OPs analogy is, well, simply wrong (rape itself is inherently immoral, while copying is not).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
To say that digital information is just bits and copyrighting the ordering of them shouldn't be allowed is just naive. By that reasoning, any novel is just letters, arranged in a certain way and shouldn't be copyrightable. Any item produced is just atoms, arranged in a certain way and shouldn't be copyrightable. People have to work to create these WORKS of music, art, programming, whatever the item may be. They deserve fair compensation for that work, as they have families, bills, things they have to pay to survive. What OP is trying to get across is that stealing intellectual property is no different than any other crime, it's not victimless. While his example may be a bit extreme, I'd be more likely to use "maybe stealing money from the banks would make them more likely to just give it away, but that doesn't make it right."
Yeah, just like the other corollary where people often purchase music they first obtain illicitly and rapists often marry the victim. It's very similar in many ways.~
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
It is illegal because the law says so. The law could be changed if it was generally considered to have a negative instead of positive net effect. The music industry's main argument about keeping it illegal (and even strengthen the laws against it) is loss of revenue. Therefore if it is shown that the main reason against changing it doesn't hold, it is an argument for changing the law.
There are different issues: First, if something is legal or illegal, that is, permitted by current law. Second, whether something should be legal or illegal.
Rape is illegal, and I think few would argue that this should change. Moreover, most would argue that you shouldn't rape even if there was no law forbidding it (and even if there were a law requiring you to do it).
Unauthorized copying is illegal, but there is not as much consensus that it should be illegal as there is with rape. The music's industry claims it should be illegal (and the laws even be made more strict) because of the losses they face through privacy. Any study that piracy increases revenue instead of decreasing it, weakens that argument.
That doesn't automatically make it legal to copy stuff without authorization. But it does make an argument for making it legal. Which can only be done by changing the law, of course. But the point is, the law is not god-given, the law is man-made. It can be changed if it is found that in the current form it is bad. And therefore it is of utmost importance that you don't just accept the law as is ("it's the law, therefore it is right"), but rather question it. Because if you find the law is bad it should be changed, and anyone who thinks it is wrong has the moral obligation to work towards its change.
And in certain cases, it may even be the right thing to break the law (I'm not going to cite the obvious example in order not to Godwin this thread, and to avoid someone incorrectly claiming I'd equate that one with unauthorized copying, which of course I would never do).
In this day and age consumers are EXTREMELY sensitive to pricing. I don't need to remind you that Valve saw over 2000% (yes, 2000%) increase in Steam sales when they lowered the prices of L4D.
Gabe also told in some interview that when some game's price is cranked back up, it still continues to get significantly more customers than before the price was lowered. Interesting stuff.
It's the sales of what they want to sell you. The Media/Content industry doesn't get the same power to tell you what to buy when you're free to choose it for yourself. They'd rather sell ten million copies of the latest ... crap, who are they trying to push these days? Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus or something? Anyway, they'd rather sell ten million of just one or two of those than twenty million albums spread across 200 different albums of varying genres.
This is about the power to tell you what to buy, not to tell you to buy from them.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Here is also a well spoken video which touches the same topic: Nintendo: Why Won't You Let Me Give You My Money?.
when he invests, he is putting the fruit of his _previous work_ at risk.
Someone who happens to inherits wealth, happens to be born in the correct country, happens to be discovered by the right publisher, or otherwise happens upon a lucky break doesn't have proportionate "previous work".
In this day and age consumers are EXTREMELY sensitive to pricing.
Not just pricing, availability is very important too.
If something isn't broadcast in e.g. Europe, some will download the TV-rips just to be able to see it now.
Whether they will later buy the DVDs or not depends a lot on how long they will have to wait. If they'll have to wait too long, they might not be interested in that show anymore.
The headline and the summary is a little misleading. The study doesn't actually show that piracy increases sales.
The submitter conflated three issues addressed in the study.
1) Making it easier to obtain authorized copies of digital music offset losses due to piracy. "Revenue from online sources including recorded music sales, streaming, online radio, subscriptions and other is increasing, both absolutely and as a percentage of overall revenue." The music industry remains healthy despite claims of huge losses due to piracy. The industry is learning to adapt by offering something other than the traditional buy-to-own model.
2) Independent artists are able to make money inside a inclusive collaborate digital culture. This challenges the assumptions that someone must have exclusive rights to music in order to make money. The authors talk about CreativeCommons and how SoundCloud is used to collaborate.
3) Prosecuting individuals for copyright enforcement isn't effective. "Targeting individual internet users is not likely to reverse the trend toward an online sharing culture, and there is an urgent need for independent verification of claims of harm to the creative industries as a result of individual copyright."
The authors make the following conclusion for responsible copyright enforcement:
"Broader ‘fair use/fair dealing’ provisions, proposals for private copying exceptions and aiming copyright enforcement and prosecution at infringing businesses instead of at citizens who share online is likely to have the desired effect of balancing the interests of the creative industries and citizens. When both can exploit the full potential of the internet, this will maximise innovative content creation for the benefit of all stakeholders."
I wonder how many people will argue that piracy is good based only on the misleading headline and not the actual contents of the study?
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Quite true. additionally our economy can only support so many super-profitable acts. There could only be one Elvis, and at the time there were only a handful of popular/profitable musical groups. Now they try to manufacture a thousand Elvis's, but don't want to subdivide the pie. You can have one king, or you can have dozens of dukes, but you can't have both, and you certainly can't have thousands of different acts and still expect any of them to make decent money.
It can be argued, however, that copying copyrighted content without permission *is* harmful.... just in a very subtle way that people who may not see past their immediate desires and notion of immediate gain are liable to notice.
Disrespecting copyright is harmful probably not necessarily to anyone explicitly, but is probably most directly harmful to copyright itself. Specifically, it depreciates the trust that content makers would place in copyright to protect their interests on works that they publish. Society, supposedly, is enriched by a steady stream of new published content. While copyright is supposed to give content makers some incentive to actually publish it in the first place. Harming copyright, therefore, may arguably pose some long-term harm to society as a whole, where if or when content makers no longer rely on copyright to protect their interests, they could resort to other means that ultimately only end up limiting their audience... although this is, in a sense, harming themselves... by virtue of how newly published content can culturally enrich a society, it can pose a much larger threat to society as a whole.
Of course, one might argue... if copyright were completely dissolved, there'd still be people who want to self-publish or would make works that could culturally enrich the society they live in without the protections of copyright. This is certainly true, but the logistical reality is that such people are not llikely to be the status quo for works of appreciable quality. If they were, in an age where people can pretty much self-publish already anyways, we would certainly see a very large amount of works being released where the author has actually explicitly surrendered all copyright claims, and the work is public domain. The fact that even in the realm of entirely freely available content, the fact that content makers still choose to want to protect their interests by keeping copyright on them suggests that, at least in the normal case, most content makers would not be as amenable to publishing without copyright as they are with it.
Because, in the end... people are greedy.
Now I'll agree that greed isn't exactly a virtue, but it's not something that's going to go away... even if you try to change society's structure so that it seems like it is no longer particularly beneficial to continue to be greedy. In fact, such a structural change is liable to only worsen the condition with many people.
So while you might argue that copyright only services that sense of greed... this argument isn't entirely valid... because it does, as pointed out above, benefit society in the end by providing some incentive for content makers to publish. Without it, we're just left with a bunch of greedy people who will resort to other means to get what they want, and a culture-starved society who must swim through an endless sea of self-published content rich with advertisements, spam, and cat-videos to find the works of quality that are out there.
In the end... people are gonna do whatever it is they want to do, and I doubt what I've said above is really going to change many people's minds who think piracy is okay, but if it makes even one person think or pause or go "hmmm.... maybe", then hey.... I'd be happy with that.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
and maybe rape makes woman more likely to put out ...but that doesn't mean it's right.
Look, I'm all for piracy. But whether it increases sales is irrelevant.
This is a false equivalency.
The laws against rape are most assuredly not because rape makes women "less likely to put out" (as you put it). The laws against rape are in place because the act of rape causes the victim to experience extreme emotional (and potentially also physical) pain. It is a very primal violation of the victims person. That is why it is illegal. The effects of rape on "women putting out" is entirely irrelevant.
The laws against copyright infringement are, on the other hand, explicitly in place to ensure that copyright holders can make a profit on their works. The only possible harm of copyright infringement is loss of income. If it can be demonstrated that non-profit driven piracy, engaged in on an individual basis, does not harm, but actually boosts profits of the works, then it is clear that the law needs to be tailored so as to not criminalize behavior that is non-detrimental.
Agreed!
Especially for long-tail content. I can't even BUY certain old TV shows / movies so if you want them you are forced to pirate them.
Don't forget that rape isn't illegal everywhere.
In some places, BEING raped is illegal. Because it's sex outside marriage.
http://trueslant.com/nealungerleider/2010/01/21/saudi-arabia-to-lash-filipino-rape-victim-100-times/
http://jonathanturley.org/2008/05/14/rape-in-saudi-arabia-reporter-has-eye-opening-conversation-with-young-saudi-males/
You're right. I was poking the, "Piracy is okay because it actually increases profits!" camp rather than the, "Perhaps the industry would think about..." camp. And lawmakers ought not to legislate based on what is more profitable!
And yeah, it is extreme - for some reason people are more worked up by rape than even e.g. murder, and that intrigues me, so I was being a bit flamebaitish.
Belief is more powerful than fact. So delivering 100 studies that consistently show that pirates are also customers. They believe it's bad and wrong and that's that.
What's more, piracy is competition. It doesn't matter if people would rather buy than pirate, the price point at which people would begin to decide otherwise is lowered when downloading for free is available somewhere.
... and your comment hit it spot on, for both interpretation. Bravo!
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I don't buy the "piracy is good for business" BS; what I do agree with is that being a full-on pissrag and advocating zillion dollar fines *cough*metallica*cough* on people for downloading a 3 minutes song is so abrasive to your customers that they will make a bigger effort to pirate your crap OFF the net. just in spite. Some will simply drop you from their playlists for good as soon as an alternative comes around with the same genre of sound.
Yeah, you'll scare a lot of people with fines but what happens is the independent musicians not tied into a label slap something up on youtube and people like it. And hey the guys not a dick, he's giving his stuff away for free. People like that and want to support that and sales go up.
So yeah, in some cases, piracy drives music sales but it's sure not the way MPAA/RIAA would like it to be. Besides, they have a lot of people with deep pockets who get nervous when they hear things aren't going so well, so they spin stuff like this to give the moneybags' warm fuzzies.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Only the ones who've read the bible.
It's actually in there, OT stuff: Rapists were directed to marry their victims and pay a hefty bride price. It was the ancient version of 'you break it, you bought it.'
Just as a small note: I largely agree with you, but the reductionist argument that they're all just bits in a certain order is fallacious and undermines your claims. By that token, a person is just a specific arrangement of atoms and we're all just a sac of chemicals. If you were to randomly generate the amount of bits of a certain song, the probability of generating that song (or even imperceptible variations with a different number of bits) are so astronomically low that you need to agree that there's more to it than that.
In this debate, you are fighting the recording labels and movie studios and the organizations like the RIAA. The worst you can do is insult the artists, who largely want the same thing as you do, by claiming that all their hard work is just a bunch of bits.
People have to work to create these WORKS of music, art, programming, whatever the item may be. They deserve fair compensation for that work, as they have families, bills, things they have to pay to survive.
Well, that's not how copyright works now.
The idea that people deserve copyrights based solely on the fact that they put in effort into creating something is the sweat of the brow theory; it's unconstitutional in the US.
Further, copyrights don't guarantee fair compensation. In fact, even if everyone respected copyrights completely, most authors would still not be fairly compensated for their effort, because most works don't sell very well. The vast majority of them have no copyright related economic value. Of the few that do, the vast majority have relatively little. Of the few that have more than a little, the vast majority are just middling, and so on.
There's a reason why there's a stereotype about starving artists.
All copyright does is concentrate some of the revenue derived from the work toward the copyright holder. How much the work is worth depends on the public. The recent Lone Ranger movie was a flop. Disney made a crappy movie and doesn't deserve fair compensation for the hundreds of millions of dollars of effort they put into making it. They deserve to lose big time, and so they have.
Copyright is all about increasing the number of works which are created and published, and then limiting the public use of those works as little as possible, as briefly as possible. If a degree of protection which you feel is less than fair nevertheless produces the greatest public benefit, then that's what we ought to have. Helping authors is merely a side effect because they are, so far, unavoidably involved. But they're not a priority.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Legality has nothing to do with morality.
Rape is a violent sex crime. Copying something is not.
If you are trying to morally equate those two then you are a sociopath and a jackass.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Also, rape is a criminal offence, copyright infringement is a civil offence. Big difference.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
You start by insulting people who disagree with you by claiming that they can't see past their immediate desires, so I should probably just ignore you.
Instead I'll point out that copyright isn't being undermined by the people who violate it, it was already undermined by the people who extended copyrights for insane lengths of time that rather than promote the general welfare, protect the profits of those who would set up toll booths to access our own culture. This is what destroyed respect for copyrights.
It's fair to say that violating copyright on new works is wrong, but respecting copyrights that are more than 7 years old is for chumps who want to pay for things that belong in the public domain.
>Gabe also told in some interview that when some game's price is cranked back up, it still continues to get significantly more
>customers than before the price was lowered. Interesting stuff.
This seems obvious in regard to multiplayer games. If you get a good game into people's hands, they'll sell their friends on it so they can play together.
> Does anyone believe the world consumes half the amount of recorded music as it did in 1999? No
Given that the music industry was on a physical format churn gravy train prior to 1999, I would say that it is VERY plausible that the world consumes "half the amount" of recorded music as it did in 1999.
People simply don't have to buy stuff over anymore. Digital is a terminal format. Computers as media appliances mean that your music collection will never wear out or become obsolete EVER.
I never have to buy another copy of Master of Puppets ever again. That's money that the publishers are missing out on and money that's a total waste.
That was not the only thing artificially inflating music sales numbers in 1999. The industry was actively trying to kill off the single and force everyone to buy only complete albums at increased cost. Both piracy and iTunes put an end to that nonsense.
It's easy to think the world is ending when your mark gets wise to your con.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The goal is to _understand_ how those in (3) move to the other categories.
No, it goes a lot deeper than that. I know people who changed from #1 (because they didn't know about piracy and didn't know how to pirate) to category #4 (because "why pay for something you can get for free [via piracy]"?) The very existence of easy access to piracy helps shift those people into piracy. If there's any doubt that he would've paid for it if piracy wasn't an option -- he *USED* to spend plenty of money on digital media.
I only pirate games I am unsure about (especially since most games no longer come with a demo, but even if they do I usually still will pirate). I will play the pirated copy for ~1 hour or so and uninstall. If I enjoyed the 1 hour it and think it is worth my money, I will buy it. If I am still iffy, I will perhaps wait a couple months until Steam has a 50 or 75% off sale and buy it then if I still care.
Have they lost any sales on me? Perhaps, because maybe a game that I thought originally looked cool from gameplay videos but after played for an hour I found stupid I may have bought it without playing it. (Deadpool comes to mind as the last one that fell into this category). However there have also been quite a few games where I originally would have given a pass, but pirated, enjoyed it, and ended up buying it (Dishonored, Dark Souls).
Before I used this system I was getting burned on buying too many games that were shit, but also passing up on a lot of games that ended up being good (sure perhaps I later bought on steam sale, but they would have made more money at release). I don't give a shit that it is "illegal", I have no moral issues using my above system. I am almost willing to bet that if I asked the publishers if they had a problem with me using my system that they would say no (except for publishers that constantly churn out shit games)
Copying NickleBack and playing it for your friends is emotionally harming. /s
Piracy should be discouraged the same as being wasteful should be discouraged, but at the end of the day, both increase revenue.
The anti-piracy campaign by Big Entertainment is akin to an anti-recycling campaign by Big Oil.
Disrespecting copyright is harmful probably not necessarily to anyone explicitly, but is probably most directly harmful to copyright itself. Specifically, it depreciates the trust that content makers would place in copyright to protect their interests on works that they publish.
I agree, although I think that we ought not to treat copyright as a monolithic entity. We could amend copyright to allow at least some of what is currently seen by most people as non-objectionable piracy, such as natural persons, engaging in non-commercial infringement, while still preserving copyright in other respects, e.g. as to commercial infringement, which is less kindly looked upon by ordinary people. By tailoring what is and isn't protected according to our shared norms about copyright, we could preserve respect for it generally, while still allowing other behavior that if prohibited, would engender disrespect.
Of course, one might argue... if copyright were completely dissolved, there'd still be people who want to self-publish or would make works that could culturally enrich the society they live in without the protections of copyright. This is certainly true, but the logistical reality is that such people are not llikely to be the status quo for works of appreciable quality.
Shakespeare had no copyrights. Homer had no copyrights. Michaelangelo had no copyrights. Copyright cares about quantity not quality. The more works there are, the more quality works there are. But you can't just incentivize only quality works. If for no other reason than because it is subjective, and no one really wants the government making those sorts of decisions. God knows there's plenty of shit now. But we can ignore it.
If they were, in an age where people can pretty much self-publish already anyways, we would certainly see a very large amount of works being released where the author has actually explicitly surrendered all copyright claims, and the work is public domain.
No; that takes effort. No one is going to do that unless they really care about that.
Better to make copyright opt-in. Then only authors who really cared about having one would make the minimal but material effort to get one. The rest wouldn't bother and we would profit from their laziness. Since it would be their own decision (or lack thereof) it's totally unobjectionable.
So when you say:
The fact that even in the realm of entirely freely available content, the fact that content makers still choose to want to protect their interests
That's wrong. Most authors don't choose a damn thing, and they automatically get copyrights anyway.
a culture-starved society who must swim through an endless sea of self-published content rich with advertisements, spam, and cat-videos to find the works of quality that are out there.
We have that anyway. And culling slush piles into published works is the opposite of what copyright seeks. If anything, publishing everything indiscriminately is more in line with ideal copyright policy. (Think of all the time wasted by works that turn out to be good but which get rejected by publisher after publisher for years and only ever become known due to the doggedness of the author; we could skip all that!) Plus, plenty of bad works get published anyway. And there's not much agreement as to what's good and what's bad.
If curation is what you want, go pay a critic. But that has nothing to do with copyright.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I completely had a brain-fart and messed up that analogy. I need to stop multi-tasking.
Conversely, there ARE some countries where downloading isn't a crime, so stop with your rhetoric that piracy == stealing.
Oh, well, if the individual laws of each country are going to be our standard for what's stealing, then I have to ask you whether or not it's possible for a government to steal money from its people. Afterall, if the government makes laws that allows it to confiscate property from it's people -- it "isn't stealing". Therefore, it's impossible for a country to "steal" from it's people (either by seizing property, or taking a cut of AID payments that were designed to go to it's people) so that it can enrich the local dictator, king, or anybody else who has seized power. Dictators and despots everywhere love the philosophical rhetoric you've constructed around "stealing".
I didn't see any evidence presented that "piracy can increase sales". All I saw were claims that box-office, gaming, and music revenues are increasing. But these increases are due to acknowledged growth areas (e.g. streaming, in-game buying, etc) and improved distribution methods (e.g., iTunes) and these claims say nothing about what revenues would have been in the absence of piracy. In other words, there is nothing to support the causality implied in the Slashdot story title
Frankly, I don't see how it is at all arguable that piracy can increase revenues. If I can download a band's entire catalog, which I have done, once I have done so the likelihood that I am going to go and pay for the band's music is drastically - in my case, completely - reduced. Same goes for downloading movies. It is, as one poster commented, just bits now. The visceral pleasure of owning a record with its cover art, sliding open the sleeves and smelling that wonderful vinyl smell is gone. A legally purchased copy of music or a movie is no better than a pirated download of same.
Best of all, you can wear the home-made one, without having to remember a bunch of arbitrary bullshit, or having to worry about events beyond your control.
The dress from the store has "malfunctions" if you wear it on Tuesdays or with a different manufacturer's shoes, and disintegrates if the dressmaker goes out of business, or may even disintegrate if they later (a year after you bought the dress) have a contractual dispute with their thread vendor.
Money issues aside, the dress from the store simply sucks, in ways that home dressmakers would never begin to imagine.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
In this day and age consumers are EXTREMELY sensitive to pricing. I don't need to remind you that Valve saw over 2000% (yes, 2000%) increase in Steam sales when they lowered the prices of L4D.
Gee, do you think that the massive amount of press and promotion they get from the price drop might be a favor (rather that just the price drop)?
At the end of the day its all bits. Claiming pseudo-ownership over a certain order/representation of them is insane but it is the current system we have, for better, or worse.
So, you're arguing that everything digital should be free, that anybody can sell other people's copyrighted works (like Walmart or Amazon printing up their own copies of books without paying anybody), and plagarism doesn't actually exist (afterall, why should you have to cite the original author when it's just an arrangement of bits?). Good luck with that. Even most of the anti-copyright activists oppose the idea of being able to *sell* other people's copyrighted works.
But TV shows don't put on concerts. Movies don't put on concerts. Video games certainly don't.
But we don't have to have those things. And we don't have to have those things at the level we have them at now.
If my art were sculpting the moon, but this was only economically feasible for me to do if everyone in the world owed me hefty royalties forever, people would probably tell me to go do something else. Even if my work was really good.
If we tire of having copyright to the extent we have it now, or even at all, that's a valid choice. If it reduces the number of works created and published, then that may nevertheless be the best option, if those works would otherwise come at too high a price.
And big budgets and high production values are not mandatory. Shakespeare did his best stuff on a stage with a handful of actors doubling up on parts, costumes that were hand-me-down clothing, minimal props, and no sets.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It can be argued, however, that copying copyrighted content without permission *is* harmful
Any number of things can be argued, but many arguments are ridiculous; that one included.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
I never would have bought an Evanesance album had I not downloaded it for free and decided they were way too good not to support buy buying their alums.
It's fair to say that violating copyright on new works is wrong
I don't think that's fair to say at all. Why would violating laws which none have proved to be beneficial be wrong? Yes, there is no proof that copyright is beneficial, and yet we have laws that restrict people's freedom? That is simply pathetic, and our supposedly free societies should be ashamed for implementing such laws without even so much as proving that they do what they say they do.
But even if copyright is beneficial, that would still not make it morally right. Censorship must be opposed, and copyright even infringes upon people's private property rights.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
They deserve fair compensation for that work
They do not "deserve" anything. If they cannot find a viable business model, I do not for a moment believe we should pretend they are entitled to government-enforced monopolies over ideas. It is on them and no one else to find out how to profit from their work.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
Legality has nothing to do with morality.
Rape is a violent sex crime. Copying something is not.
If you are trying to morally equate those two then you are a sociopath and a jackass.
Rape is a violation of the property rights of an individual (your body is your property and no one can use it without your consent), which is discouraged by making it illegal.
Piracy is a violation of property rights of an individual (your creative works are your intellectual property and no one can reproduce them without your consent), which is discouraged by making it illegal.
Proving that freely distributing a work makes more revenue does not support the claim that it is moral to violate copyright (the motive for controling distribution may not be profit maximization). You are still using someone else's property without their consent and parallels can be drawn between robbery, rape, squatting, etc. The fact that copyright is intellectual property while relevant to discussions regarding specifics of the laws and punishment, does not make it an invalid comparison when pointing out that fundamentally intellectual property is still property and piracy is violating the property rights of the copyright holder.
In fact rape makes a nice comparison for one very good reason:
If it were found that prostitutes who gave out freebies made more money, that would not justify rapping arbitrary people.
(this should be sufficiently well understood that no one will contest it)
Similarly finding that distributing free copies of your file increases revenue, does not justify pirating files that are not freely distributed by their copyright holder.
(to contest this without also contesting the first you must show why intellectual property rights do not deserve the same respect as someone's right to their own body)
It's not just about morality. Copyright violation (In the US, at least, I'm not sure if it ever was under the older European system) was all originally a tort. To sue for civil damages, yes, you normally have to show there actually are damages. Copyright law only started using statutory damages in the 2000's, and the US got by with considering actual damages only for over 200 years, before anyone thought it needed changed. Copyright law still covers cases where the matter ends up in a civil suit rather than criminal courts.
Profits are therefore still relevant, so long as getting a conviction, or just threatening to seek one, also supports winning civil suits. What we have now allows the possibility of people paying statutory damages to other people who have not in fact been damaged, and criminal law being used to support that civil litigation trick. That's not good law, and there's plenty of practical reasons not to do laws like that.
This also points up that people who don't know the law covers torts as well as crimes should learn before they use a word such as "illegal" in a blanket way and think they are shining light on the subject. Recognizing that copyright torts still exist means that a claim that "profits are irrelevant" becomes self-evidently false. Knowing that criminal prosecution is often threatened in this area to force capitulation on civil claims makes it generally relevant to all current copyright cases and laws. But that's not particularly a moral point - torts are not about moral action - responsible is not the same thing as guilty, and charge abuse is not just happening in copyright cases, even if it's very common there.
Now taking the thread back to support your moral point - declaring that the profits don't matter means pointing out the immorality of getting paid for NOT having been harmed can't enter the discussion. To run with the rape analogy, someone is trying to declare that the court in a rape case should not consider whether the rapist is actually HIV+ or not before they choose to seek a charge of aggravated rape. (yes, that's only roughly analogous, maybe I could get closer with a car anaolgy).
Who is John Cabal?
The idea that people deserve copyrights based solely on the fact that they put in effort into creating something is the sweat of the brow theory; it's unconstitutional in the US.
I beg to differ. If you create an original work recorded on a tangible medium, it's automatically copyrighted in the USA. Since around 1986, IIRC, you don't even have to file a formal copyright registration. As long as it's a creative work subject to copyright protection under US law, it's copyrighted. You can keep the copyrights or pass them on but it's yours do do with as you like.
That's not the same thing as being a profitable copyright. If nobody wants a copy at any price, your copyright is financially worthless. I have stacks of stuff that are dead-ends, low-quality or outright horrors that I'd never dream of publishing, but they still fall under the same legal protections as Stephen King's latest bestseller.
Gaining a copyright is trivial. Making a profit off it less so, and protecting it is a job all its own.
I beg to differ. If you create an original work recorded on a tangible medium, it's automatically copyrighted in the USA.
Provided that it is a creative, copyrightable work, that's true, and I didn't say otherwise. What I said was that merely investing effort into creating a work isn't a justification for copyright. In Feist v. Rural, the case that finally killed off sweat of the brow in the US, it was argued (and the lower courts had agreed!) that compiling a completely non-creative telephone book deserved copyright because it was a lot of work to do. It was certainly original and fixed in a tangible medium of expression. But it lacked creativity, and that's what did it in.
As it turns out, whether it takes a lot of work or virtually none at all makes no difference. The work must be creative, original, of a copyrightable type, and fixed in a tangible medium; that's what merits a copyright.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
-1 Bad Rape Joke
Some days I just get bored and Troll post all the memes I can think of...
The US constitution merely authorizes the government to have something like copyright for the sole purpose of encouraging innovation; it does not require that it exist. Furthermore, copyright is not for the artists; it is supposed to be for society.
The US constitution doesn't really disagree with anything I said in that comment, and I feel it was a mistake to ever let the government have the power to create something like copyright (since it violates freedom of speech and private property rights, and there is no evidence that it's effective), which is why I believe the constitution should be amended to ban copyrights and patents.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
(except for publishers that constantly churn out shit games)
But most publishers occasionally churn out shit games. I think the game industry whole prefer that you spent more money on shit games OR spent money on trade magazines that tell you what games are shit or not. Your system, reasonable as it may be, ensures that money only gets spent on GOOD games which FORCES the industry to value high quality. I'm sure you know how much harder churning out a QUALITY games than shit games. It's A LOT harder.
The main focus of piracy on music... though... I think as long as the industry isn't suing people for thousands of dollars for downloading music than everybody is happy. I haven't heard of any recent high profile music lawsuit cases... so I assume this has basically stopped. Right?
I'm unclear on your point. I think we all agree that a criminal is never going to return your car. A police officer commandeering your car isn't (and shouldn't be) planning on keeping your car, isn't going to sell it for money, and isn't going to strip it down for parts to sell.
Actually, there are definite benefits. It (along with patents and other related laws) formalizes how ideas can be bought and sold, facilitating the growth of US/Western economies based on intellectual property.
There are no proven definite benefits until proof has been provided that people wouldn't make money from their 'creations' without copyright. The benefits of copyright laws quite literally have not been demonstrated sufficiently.
Not every copyright holder is a corporate CEO who would sue little old ladies who accidentally listened a song for a second longer than she "shouldn't" have you know.
I believe copyright itself is immoral, so I don't care how 'good' or 'evil' an individual copyright holder is.
And if we jail or execute a person for murder, we're infringing upon his right to life. Again, that's a feature, not a bug.
And I suppose jailing people who say things that you don't like would be a feature, too? Well, to some people, it indeed would be.
If we as a society decide certain behavior is wrong, then whoever does that will see their rights revoked.
Oh, I see; you're stating the obvious. In other words, the side with the biggest guns will win. Tell me something I don't already know.
The problem you need to tackle is that other people (and there are lots of them) don't share your moral view on how ideas ought to be treated under the law.
You say these things as if I weren't already aware of them...
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
i thought he was talking about legally right, not morally right. in the case of morals, i totally agree with you, they shouldnt be compared.
<p>But most publishers occasionally churn out shit games. I think the game industry whole prefer that you spent more money on shit games OR spent money on trade magazines that tell you what games are shit or not. Your system, reasonable as it may be, ensures that money only gets spent on GOOD games which FORCES the industry to value high quality. I'm sure you know how much harder churning out a QUALITY games than shit games. It's A LOT harder.
</quote>
I think that depends, now there are definitely games that are undisputed shit that everyone agrees, but stuff like Call of Duty and WoW, even though many people consider it shit (I among them) a lot of people also consider it good (as is backed by their sales/subscription numbers). Hell even the latest SimCity falls into this category.
It also goes the other way, there are plenty of good high quality games, but they are in a niche market, or don't have the marketing budget, so they are considered flops sales wise.
So-called "intellectual property" is totally unrelated to actual property.
There's nothing like $HOME
[takes a bow]
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
I see what you're trying to accomplish here but I think you fail to understand that by picking such an inflammatory comparison, you're likely to lose your audience and leave your attempted point lost in the negative response and bad connotations.
(I find it important to state at this point that I am not addressing whether I agree with the point or the approach)
That being the case, I would have to call this whole approach flamebait, whether or not you are doing it intentionally.
- No Bounce, No Play -
Well replace Pirate with steal and yes its a lost sale. You have a copy of the game, use the game, you can only do that if you have paid for it and you did not so that means you stole the game.Whatever your excuse was to make zero difference or make it less a crime just ask any shoplifter who got cought.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Our prisons are full to the max with people who think just like you do and were proven wrong by society who has punished them by taking there freedom away.
Jack of all trades,master of none
You are 100% wrong you dont even know what copyright is much less making a legal comment on it
copyright
Use Copyright in a sentence copyright [kop-ee-rahyt] Show IPA noun 1. the exclusive right to make copies, license, and otherwise exploit a literary, musical, or artistic work, whether printed, audio, video, etc.: works granted such right by law on or after January 1, 1978, are protected for the lifetime of the author or creator and for a period of 50 years after his or her death.
So once copyright is granted it IS protected by the law and if they decide to charge for it that is there legal right to and you do not have the right to give away someone else copyrighted works by law.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Dude you have no clue what copyright is or whats its for everything yove said is ..wrong
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf
Jack of all trades,master of none
That's not how it works. Proving benefit of copyright doesn't require showing that people would be harmed without copyright. The only requirement is to point to something that is beneficial with the existence of copyright.
Which may exist with or without copyright, so that wouldn't exactly be a benefit of copyright, now would it?
How do you expect to solve the copyright issue if you don't care about the source of the problem?
Who says that I don't?
I prefer if people care a little about each other and talk things out.
That's fine, but you seem to have misunderstood the meaning of that sentence.
You may already know, but you are not acting upon that knowledge.
News to me.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
In what sense were they "proven wrong"? If I beat you to a pulp because you disagree with me about something, does that mean you're wrong? I don't really understand your point.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
fair price, and offer your product/service in convenient ways, people will buy rather than steal, for the most part.
This argument fails because it assumes you have the right to decide what someone else can charge for their efforts and that they must distribute it in a way that is acceptable to you.
Thus, you've already decided before the work is published that you have rights to control that work and that by the act of publishing it the author has abandoned his.
In other words:
As a result, HBO, who I would be willing to pay a fair amount to (even through a third party like netflix), refuses to provide what I desire and take my willingly offered money. And then they bemoan the fact that people steal from them. Boo fucking hoo.
You've decided what you want to pay for their service and if they don't accept your offer then you change your offer to zero and take what you want anyway.
Your hypothetical idea is so way out there i haven't a clue what you question is or point.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I just know what the US constitution says.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
It's not "way out there." I interpreted your comment to mean that because people are put in prison, that means they were somehow wrong. My analogy was intended to convey the fact that violence (imprisoning people) doesn't make you right; in other words, might doesn't make right. If that was not the point you intended to convey, then please tell me how the people in prisons were "proven wrong."
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
they'd rather sell ten million of just one or two of those than twenty million albums spread across 200 different albums of varying genres
Well, no kidding. Of course they would. Selling ten million copies each of two albums versus a hundred thousand copies each of 200 albums is far more profitable. For each separate album, you have recording costs, production costs, studio time, perhaps some session musicians to be paid, promotional costs, distribution, supply chain costs, etc., etc., etc. It all adds up.
If you have 200 different albums, that's a lot more expensive (considering all those costs coming in for every single one of those albums) than investing in two different albums. These people, by and large, are in business to make money. If you can make the same amount of money with an outlay of a tenth or a fiftieth or a hundredth of the cost, that's good business and it's far less risky (if you know that one album is very probably going to be a blockbuster).
Look, I'm a musician and I love listening to diverse kinds of music. I also understand that the music business is just that - a business. And that's okay. Everyone who's reading this needs money to live, somehow. At some point, someone made some money - you, or someone who is supporting you. There are a thousand ways to make money, and very few of them are totally noble and selfless. Sorry about that.
This is about the power to tell you what to buy, not to tell you to buy from them
Another thought - perhaps they just want to make lots of money with little risk. Really, what's wrong with that?
Want to make bizarre and experimental music, of interest to perhaps only a small number of people? I applaud you (I've been in bands that did just that). But don't be surprised if a major music label decides they're not going to put in the huge amount of time and effort it takes to distribute and publicize your band, when they know (a) they'll likely lose money, and (b) the mainstream band they already have signed will make an actual profit.
Still don't like the major labels? Then why not start your own open community recording "label". As so many people point out, it is possible to record an album with a comparatively inexpensive home studio. Solicit bands, tell them to send you their music. Be honest with them and if you're going to encourage people to download and share the music for free then tell your bands what your policy is on file sharing, and let them decide if they're okay with that.
Put up a cheap web site to tell people what's going on. Figure out the advertising and distribution somehow - use Twitter, or Slashdot, or anything else that takes your fancy. Distribute using peer-to-peer. I suspect nobody will want to pay full-out hosting charges in this kind of a venture because, you know, bandwidth ain't cheap, even for evil empire record labels. But surely someone can figure that out.
Make it a point of pride that you're going to distribute any kind of music, and get together with people who understand marketing and are willing to volunteer their time. It worked for Linux, because people were passionate, so why wouldn't it work for music?
Seriously, go ahead. Stop wasting energy and time just bleating about how evil the big record labels are, don't even worry about what's going on with the mainstream stuff...put your effort into making a difference. Most people involved in this kind of community effort won't make money doing it, but that's the magic of the Linux community, isn't it? Most people involved in developing Linux have day jobs to pay the bills, and work on Linux because they want to make a difference.
If there are enough people who are passionate enough about this, then you could make it work. Stop complaining, and do something to try and make it different. Carpe diem!
There are a lot of people in groups 1, 2 and 3 on your list who WANT to acquire content lawfully but cant because the content they want is unavailable to them through a lawful source. There are also a bunch of people in group 3 that can get the content lawfully but choose not to because of price (or because they have to acquire content they dont want in order to get the content they do).
For example, there is a documentary series produced by the History Channel called "Tales of the gun". If I wish to obtain this series here in Australia, I can:
A.Buy Foxtel pay TV at great expense and hope the episodes I want to see gets aired on History Channel Australia
B.Try and track down a DVD copy from overseas and import it (and hope it works on my DVD player and doesn't fail because of region lock issues)
or C.Go to YouTube or Google, type in a few keywords and watch the episode online.
If I could walk into a store and buy a box-set of this series (or a number of other pieces of older content that just isn't available on DVD in this country) I would do it. But since the content producers refuse to sell it to me, I have no option but to pirate if I want to consume the content.
How does it make you feel that I don't give a damn what you think?
The above was my opinion... I hold firmly to it, and I respect copyright. I sincerely wish others would do likewise, but I'm aware enough of the realities of this world to realize that it's not likely to happen... sort of like wishing for world peace, in that respect, I guess.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So once copyright is granted it IS protected by the law and if they decide to charge for it that is there legal right to and you do not have the right to give away someone else copyrighted works by law.
I never said otherwise. Although, I will point out first, that copyright law does permit people other than the copyright holder to give away copies without permission or payment under some circumstances. And second, that just because the law is this way at present doesn't mean we can't change the law to better suit our purposes.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
This is very interesting, and its good to see a report that is honest and not biased by the powerful media groups. However, the headline that, "Piracy can increase sales" is not backed up by this article, or the linked article for that matter. Its the fact that people are LEGALLY sharing media online (through subscription services, digital lockers, and the opportunity for artists to directly sell products) which is proving beneficial for all involved, not torrenting and illegal file sharing.
Had my remark that you interpret as insulting people who disagree with me stood alone, I'd suggest that such an interpretation might be reasonably valid. However, I followed the remark with an endeavor to uphold how the ramifications to copyright infringement, which can be bigger than what might be immediately obvious when one is just making a single copy, can be a potentially negative thing. Assuming that the remainder of my position has some merit, people who would engage in piracy in spite of this either do not care about such repercussions or are simply ignorant of them.
No insult was specifically intended towards people who have a different opinion... people are welcome to disagree, but I was only endeavoring to present why I believe what I do.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
Casteism
Quote "I never said otherwise. Although, I will point out first, that copyright law does permit people other than the copyright holder to give away copies without permission or payment under some circumstances."
Yes you DID say otherwise ya cant even keep up with all the garbage you say dude.
Quote 1 "All copyright does is concentrate some of the revenue derived from the work toward the copyright holder."
Quote 2 "Copyright is all about increasing the number of works which are created and published, and then limiting the public use of those works as little as possible
Quote 3"
The idea that people deserve copyrights based solely on the fact that they put in effort into creating something is the sweat of the brow theory; it's unconstitutional in the US
Jack of all trades,master of none
Okay, but none of those quotes consist of me saying that copyrights are not protected by the law once they've been granted. Nor do any of them stand for the proposition that authors cannot attempt to exploit their copyrights for financial gain. (Whether they will do so successfully depends on the market; outright doesn't guarantee that anyone will want what they're selling) and until you brought it up by accusing me, I had not said that people could give away copies of copyrighted works without permission; which, as I said, is true, they generally aren't allowed to, though the law does provide some exceptions to that rule.
So far all I can tell is that you like to accuse me of things and that you can use the copy and paste commands. Put a real argument together if you want to continue this. Otherwise don't bother.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I think you misunderstand my post, and I actually agree entirely with what you're saying. What I'm describing is the anticompetitive, monopolistic behaviour of an industry organization. In this case, stifling, stigmatizing, or otherwise creating problems for anyone who dares work outside their auspices.
As for community, volunteer-style labels, I have released music in exactly the context you describe, with my first release produced on demo-version software on a Pentium 2 running Win98 (back in 2001). So I'm not exactly a stranger to it, even though I did drop out of it for quite a while. I've been researching the idea of doing some recording again, this time on a much more advanced Linux-based system.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
True, thanks for the correction of the enumeration!
Maybe it should be made into a 2D matrix?
Purchase - Pirate
0. Y-Y
1. Y-M
2. Y-N
3. M-Y
4. M-M
5. M-N
6. N-Y
7. N-M
8. N-N
Legend:
Y = Yes
M = Maybe
N = No / Never