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Stop Piracy? Legal Alternatives Beat Legal Threats, Research Shows (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Threatening file-sharers with high fines or even prison sentences is not the best way to stop piracy. New research published by UK researchers shows that perceived risk has no effect on people's file-sharing habits. Instead, the entertainment industries should focus on improving the legal options, so these can compete with file-sharing. Unauthorized file-sharing (UFS) is best predicted by the supposed benefits of piracy. As such, the researchers note that better legal alternatives are the best way to stop piracy. The results are based on a psychological study among hundreds of music and ebook consumers. They were subjected to a set of questions regarding their file-sharing habits, perceived risk, industry trust, and online anonymity. By analyzing the data the researchers found that the perceived benefit of piracy, such as quality, flexibility of use and cost are the real driver of piracy. An increase in legal risk was not directly associated with any statistically significant decrease in self-reported file-sharing.
In general, threatening people will not produce better results than encouraging people over the long term.
really a surprise to anyone not affiliated with the **AAs.
It's always an availability problem. Look at Steam and how much it gets from making so many titles available.
The games that aren't available are in the usual publisher rights hell, like NOLF, leaving one no choice but to go second-hand for that brilliant and feminist game series.
Long Live Kickass torrents
.. bang bang ...
Long Live torrentz.eu
Viva la revolution !!!!
How about we jail all the CEO's and Bankers who have gotten away with scamming the Public out of billions and gotten a slight slap on the wrist FIRST?
If you're a music executive who made it to where you are by cheating musicians and paying them as little as possible, and by overcharging customers at every opportunity, you will tend to assume other people will behave the same way you yourself do. It will literally be inconceivable to you that a lot of people, even given the opportunity to get something for free by piracy, would rather pay you what they consider to be a fair amount for your work.
Drop movie prices to a fraction downloaded to the superior version at the theater.
That works.
Fining some poor kid's family $100,000 cause he stole anime movies from some ultra-rich CEO?
Nope, zero impact.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I totally agree worh the article. I remember back in the earlier days was Napster was big and legal downloading was inpossible.
I think the thing that kill napster was the ability to do a fast, easy $0.88 song download from Walmart - and stuff like that.
On the other hand, a threat you don't carry out is no real threat at all.
The problem we have at the moment is that we have this bizarre situation where the law says creators have certain rights as an incentive, and a lot of people do create and share work on that basis, yet actually enforcing your rights is impractical in many circumstances so there's no real deterrent.
This naturally results in a situation where people who are honest and can afford to pay for works do so, but they are effectively subsidising those who rip the works illegally. The honest pay, the artists get some money but not as much as they were legally entitled to given the distribution of their work, and the people exploiting the system are the only ones who actually benefit. Obviously this is backwards.
It also results in a situation where creators will seek to protect their works through technological measures rather than legal ones. This works to some extent, but again, the honest customers lose out because they get all the inconvenience when things go wrong, while those who still manage to pirate the works don't have to put up with such things. Obviously this is also backwards.
I'm generally not a fan of the ever-extending copyrights, nor of scope creep where copyright laws are abused to prevent reasonable actions by exploiting the worst kind of legal technicalities. However, I don't have a problem with the basic idea of copyright, in the absence of any more effective ways to support creators (which I don't think we have found yet, in general).
So lately, I've actually been wondering whether a lack of serious enforcement isn't a big part of the real problem. If stores had to investigate theft of chocolate bars on their own and then sue in court themselves at considerable time and expense with no prospect of recovering more than the original cost of the chocolate bar anyway, I imagine the world would see a lot more theft of chocolate bars, unethical as it would be. If victims of minor assaults had to take civil action to get any sort of justice, and even then the attacker wasn't really punished for their actions and only had to pay some token compensation, we'd probably have a lot more violence on our streets, again despite the unethical nature of such behaviour.
And yet, we have this whole theoretical economic model with copyright that is almost totally unenforced in practice because the costs of doing so are too great. It's hardly surprising in this context that studies show people don't much care about the theoretical level of penalty they might receive. If they think there's no real chance of being caught and penalised anyway, what does the scale or nature of the penalty matter? So instead we get half-broken alternatives like takedown notices and DRM that sorta kinda work in the real world, but that also cause a lot of collateral damage.
So, playing devil's advocate for a moment, maybe copyright infringement should be a crime, treated similar to other financial crimes like fraud, not just a civil matter. Maybe it should be investigated by police and prosecuted by public authorities, like low-value theft or public nuisance offences. Maybe it should carry criminal penalties, not just a civil compensation that in many places can only be actual losses even if the infringer is guilty as sin. Maybe all those people so flagrantly ripping off new works they want but don't want to pay for should get punished for it.
It seems this might have two effects that are both very desirable, after the initial shock wore off. On the one hand, obviously it would force freeloaders to pay their fair share. On the other hand, it would also force price-gouging and other customer-hostile business models into the open since no-one could avoid them any more, perhaps leading to more realistic laws that kept the scope of copyright to what it was always meant to be. It seems that effective enforcement would make little difference to those who are honestly paying for works they enjoy anyway, nor
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The same should be done for everything. Obviously threatening people with jail hasn't stopped murder so we should offer legal alternatives to the criminals.
Theft is still ongoing so we should do the same.
Yes, let's continue to coddle criminals instead of making punishment so harsh, and following through, that common sense and civility is tossed aside in favor of allowing criminals to continue with their ways.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I have yet to meet a file "sharer" who thought there was *any* perceived risk. Not audio, not video, not programs...
Seriously. Not one. Since the first digital days. That's anecdotal, but it's a whole lot of anecdotes, as in every adult and teen I've met in the last 40 years.
And speaking as a software developer that decided not to copy protect, threaten or prosecute, but did implement anonymous active copy / IP reporting over the net so I knew what was going on in terms of interest and activity, there have been hundreds of times the number of non-purchased copies of my various software products in use as compared to the number that were purchased during the sales lifetimes of those products.
There's no fear out there. I'm not sure there should be, either. Because the threat level is basically zero. And perhaps it should be, ethically speaking. Legally... well, the law is often wrong.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I still remember the day I found out just how little of the ~15-20 bucks I spent on a CD actually went to the band. I felt robbed. I felt bad for the bands. I hate rent seekers who use their position of power and influence to take far more than their fair share as an fiefdom tax.
Legal Alternatives that don't suck work but when Piracy get a better ver that is bad. When you have to re buy the same stuff for you phone and for you pc that is bad.
When you have to rebuy the same content on ios and google play that is bad.
Steam get's it right and you don't have to rebuy the same games just to run them on mac and windows and Linux.
I don't know about your country, but in mine, for transgressions being elevated to "crime" started, something called "public interest" has to be at stake. With murder, there is public interest. Because everyone has a life and doesn't want it been taken. With robbery, there is public interest. Because everything has something that belongs to him and doesn't want taken. With physical injury, there is public interest. Because everyone has a body and doesn't want it harmed.
As soon as everyone has something copyrighted, we'll talk about the public interest in it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The industry is very aware that if they provided better alternatives that piracy would be drastically less. However, their interest is not in stopping people from pirating, it's to maximize the amount of money they can make. They know that keeping prices inflated will ultimately earn them more money from the people that do by it than if the lowered the price and almost everyone obtained music legally. Complaining about pirates also gives them a specious reason to lobby for all sorts of bullshit laws they don't need and people don't want, all in the pursuit of higher profits.
They know the evil they do and they do it gladly because the only thing they love is money.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
But one of the biggest mistakes the MPAA ever made was ensuring that every single big screen movie that landed in a cinema was accompanied with a lengthy ad from the MPAA asking audiences whether they would pay money for an inferior copy.... which was then followed by an inferior copy. The advertising was so effective, that every time I am about to purchase a movie rather than downloading it, I ask myself "would I really pay money for an inferior copy?", at which stage I realise that would be friggin stupid and I go an download I high quality version for free. Unfortunately, this behavior is trained, by the very people who don't want me downloading good quality versions rather than seeing things at the cinema. As such, its hard to consider legal punishments are fair when the same industry suing pirates are the same industry that created the pirates.
Based on my observation, the greater then crime, more minor the punishment.
Nazi war criminal serves relatively few years in prison for industrialised murder of six million.
IP piracy according to FBI warnings on all the DVD discs will land you 10 years in Federal prison + 250k in fine, per incident.
Politicians launched wars of aggression against a few third world countries and causing deaths of hundreds of thousands and dislocating millions are still enjoying the protection of Secret Service on tax payers' dime.
Murder one or two persons may get you the chair.
Fraud by Wall street men in the scale that nearly brought down the world economy are still drawing millions in yearly compensation since, but stealing a loaf of bread in the local super market will get you jail time.
Ponder how many things are free or cheap, and then ponder how many people are willing to pay, or pay a premium, for getting it more conveniently. Yes, convenience is a commodity in our society and it has a value. Getting crap delivered to you instead of having to go to the store, pick it up and carry it home is at the very least a reason to pick the delivery service over the one that doesn't deliver, and most likely even a good enough reason to pay more than you would at the place where you'd have to pick it up yourself.
The same applies to the convenience of "just works". People are very willing to pay for the convenience of not having to jump through various hoops to crack this and copy, move and alter that, rewrite this or that registry entry, and instead just click something and it works.
If you need proof, look at Apple. Then look at any Linux distribution of your liking. What exactly IS the difference? Convenience.
This does work for Steam. But often, it does not work for a lot of AAA titles. Why? Because they lack convenience! If I have to be "always on" and the Servers cannot be reached at launch, that's the opposite of "just works" convenience. If, on the other hand, the cracked version is easy to install and "just works" because it doesn't give a fuck about the Servers not working, that IS convenience. And that, not the price, is then the reason why people give the legal copy the finger and go for the rip.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While logical, sensible, and straight forward in its reasoning and conclusion, this will require the rights holder to lower thier prices while increasing availability.
this is unpopular.
here is why.
1) more downloading at lower pricepoints increases distribution costs in terms of supplying the needed bandwidth.
2) more downloading at lower pricepoints reduces the per transaction profit margin.
that is both more money going out, and less money coming in.
the grim reality that thier product is overpriced in the market is only considered in terms of how to force buyers into buying the overpriced options they provide, via exclusivity and threat of the legal system.
They hate piracy, not because "we cant compete with free!", no. they hate piracy because it demonstrates that thier prices are not appropriate for the market. (as evidenced by this groups findings, and the findings of other groups like them.) they realize that the age of big radio, big music, etc is over. they are in serious danger of being dethroned as the gatekeepers and storytellers of culture. having to compete with the millions of other story tellers that a lower market price enables, as the cost of producton drops, scares the shit out of them.
piracy is just the scapegoat they blame. the garage band that self produces and succeeds on talent is what scares them. the lawyers and the lawsuits on infringement are really aimed at these bands who inadvertantly use 3 chords from a song the paranoid publisher owns, so the paranoid publisher can destroy them, and not look bad doing it.
I would gladly give every music exec exactly what he deserves, but murder is illegal in my country.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think that there's a good probability that this claim is true, but all that this shows is that people who pirate or don't pirate believe it to be the case that having legal options for accessing content is a better deterrent. Unfortunately, humans very often do not understand their own motivations.
What you'd need to do to actually tease out the causation here is to do actual policy trials. This is exceedingly difficult, unfortunately, as it's not so easy to just mandate that some number of people be given access to legal content: there's a lot of infrastructure work involved, and it requires licensing agreements. I don't think it's completely impossible, just hard.
In the mean time, I think it should be natural to accept the conclusion of the OP article until evidence against it is presented.
It's an interesting situation, because "intellectual property" and the fact that people actually pay for it, is at complete odds with modern economic theory.
The general understanding of market economics is based on fundamentals like, "Supply and Demand" - and these are easily described using mathematical models: The greater the supply and the lower the demand, the lower the price will be, and vice versa.
If we look at intellectual property and software in particular, we find the following characteristics to be true:
1. It is difficult to create
2. Can be easily copied
2a. For little cost or effort
2b. An infinite number of times
So in a free market you end up with a product that is expensive and time consuming to create, but which once created, can be reproduced as much as anyone happens to care for. If someone wants 5,000 copies of your IP, they CAN and it wouldn't cost them a dime. This means the supply is infinite; in which case the demand doesn't matter and the going price for your product is: Zero! Zero dollars!
The rational economist / businessman see this and knows per their rational / purely selfish point of view, that they can never make money in a market where rational actors will simply "steal" their product by copying, sharing, and distributing it with each other. If you walked into a business class in the 1950's with videogames that can be freely copied past the first sale as your business model, you'd have been flunked out and laughed at.
Their solution? Artificial scarcity! Using the threat of violence against their own customers, these economists and businessmen impose DRM, fines, lawsuits, jail, and even death (should you actually defend yourself from police enacting these legalized threats) in order to limit the supply and force customers to pay for the product.
YET
We see today that games with limited or no DRM restrictions - in fact even games that are literally and intentionally given away for free - still attract profits, and not just small profits, but enough profits to continue running a business. Because the public irrationally supports people creating intellectual property in spite of the fact they can or have, obtained that intellectual property for free.
Ironically I often see in arguments about this (particularly at the hands of business-owned "news"), that it's the pirates, gamers, consumers who are being entitled and demanding. In spite of the fact these are the very people who pay money for things they can have for free to begin with. Meanwhile the publishers go out of their way to actively attack their own customers and spend millions on thwarting the copying and sharing of information. It's like living in a world where the buggy-whip makers have won and outlawed all automobiles. Actually - it's worse than that. It's a case of having automobiles already, and then monied interests outlawed them in order to sell their buggy-whips. It's so farcical I almost can't believe it's the way our modern economies function.
Just as it is probably inconceivable to you that a lot of people, when given the opportunity to pay more for something than they consider it to be worth, just walk away and do without. No twisted justifications for stealing. They simply do without. Weird, eh?
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
I don't think your implication that it's only in the public interest to make behaviour criminal if everyone can be a direct victim really holds up under scrutiny.
The entire premise and justification for copyright is (or at least used to be) that it was in the public interest to incentivise creating and distributing new works. The fact that such an incentive is necessarily beneficial to creators is just a side effect.
Moreover, copyright is not an isolated case. For another example, most people don't run a business, yet we value laws that prevent people exploiting businesses in various ways, because it's in our interests as a society to support those who do run them.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
And prices less insane, the pirates will play. Well, most of them. see: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime.
Bonus points for not attacking your customer base.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Although you're right in your point about music executives having no ethics, there is also another misunderstanding which misguides them even further: belief that "their precious" is always worth top dollar. This is especially true in the movie industry, in which low value is much easier to discern than in music.
The total lack of any correspondance between movie quality and selling price means that the publishers think it's entirely correct to charge as much for the worst kind of drivel as for a top quality blockbuster.
As a result, there is no possibility of sensible pricing for the bulk of movie studio output which is of mediocre quality. Since only a fool will pay high prices for rubbish, this disconnect between quality and price effectively means that most films are not really on the market at all --- they will only ever be watched on torrents or on other free outlets.
The failure of markets to link prices to quality and the "my precious" mentality of execs has made most movie releases effectively not purchaseable by those of sane mind.
Just as it is probably inconceivable to you that a lot of people, when given the opportunity to pay more for something than they consider it to be worth, just walk away and do without. No twisted justifications for stealing. They simply do without. Weird, eh?
That's me.
I could pay for any movies, books, music, etc that I want, but in most cases I'm just not that interested. I'm not the average "consumer", driven to see every movie, every album, every whatever. I'm not terrorized by the urge to buy. On the rare occasions I do want something and feel it's worth it, I'll pay for it but most of the time I'm just not interested.
If there was a service that I could pay to screen out the endless stream of mindless pop-culture horseshit out of my awareness, I'd fuckin' pay for that in a heartbeat. I'd literally pay money to never hear another word about Kanye West or his bloated wife with a giant ass that blots out the sky.
I'd pay not to hear about the newest sneaker, TV show, boy band, diet, movie star, or self-important windbags pontificating on what he or she thinks everyone else should do. I'd also pay to avoid hearing rabid SJWs tell me how I'm the root of all evil for being white and male.
I'd pay not to see ads about the latest products that "everyone" needs to own RIGHT NOW. I'd pay never to hear another budding movie star's opinion on anything, ever.
Show me that service and I'd whip out my credit card so fast that you'd hear a sonic boom as it left my wallet.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Here's a cheaper alternative. When an ad comes on, take out your ear buds and make up your own dialogue. Or go get a snack, and rewind if it took too long.
I have pay tv (with ondemand movies), Netflix and Google Play music/ YouTube Red subscriptions.
Cost: $150 per month. I still am limited to relatively shit old movies and a music library that has many titles not available.
Paying for content does not work. You have to pirate if you actually want to see and hear what is available.
Coincidentally $150 a month is more than I ever sent on CDs, DVDs and cinema tickets.
The system is fucked. Pay tv is useless but it's not entirely my decision to get rid of that. I don't pirate because I figure if it's not available clearly they don't want my patronage but I think if I was to, it should be fully justified. It is their broken business model.
I think this is what they have in mind.
Just as it is probably inconceivable to you that a lot of people, when given the opportunity to pay more for something than they consider it to be worth, just walk away and do without. No twisted justifications for stealing. They simply do without. Weird, eh?
Oh. I've heard this idea before. It's the "boycott X store by not shopping there" method of protest.
That's fine, but I have two responses (not arguments, just responses):
First, boycotting doesn't deliver any message to a place or business. If you just "do without", then there's no way for the business to be aware that the product they're selling is desired but that the packaging is offensive. Piracy is a long-standing issue that's been discussed and increasingly made known to be a symptom of a distribution and pricing model that is incompatible with obtaining maximized profits. Business will eventually learn, which wouldn't happen if people just "did without". Understand, I want to pay for digital stuff. Problem is the distribution model makes it artificially impractical to do so.
Second, just because a law is on the books doesn't make it moral, or even right to defend. There is a long history of lawmaking that is eventually viewed as silly or morally wrong. Being lawful isn't necessarily a good thing. In the case of digital piracy, depending on the individual involved and the product involved, it is in many, many cases a victim-less crime. Indeed, I'll admit to having pirated a few e-books which have then inspired me to spend ridiculous amounts of money tracking down physical copies of all of the author's works. Same for music. I "stole" a costless copy of a product I was never going to independently purchase, only to discover I liked it, and then spent lots of money doing so. So yeah, while it's an anecdote, keep in mind that digital piracy isn't theft because the copy we "steal" doesn't have a cost associated.
"Oh no... he found the
So if I run ufsdump | ufsrestore, am I a pirate?
Who comes up with these dumb acronyms?
Effective policing with the correct fine is surely the best approach. If every second culprit copped a $50 fine the problem is likely to be vastly reduced very quickly, and nobody is unfairly devastated by a completely inappropriate level of punishment for something which is certainly not to be compared in any way with violence etc.
It's so easy to buy games from steam, gog, gmg , etc. Especially when they are on sale.
It took the study... 17 years to reach the conclusion many of us reached way back in early 2000s?
Wasn't song piracy cut immensely with iTunes legal model of 99 cents per song?
If the MPAA/entertainment industry only got their heads out of the sand, and afforded easy access to their content; most would happily pay $4-$5 conveniently to click and watch a high quality version of the media. Even at the price of half of the movie ticket, the volume from legalized offering and the relatively inexpensive infrastructure investment would rake in immense profit. The market for piracy will automatically diminish; incentives to cheat the producers out of the money when the cost to legally obtain it is low enough will be reduced.
But.... no.... let's threaten and bully and make it difficult to access our content because it's too difficult to change.
Holy fucking bagicalnuts batman!
Logically speaking you're begging the question here: if people can't enforce their rights, you can't say that the expectation of enforcement is the basis of their creative activity, because if they really couldn't enforce it, they would not do so in your view. And yet we see creative activity everywhere.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
All they have to do is step back and view the digital playing fields. The old distribution methods are no longer viable, though if the movie companies move away from the old method then a lot of people (ie the middle men) will lose their distribution jobs but it's the same in any market where technology and innovation move faster than humans. ALL the movie companies need to do is this. 1) Call and end to country distribution worldwide and make the middle men redundant 2) Get a single remembable domain name eg movies.com 3) Speak to large hosting companies to set up datacentres and peering 4) Off each movie in various birrates from phone 3g capability to 4k 5) Off the movies as a netflix type subscription ie really affordable (unlike how they rip off customers with DVD prices) 6) sit back as millions of people will subscribe paying millions of dollars from every country with net access. 7) Go to the bank
If you're a music executive who made it to where you are by cheating musicians and paying them as little as possible, and by overcharging customers at every opportunity, you will tend to assume other people will behave the same way you yourself do.
This is bullsh**t. The reason that executives make a lot of money (not only in the music industry) is that companies can afford it. Because there are only a few executives, that's still a tiny amount compared to the money it would cost to pay musicians more or to charge customers less.
Switching a business strategy, however, is never easy. Besides the risk that the new strategy may not work, there will also be resistance from the staff who may no longer be needed (the managers do care about that, btw, but wouldn't if their motives were purley egosistic).
We see today that games with limited or no DRM restrictions - in fact even games that are literally and intentionally given away for free - still attract profits, and not just small profits, but enough profits to continue running a business. Because the public irrationally supports people creating intellectual property in spite of the fact they can or have, obtained that intellectual property for free.
DRM-free games are still protected by copyright - it is possible but illegal to copy them. If you give away games for free, you need another revenue source: donations and merchandise (which relies on copyright and trademark protection, at the end of the day) can only bring in enough money if your game is extremely popular. In most cases, giving away your product for free means that you need to have a day job to cover living expenses.
Not necessarily. As the grandparent posted, and I've said many times before, creating is hard, copying is easy. You need a business model where people pay for the creation, not the copying. For example, you release a beta version of the game with most of the game world missing for free, then you ask for funding to finish it. Once you've received enough to cover your development and distribution costs and make a decent profit, you release the game for free. Then you start asking people to contribute to developing the next one.
This sounds weird, but it's actually exactly the business model that many TV shows use. They produce a pilot and send it to the networks for free. The networks watch it and if they like it then they fund the development of the first season. If the first season does well, they start asking the network for money for the second, and so on. The only difference is that you'd ask the customers directly, rather than having a middleman who wants to sell adverts.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There's a third option: copy it. You don't have to pay more than it's worth, you don't have to steal and you still get to enjoy it. Many people will do that if copying is easy and they are not willing to pay the price asked or they think the money does not go to the right people.
It's also, for example, precisely how many video games used to be sold - this is the model of shareware that id Software used for Doom and Quake, for example! (You get Episode 1 for free: now give us money for Episodes 2 through 4!)
Autocad and Inventor has been pirated for years. They release Fusion 360 which is free unless you make over $100K. End of problem. I can learn and do my odd private projects legally. Maybe one day I'll hit the big time and then I will have no problem paying for it.
> They were subjected to a set of questions regarding their file-sharing habits
I'm sure the resuts give statistically significant predictions over how people would fill out such questionnaires
The public interest of copyright is in its limitation, not in its establishment. The establishment is, from a public point of view, the necessary evil to promote creation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm not arguing that the current copyright rules aren't excessive in some (perhaps most or all) jurisdictions today. On the contrary, I would be the first to agree that they are and that copyright should be brought back to a reasonable level that is justified as an incentive but does not go excessively far beyond that.
However, that is a different point to whether infringement of reasonable copyright protection should be treated as a criminal matter to allow effective enforcement, which is my "devil's advocate" proposition here.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
How is the imaginary property of content more "crime-worthy" than the imaginary property of honor? To explain, if I am being slandered, I have to drag the slanderer to court myself, too, no general attorney gives a shit about it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You nailed that right on the head. Bravo!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I still remember the day I found out just how little of the ~15-20 bucks I spent on a CD actually went to the band. I felt robbed. I felt bad for the bands. I hate rent seekers who use their position of power and influence to take far more than their fair share as an fiefdom tax.
OMG, I know.. If it weren't for the psycho fan risk, it would be nice to be able to give money to the band members directly to ensure it isn't going to get a[n] [over]weighted fee pulled by someone else. Tax reporting isn't brought into this thought, anyone who reads this. That's the band members' responsibility to do what they wish in terms of evasion or reporting.
I would gladly give every music exec exactly what he deserves, but murder is illegal in my country.
How about an alternative... Freeze all assets, strip them of their belongings, give them an apartment and food for a month, and go make them learn to play a musical instrument. Like Trading Places; get other execs to back it for a reality show. Heck, they'll gain from it so why not screw one of their own over? ;)
... It's so farcical I almost can't believe it's the way our modern economies function.
You have a very interesting and enlightening post here. Gives people something to think about, except for the execs that make the decisions. They're older and HATE changing business models because they're scared of it not turning out where they're in the same tax bracket (sorry for the bad use of terms, but hell...) than they are now. Not to mention the investors, those freaking scumbags that put pressure on the execs to do what THEY, the investors, want to ensure they have a return+++ on their investment. Combine the two, and it's sort of like a bad government setup - people who don't want to muddy the waters too much because there are so many risks to take, and those behind them that are (sorry to say, but they are) threatening them every day to continue instead of giving up and moving toward current technological, psychological, and many other variables in the real-world models.
The execs are also (almost 100% because they were to get in, or are because they got in and feel entitled to way more than they are) narcissistic. There is no way they can change their official operations and opinions/appearances unless it is THEIR idea. Somehow, someone else is going to have to come up with a new world model for A/V arts and step-by-step help them think they (execs) themselves came up with the ideas. That or wait for them to die off from natural causes and, try to help the ones observing and learning to be like them, to think they have a better idea that they came up with all by themselves.
Human behavior is so sad when it's been researched so thoroughly and proven, yet people repeat behaviors and get the same results. I guess one of the K-12 (in the US, anyhow) classes should be behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic psychology. When I saw K-12, I mean every year from K-12. Maybe that would help people more easily realize that something changing doesn't mean you lost a game that your entire self-worth is based on internally; you just changed your opinion or operating behavior because something more effective was found. Not to be off-topic, but same with government... stop sticking to [this] or [that] party line and making sure when you have a stance or opinion that you always stick to it to prove integrity. Prove freakin' integrity by showing you're the same person with good intentions that's simply adapting. I bring this at the end because it ties to business.
Unfortunately this is why so many games that get funded by the consumers through Kickstarter and Steam Early Access end up never getting finished, while the developer keeps all the money.
I do see your point though, and this has worked well for some developers that have delivered good products multiple times through crowd funding.
Just as it is probably inconceivable to you that a lot of people, when given the opportunity to pay more for something than they consider it to be worth, just walk away and do without. No twisted justifications for stealing. They simply do without. Weird, eh?
What you say makes sense and is a very good way to live life in a mentally healthy state. There are a couple of things you can't put into that blob, though - communications (arts) and protective instincts (child-rearin').
You can't expect your wife, mother, or other directly tied one who had a child to one day decide they can do without. It's something the species needs to continue and instinctively it's a protected behavior. Communications is another - arts of music and visual; we have those embedded as one of the core drivers and accompanying components of our lives (brains). I, nor anyone with a realistic and working Human brain, can decide that because we no longer, do not, or will not have the means to see video and listen to musical patterns, that it's something we can 'do without'. Unless we want to brainwash all of a generation, and ensure they raise their young with punishment, cannot make music something we can do without. If you can, that's just you. You're a glitch in the matrix of all Human kind covering the globe. Even African tribes and groups that are just now being discovered have music and dance as part of their core beings.
Move away from Humans and you have other animals that rely on and express themselves in visual and auditory ways every day. To be a corporation/group of them/government/group of them that thinks they can put a price tag on music with a "you must do without unless you pay" is on dangerous ground. They're lucky they were getting what they did because of convenience; it was easy to love something heard on the radio and buy it. CDs added higher quality. Digital music added easier spread. It's done. Modeled, it's like a virus that is unstoppable spreading across the globe and infecting everyone (except lucky people like you, that is if you're really not just trolling). It can't be stopped. Finding something new or desirable that adds to the spice of it, so to speak, is the only way.
Go ahead, argue that point. If you do, you're just suffering from a case of cognitive dissonance. It's okay, we all do it. Just remember that this isn't a battle or game with a winner or loser. I'm stating facts, replying to you because you seem to be a bit lacking in knowledge of the facts, or are just in a grumpy mood today and need to seize power by arguing points that can't be argued - just to get in an argument. I'm not going to argue with you. Stating anything outside of basic Human needs and long-term animal instincts as a point of superior logic is nothing more than cognitive dissonance, or a really smart person who should be working on AI - AI can be controlled and dynamically changed per one's desires. :)
I have spotify and netflix, only thing I have pirated past year was the recent season of Game of Thrones, mostly because I wanted to watch it at 1080p, OTA tv shows it only as SD.
Those services have basically ended my illegal downloads. The availability and variance in offered material is enough for me.
It's a matter of degree.
Obviously legal systems differ from place to place, but in my country civil suits can normally only result in compensation for actual losses. In a defamation suit, if say a celebrity loses a lucrative sponsorship deal after an libelous allegation that they take illegal drugs, the court might take the value of that sponsorship deal into account when determining those losses. That means a big pay-out, usually enough to justify the cost of bringing a civil legal action. However, in the case of say a single individual copying a single DVD that they could otherwise have bought from Amazon for £10, the people who made that DVD have no mechanism for effectively enforcing their legal rights, because the costs are prohibitive relative to recovering probably less than £10 of actual loss.
The difference in practice is that defamation suits tend to be one-offs and if there has been serious damage as a result it's typically all addressed in a single case against a single other party or a small number of related other parties. Copyright infringement, while overall it too could represent a lot of financial damage, is death by a thousand cuts, and it's not practical under our system to exercise your legal rights against each individual infringer. For related reasons, a serial infringer who rips off many rightsholders by a small amount each time may benefit greatly overall, yet may effectively be immune to any sort of penalty from any of them because there's no mechanism to combine any resulting legal actions to make them cost-effective.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Then I have to wonder where the insane compensation demands come from if you can only sue for whatever amount the damage actually was.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Unfortunately, we've wound up with a system where enough people are honest and pay for content that some of it is commercially viable to create, yet those honest people are effectively subsidising the freeloaders who benefit from the same content without contributing anything to support it.
Then to address the freeloaders we've wound up with a kind of pseudo-enforcement system through the likes of takedown notices and DRM. From the point of view of Big Media, these moderate the perceived damage from copyright infringement. But in the process they again hurt honest customers, who have to put with crap like unskippable content on their disks, or seeing perfectly legal parody content removed from sites like YouTube, or having their new game keep crashing because the DRM servers are overloaded on launch day.
Basically, because of the lack of effective enforcement through normal legal means, we now have an alternative system that hits legitimate customers not once but twice. I don't see how that is a good thing.
Of course, that alternative system is probably also less effective from the rightsholder's point of view. While that may not get in the way of Hollywood making next year's summer blockbusters that will bring in a fortune anyway, it can be a very different story for an individual artist or small business when their original content gets ripped and shared, and it really can send those businesses under.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I can't speak for the other anonymous contributor. But once I graduated from college in 2003 and had to buy my own software instead of relying on my institution's site license, I had already tasted the proverbial Kool-Aid of the free software movement, having replaced NeoPaint with GIMP as my primary paint program on Windows. So I didn't buy WinRAR in part because of the author's active refusal to document the RAR format. I guess I was spoiled by Phil Katz's full documentation of PKZIP's format (APPNOTE.TXT), which allowed Info-ZIP contributors to create a competing free tool. But the license of unRAR prohibits reverse engineering to create such documentation. So I skipped RAR and stuck to Zip. And by the time I needed something that could make solid archives with more than 32K per file (the window limit of DEFLATE as used in TGZ files), 7-Zip was ready.
What insane compensation demands? Almost no-one, at least in my country, is being sued for large amounts of money for copyright infringement, even if they've ripped thousands of pounds' worth of content. Unless you're actually running a major piracy site or large-scale DVD cloning farm or something like that, your chances of suffering any penalty under the law for copyright infringement are extremely low. That's the point.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You're clearly not an economist because a 101 course would have thought you why all that is wrong.
1. You're rating the cost of copying as $0 in spite of the fact that that is not true. There are a lot of non-monetary costs from the time you spend looking for the files, to the risk of being punished for illegal activity, to the amortized cost of the time of whomever cracked the DRM, etc. There's also the costs of bandwidth and electricity. Copyright increases the cost of making an unauthorized copy by making it illegal and therefore adding risk of financial loss to the action. That also results in increasing the cost in time to find files as it's more time consuming to find people doing illegal things because they have to be at least hard enough to find that the cops haven't gotten them yet. All those costs have a dollar value in spite of not involving handing over actual dollars (because dollars are a unit for measuring value)
2. It's not necessarily irrational for people to donate if they don't have to. They wouldn't do it unless they were deriving utility from the action in excess of the value the donated (probably in for form of feeling smug over having done "the right thing"). This sort of "conspicuous altruism" is actually pretty well understood. And is actually the basis of a lot of pre-modern economic systems, while continuing to be a factor in modern economics as well.
The actual analysis of the combination of fast follower and free rider problems that you get with digital media, would be that small scale works still get crested but there's no incentive to publish/advertise them and they are limited in complexity because the cost of creation has to be fully justified by the intrinsic utility of having made the thing not any expectation of compensation from anyone else who enjoys it.
That is, there'd be a few "self published" quality novels but no Amazon.com to promote and distribute them, and no "Holywood" movies or AA video games. And there'd be far fewer of all media than there is now.
Because we have copyright (which was designed to solve a related but different problem) we instead have a situation where publishers can afford to exist, but only in an inefficient perpetual arms race, against the free riders who benefit from their work (finding, distributing, and promoting media) but don't pay for that work.
First, boycotting doesn't deliver any message to a place or business. If you just "do without", then there's no way for the business to be aware that the product they're selling is desired but that the packaging is offensive. Piracy is a long-standing issue that's been discussed and increasingly made known to be a symptom of a distribution and pricing model that is incompatible with obtaining maximized profits. Business will eventually learn, which wouldn't happen if people just "did without". Understand, I want to pay for digital stuff. Problem is the distribution model makes it artificially impractical to do so.
Not on it's own it does not. But then neither does piracy.
For example, if we're discussing a movie knowing how many times it'e been downloaded on a torrent site doesn't tell you how many people who downloaded it watched it (they might have been downloading anything that sounded interesting then never got around to that one title), or watched it all the way through. It also doesn't give you any visibility on the distinction between "i watched it and liked it, but not enough to buy it after I've already seen it" or "I would have bought it but I was already torrenting something else and torenting this as well was easier than looking for a way to buy it".
Businesses have entire marketing departments dedicated to figuring out what people want and what the things they want are worth to them.
The added information piracy provides (you want this thing if it's free) is of next to no value there, as the case where it's not true (you don't want it even if it is free) would be easily determined though otehr means.
Not all industrialized countries recognize the same sort of statutory damage awards as the United States.
The games that aren't available are in the usual publisher rights hell, like NOLF
That or they were never ported to the PC in the first place. Even games that aren't first-party often get ported to multiple consoles, such as the PS2 and Xbox, PS3 and Xbox 360, or PS4 and Xbox One, with no PC version. This could be caused by a lack of resources, by greater infringement rates of the publisher's past PC releases compared to its past console releases, or by the game focusing on local multiplayer (though this last reason has started to diminish with Steam Link). Or do you consider lack of a PC version a subset of "publisher rights hell"?
So someone who didn't cause damage cannot be sued for ridiculous amounts of money?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Again, begging the question: you still accept the theory that it is enforcement of rights that motivates people to create. You just shift the goalposts a little by saying that there are enough honest people to make it work.
The simpler model is that people like to create things, and given decent access to creation, enough people are willing to pay that this is a viable living for creators. The commercial artists who experimented with a low-threshold access to material (by not enforcing copyright) showed us empirical data that this is in fact a more likely explanation of reality.
This study merely confirms what people like Eric Flint already told us 16 years ago.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Not in much of the world, no. As far as I'm aware, the US is alone in offering such staggering punitive damages in this context. The US also has an everyone-pays legal system, allowing for rather transparent barratry in various copyright-related actions, so it's not as if the legal system there being heavily stacked in favour of wealthy rightsholders is surprising. Fortunately, most of the world is not the litigious absurdity that the US is in these respects.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Make it easy, hit the right price point, and people are quite prepared to pay. Look at the $ turned over by GoG, or HumbleBundle. Cheap, choice, easy, hooks into steam or whatever.
Make it hard and people will go "screw this, I'll just bittorrent". When Wrestelmania XXV was on, I was quite prepared to watch in on PPV, but due to restrictions by my cable company I could not. A few hours later I hit the torrents, boom, done. I was prepared to pay the full PPV price, but because they made it hard I sourced from elsewhere.
This discussion always reminds me of this http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
The commercial artists who experimented with a low-threshold access to material (by not enforcing copyright) showed us empirical data that this is in fact a more likely explanation of reality.
Really? Most of the experiments I've seen along those lines seem to have found results that were far less positive about people paying for work just out of good nature, and most of the exceptions were situations where the artist was already very well known thanks to earlier work supported by the usual payment model. Did you have any specific examples in mind where that was not the case?
Of course there are always those who will give money to support creative work that they believe in, entirely voluntarily. Charity applies in this sector as in almost any other with worthy goals. But it's a big jump from acknowledging that other forms of funding can be viable and useful in some cases to arguing that the copyright-backed model doesn't generate substantial extra revenues over relying on charity or other alternative models alone.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
If you are going to ignore the example I gave you, while asking for examples, I am going to assume you are arguing in bad faith. So do your own homework, I'm done with you.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
So, playing devil's advocate for a moment, maybe copyright infringement should be a crime, treated similar to other financial crimes like fraud
It is, if conducted at a commercial level.
Yes, in some places that is true, but I am talking here about "minor" copyright infringement. If stealing a $1 chocolate bar is criminal theft, I'm suggesting (as a basis for discussion) that perhaps downloading a movie instead of buying a $10 DVD should be criminal copyright infringement, and therefore something that public authorities are responsible for policing in the same way that they would prosecute someone caught stealing a chocolate bar from a store.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Soon you will be fined for thinking about a movie or book you watched/read. You payed for a 1 time viewing only.