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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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*)
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* - 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 ]
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
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.