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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.
Look at Steam and how much it gets from making so many titles available...
I think this is a very good example. I have bought several older titles from Steam because it's easy and priced correctly ($3 for an old game is fine by me). Steam also makes it easier than pirating.
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.
As someone who has been on all three sides of the fence I can tell you with some credibility that the sales you lost are, relatively speaking, few. The question is not how many have copied, the question is rather how many of those that did copy would have bought instead if they could not copy.
For many it's a bit like the free sample at the grocery. Sure they take a free sample of that wasabi cheese on white bread, but actually buy some?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
I "know someone who" wanted to rent a 5 year old movie on iTunes not long ago. He was ready to pay for it. The rights holders, however, had decided that this particular movie was only to be made available for purchase, not rental. More than twice the price of a rental. So guess what he did...
Other example, same guy, rented a movie on iTunes then decided he liked it so much he wanted to purchase it. Do you think they would let him convert the rental into a purchase? Nope, full price on top of rental. So guess what he did...
Bad service turns potential customers into pirates. In both examples above the rights holders missed out on the money someone was willing to spend because they were simply too greedy. It's easy to blame the pirates, though.
You don't even have to go that far. If I go into a shop, steal a DVD, and give it to you, the penalty is lower than if I buy the DVD, make a copy, and give that to you. I suspect that part of the reason that people don't take the risk seriously is that it's hard for a moderately sane person to imagine that a court would uphold a penalty for copying an object that's greater than the cost of stealing it.
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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.
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