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'Pirates' Tend To Be the Biggest Buyers of Legal Content, Study Shows (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: According to a paywalled survey of 1,000 UK residents by anti-piracy outfit MUSO first spotted by Torrent Freak, 60 percent of those surveyed admitted that they had illegally streamed or downloaded music, film, or TV shows sometime in the past. But the study also showed that 83 percent of those questioned try to find the content they are looking for through above board services before trying anything else. And while the study found that 86 percent of survey takers subscribe to a streaming subscription service like Netflix, that total jumped to 91 percent among those that admit to piracy. The survey found that the top reason that users pirate is the content they were looking for wasn't legally available (34 percent) was too cumbersome or difficult to access (34 percent), or wasn't affordable (35 percent). "The entertainment industry tends to envisage piracy audiences as a criminal element, and writes them off as money lost -- but they are wrong to do so," MUSO executive Paul Briley said of the study's findings. "The reality is that the majority of people who have gone through the effort of finding and accessing such unlicensed content are, first and foremost, fans -- fans who are more often than not trying to get content legally if they can," Briley added.
So the upshot of this study is that people who consume a lot of content consume a lot of content, and they consume some of that content legally.
That's it. There's no indication that people who download lots of contents are some huge fanbase.
the more they stay the same.
A few years ago I came across a magazine article from 1981. Back then, the record companies were complaining about "piracy". The villain, they said, was cassette tape recorders. People were using cassette decks to record their friends albums, instead of buying them.
So the RIAA commissioned a study which they hoped to take to the government and convince them to do something to stop this terrible problem. Unfortunately (for the RIAA), the study showed that people who owned cassette decks bought 80% more albums than people who didn't. And the study was shelved and never pursued.
But isn't. The material I pirate are material that would be really, really hard to come by (rarer music and movies). I have Netflix and Amazon Prime, in addition to having additional accounts here and there. At some point my CD collection was over 600 and my DVD collection over 800.
Another issue is also that I feel like I paid my dues. Between cassettes, CDs, DVDs, bullshit cable TV subscription for 30 years, I feel like I'm done contributing for the most part. I don't watch recent movies, and if I do, I pay for them. I definitely don't listen to today's crap music. So when I'm looking for a song from the 40's, I hit YouTube and rip the music out. Even 80's would be the same.
At the end of the day, it's the studios that fucked themselves up the ass by gouging their user base. Had they not been so greedy and made music affordable and available, they wouldn't have half the problems they're having right now.
I used to (5-10 years ago) buy a lot of DVDa and Blu-Rays.
But I almost always bought them used. So no income for any movie/content companies. Oh well.
Netflix's DVD business is alive and well with 100,000 titles. As for Netflix's streaming service, it offers only 5,600 titles.
It is the wrong question.
Not: Do you download? How big is your media library? What % did you (get legally/rip from media you own)?
Also: Argh...When private media servers are outlawed, outlaws will change their firewall configuration.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I still pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, & PS Vue. But I download all the shows I enjoy and put them on a personal media server just so I can have everything in one place for my viewing pleasure. I could very easily stop paying for all of those services and still keep watching whatever I want. But I can afford to do so and the cost is still far far less than paying for straight up cable.
Importantly, what this is saying is that a portion of the population that pirates do so for reasons that the distributors control or can address.
Increasingly draconian DRM and punitive punishment does little to either decrease piracy or create more customers.
Increasing the ease of access to content and either lowering price and/or offering some kind of tiered pricing will do both.
I try to buy all the content I like: stuff like GoT, The Expanse, good indie music, etc.
However, especially for video content, I watch pirated versions, even though I own it legally. Why? Because of the content protection clusterfuck and studios trying to dictate what devices I can play it on and monetize where and when I play it.
Fuck off with that. I'll buy the series to support the actors and production crew. I'll watch rips of same to avoid the MPAA shitfest.
I'm probably a dullard because I still buy retail CDs and DVDs. The first thing I do when I get home with a new DVD is to rip it to my media server. I'm sick to death of sitting through 5-10 minutes of unskippable advertising and legal notices before I even get to the root menu. Thank goodness format shifting is still legal in our country or I wouldn't be buying anything at all.
And in the eyes of the media companies, you might as well have pirated it. So why don't you?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Never mind.. what country is format shifting legal in?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Most of the stuff on Netflix you can pre-download to the phone before your commute...
I download some movies etc, but I also have over 100 movies on laserdisc and over 500 records and a smaller CD collection.
Laserdisc, records and CDs do not have DRM or unskippable ads.
One of the reasons people pirate is because their is NO legal purchasing option available.
The classic example is games for the 8-bit computers. Can you buy these title anymore? 99% nope. If you are lucky you might be able to find a used copy on eBay.
No one is losing money when people pirate a game that came out out 40 years ago for a "dead" platform -- especially when the original developer(s) and publishers are long out of business.
Same thing with TV shows. Where can I buy seasons 1 through N for my favorite 80's show? Let alone at a _reasonable_ price? Chances are it isn't even available. So I can understand people pirating them.
Sadly, most companies view piracy as some sort of "distribution problem" -- it isn't. Piracy shows there is a demand. The "free" price is just an added bonus.
Also these dumb fucks would rather it make it illegal to pirate a ripped DVD / BluRay of a movie you already own so you can skip all the bullshit "unskippable" trailers.
The Law is so out of touch with reality that it isn't even funny.
Guarantee you that The Expanse was saved by pirates downloading the show. If it wasn't for the response of the pirate community on forums and chats to go buy the show on Amazon, it would have been cancelled.
It just amazes me how little these idiots underestimate this medium and the pirate community. How completely under utilized it is for many shows to gauge if a show is popular or not. You can actually tell if a tv show is absolutely shit by looking how many seeders it has on torrent sites.
People pirate because they want to see if it's worth watching.
When downloading wasnâ(TM)t illegal and The Pirate Bay wasnâ(TM)t blocked in the Netherlands, I downloaded a lot and bought the movies I liked. Being a movie fan, it was quite a lot. But now (thanks BREIN), I donâ(TM)t download anymore. I havenâ(TM)t bought a new movie for at least half a year.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
The Billboard Top 100 has always been shit. Try elsewhere if you want stuff that came out in 2006 that didn't suck
That idea that music has been going downhill is just.. well... sad really. Music has always been fantastic, and it always will be, you've just - like always - got know where to look.
Most of the stuff I've pirated I've bought later.
I have a shitload of blurays.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Increasingly draconian DRM and punitive punishment does little to either decrease piracy or create more customers.
Precisely! Literally the only person DRM has the power to hurt is the paying customer. The preson who gets it from the Pirate Bay (or whatever the current equivalent is) gets a nice clean product by comparison. No adverts. No crappy "streaming" which keeps flipping back to 320p for no good reason, no format shifting limitations etc etc.
Piracy isn't just free, it gives a beter product.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I bought about five DVDs in a row where the copy protection prevented them from playing on the only DVD player I owned - my laptop. Having shelled out about 20 euro for the DVD, I'd then have to download an illegal torrent to watch the legally-purchased movie.
Do that often enough, and yarrrr going to optimise the process.
I paid $80 for season 1 and then paid for a subscription to see the other seasons but I couldnâ€(TM)t download them to watch offline. So I pirated the entire series and will cancel the subscription when Iâ€(TM)m done watching.
Thirteen 16 minute episodes (the average amount of new content per episode) for $20 is far too expensive. Especially for 200+ episodes. So, I figured $100 for 320 minutes of entertainment is more than fair. Especially for content that is 10 years old.
Otherwise, I buy all my stuff.
There’s another possible interpretation as well. People tend to want to justify their own actions; it’s entirely possible that people who are “unethical” enough to download content (I put the word in quotes as I do it myself) may also have little compunction about lying in a survey in order to save face. By furthering the image that pirates aren’t bad people, just people without legal options, they make themselves the victim rather than the offender.
Just a thought.
I was very poor as a kid, and now I'm a successful IT professional. As soon as vintage games became available on GOG and Steam I started adding them all to my collection. I don't really have time to play a lot of computer games but I like being able to imbibe the occasional dose of nostalgia, and the fuzzy feeling of doing what's right.
That is not a true statement. You do not just pay $10.00 a month -- and you know it.
What about your internet (of at least $80.00/month in U.S.)? Are you trying to be silly?
If you want to be taxed for the rest of you life to listen to music you probably purchased
in the 70's, that's your choice. Please don't look down on smarter people who purchase
a product once instead of the same product thousands of times. You okay with that?
Try not to bother me with this dribble any further, please...
CAP === 'perspire'
Importantly, what this is saying is that a portion of the population that pirates do so for reasons that the distributors control or can address.
Increasingly draconian DRM and punitive punishment does little to either decrease piracy or create more customers.
Increasing the ease of access to content and either lowering price and/or offering some kind of tiered pricing will do both.
Exactly. Sometimes I'll simply order CD's and videos from Amazon or from my local used-CD-and-video store. Sometimes I torrent stuff because I want it now, and I'm just not into subscribing to anything. I may keep only the torrent - possibly because I don't like the content as much as I thought I would, or I can't find it elsewhere, or it's ridiculously expensive because of various 'artificial scarcity' mechanisms. But in a fairly high percentage of cases, I'll buy a CD after I download an album. I like having something I can hold and look at, and the sound may be better than what I downloaded.
I also like to have the 'hold in my hand and put on a shelf' experience with movies. But the DRM, and the unskippable FBI warnings, advertisements, and other 'action not allowed' shit that videos are encumbered with, makes buying the physical object a much less compelling prospect. If they were easier to rip and copy, then I'd buy, rip, and have the content conveniently on my Patriot Player and on my computer. But since ripping is a pain in the ass, and somebody else has graciously already done that part and posted it for others to enjoy, I often torrent it and forego the actual disc.
I do my best to buy stuff that enables and supports my autonomy and my right to do with my purchases as I see fit. But those who cause prices to be too high via artificial scarcity, or who want me to pay more for something that's less convenient and flexible, or who attempt to control what I buy AFTER I buy it - well, they get WAY less of my money than they would if they weren't such cowering control freaks.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Guarantee you that The Expanse was saved by pirates downloading the show. If it wasn't for the response of the pirate community on forums and chats to go buy the show on Amazon, it would have been cancelled.
It just amazes me how little these idiots underestimate this medium and the pirate community. How completely under utilized it is for many shows to gauge if a show is popular or not. You can actually tell if a tv show is absolutely shit by looking how many seeders it has on torrent sites.
People pirate because they want to see if it's worth watching.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
To build upon the answers of that AC and that AC,
let's translate to a slightly more modern time :
In the early 80s, functionally :
- vinyl played the same role as audio CDs played a decade or so ago (the media that you buy your music on),
- tape cassettes played the role that USB stick or CD-R/RW played at the same time on which you could write heavily compressed MP3s with your whole collection of favorite palylist, that you stick in your MP3-compatible car radio.
Or iPod/other MP3 player, plugged in the car's AUX-in port if you're unlucky to have a car radio that doesn't support MP3 and doesn't have a standard DIN format so you could swap it easily with a better one.
(Really gettho solution: small FM-emitter attached to the iPod/MP3 player, broadcasting your own private local radio within the confine of the car to which you could tune your car radio. Or which other people stuck in the same traffic JAM could eavesdrop, because lots of these emitter came from China and weren't that precise with frequency broadcasting legislation).
In other words, both with cassettes and later with CR-R/USB sticks/MP3 player, there was a ton copying going on, but it wasn't that much what the **AA call "stealing" but much more for format shifting. Which back then was still considered completely legal.
Still, some jurisdiction managed to impose taxes on blank media, on ground that the media was mostly used for "stealing" so that the content owner get compensated for every blank media sold (e.g.: France had a tax on blank CD-R/RW. There are case of french people sued for "piracy" that have successfully defended, arguing that they only burned downloaded content on media that is taxed (CD-R/RW) and that the burned media was only used privately - no commercial exploitation )
or more "nowadays" example:
- vinyl played the same role as your Spotify/Netflix/Youtube Pro subscription (The thing you pay to obtain music).
- tape played the same role as your 400gb A1 microSDXC card into your smartphone's slot (The thing on which you copy it, to be able to listen to it while on the go, by streaming it to your car's bluetooth receiver).
The subtle difference is that nowadays, due to DMCA law and similar laws in other countries format shifting might be considered outlawed in some jurisdiction.
(US, I think ?)
(Here in CH, the local DMCA-like clone has exceptions explicitely put in place for Fair-Use exception of the copyright law, which in turn lists "technical reasons" as a reason which could be argued to cover gray areas such as "My device doesn't support the format of my legal music that I have legally purchased, I need to format shift and for that I need to blow up the encryption". Though it hasn't been tester in court)
So nowadays, the format shifting (from streaming to on-card) is done by the app itself controller by the content provider and is still protected by some form of DRM. (Netflix and Spotify apps store in their own private storage, and you should not be able to open this content with the VLC app).
On the other hand, these app can offer better quality for offline storage than for streaming (you could set Spotify to use a lower quality setting when streaming music on the go over 3G, and a higher quality setting when downloading and storing playlists over Wifi).
That wasn't necessarily the case back with tape (most people only could afford cheap lower quality tape material, and cheaper higher noise recorders - the end result being poorer quality than the original. But who cares, the point is to listen to it while on the go in a noisy car. Silent e-Car weren't a thing back then*)
---
* - There *were* e-vehicles even back in the (late) 80s (/90s): Citroen did have NiCd-powered mini-vans even back then. They were mainly used to fuel economy for frequent "stop-and-go" in city routes : Mostly used by postal services. But outside of postal service, e-cars weren't a thing, indeed.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Who the fuck is doing the math on these things? How am I to believe these stats if you are rounding up a percent on everything.
Is it your political/ideological agenda "the RIAA sues their customers", or did you just grow up?
Because, you know, I had a lot of CDs when I was younger. Then past 18 I started college and work. I had (and have) no time to buy or listen to CDs anymore.
How to legally skip "unskippable" trailers:
Put the DVD in a linux PC.
That depends on your local jurisdiction.
Here around in most European countries it should be legal (With some exceptions)
In the US : actually, no.
On two grounds :
1 - DRM and DMCA.
Any media since the DVD is encrypted (okay, its often encrypted with some laughable scheme that barely qualifies as such in the eyes of most cryptographers. Cue in usual discussion that "Bob" and "Eve" are the same person). Let's call it "scrambled" which is closer to reality.
DCMA restricts you severly in how you can un-scramble it. Even something as stupid as the CSS on DVDs that can be trivially broken with libdvdcss. This piece of code is considered illegal in the US (and is hosted by the VLC project *in France* were it is considered legal under fair use)
BlueRays and HDDVDs have similar problem as you need to break their AACS.
2 - Patents
More recent media (e.g.: BlueRays) use codecs for video (H264, H265) and audio (AAC) which are covered by patents.
Libraries that can decompress them are considered illegal in jurisdictions that recognize software patents (e.g. US) as they don't have a license to the patents.
You would need to obtain a patent to the corresponding codec before being able to run libavcodec.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It's legal in the USA until you circumvent protection to do it. Enjoy format shifting your vinyl, I guess.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I doubt the he is only using the internet for music.
It's like saying you need to include the cost of your house as part of the purchase price for that music you bought in the 70's since you have to store it somewhere.
You know, the more we talk about the importance of privacy for mundane shit like pausing music, the more we dilute the importance of privacy to the masses
Could be worse. In the UK the primary sport is football, and the most watched is the Premier League in England.
To watch the live games on TV you now have to subscribe to three different services, and even then you'll only see a small subset of the games the team you support plays. They wont broadcast many of them live.
Streaming is shit quality but oddly enough it's significantly better than no game at all.
The daft thing is that I'd pay the cost of all three services for one that showed all my team's games, even if that was all it showed. Sadly nobody offers such a sensible fucking option.
Obligatory Reference: The Oatmeal on Game of Thrones- http://theoatmeal.com/comics/g...
This is possible. I also never give too much weight to a single study.
That said, as a musician, I would often "trial" songs/bands not typically aired on the radio (this was before Pandora and Spotify, etc..) by downloading them from Usenet first; if I liked the band, I went and bought all their CDs so as to support them: Type O Negative, Lacuna Coil and Killswitch Engage are a few examples. There is also material however that I felt "meh" about, most I deleted but probably not everything, tbh.
I just find it annoying when people espouse the victim mindset to justify their pirating. Nothing says 'entitlement' more than that.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Enjoy format shifting your vinyl, I guess.
Or CDs. Right?
The situation with CDs is substantially more complicated, since there actually are copy protection schemes and the DMCA makes it illegal to subvert those. It remains legal to copy audio CDs for which the copy protection bit is not set.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually, no need to prorate your internet costs into your music or Netflix costs because most would have Internet anyway for porn, I mean general surfing.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That's the point I was trying to make :)
"So the upshot of this study is that people who consume a lot of content consume a lot of content, and they consume some of that content legally."
The study showed they consume more legal content than those who don't pirate. It doesn't matter if you consume boatloads of content and 90% of it is illegal if the 10% which is legal amounts for more than the people with no illegal content.
That was a great dream, unfortunately the content companies spread their content across multiple services to keep you from just paying x/mo to a service and streaming everything. They also shift it around so that shows and movies you like disappear from the streaming services. Trust me, I know I have subscriptions to hulu, netflix, amazon prime, every premium cable and movie channel, and go to the movies here and there as well. I still have to pirate 99% of my content.
I'd live with DRM and streaming if streaming services actually bothered with decent audio instead of just worrying about video and if the content companies didn't distribute the content among them rather than combining together into a massive streaming service or selling to all of them with no exclusivity.
Movies and shows not being available on the major streaming platforms alongside live air time isn't acceptable, neither is movies and shows disappearing from streaming services, random episodes missing, seasons missing, etc.
I've got to keep my crew entertained with something while we're hiding out in Tortuga.
Have gnu, will travel.
Are you talking about TrueHD vs DD+?
The vast majority of people using streaming services are lucky to have a soundbar versus their TV's built-in speakers.
That said Atmos is possible over DD+ and Netflix is rolling out content that includes it.
A lot of people could cancel cable Internet and make do with 10 GB/mo of mobile tethering were it not for video streams and game downloads.