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Studies Keep Showing That the Best Way To Stop Piracy Is To Offer Cheaper, Better Alternatives (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Study after study continues to show that the best approach to tackling internet piracy is to provide these would-be customers with high quality, low cost alternatives. That idea was again supported by a new study this week out of New Zealand first spotted by TorrentFreak. The study, paid for by telecom operator Vocus Group, surveyed a thousand New Zealanders last December, and found that while half of those polled say they've pirated content at some point in their lives, those numbers have dropped as legal streaming alternatives have flourished.
The study found that 11 percent of New Zealand consumers still obtain copyrighted content via illegal streams, and 10 percent download infringing content via BitTorrent or other platforms. But it also found that users are increasingly likely to obtain that same content via over the air antennas (75 percent) or legitimate streaming services like Netflix (55 percent). "In short, the reason people are moving away from piracy is that it's simply more hassle than it's worth," says Vocus Group NZ executive Taryn Hamilton said in a statement. "The research confirms something many internet pundits have long instinctively believed to be true: piracy isn't driven by law-breakers, it's driven by people who can't easily or affordably get the content they want," she said.
The study found that 11 percent of New Zealand consumers still obtain copyrighted content via illegal streams, and 10 percent download infringing content via BitTorrent or other platforms. But it also found that users are increasingly likely to obtain that same content via over the air antennas (75 percent) or legitimate streaming services like Netflix (55 percent). "In short, the reason people are moving away from piracy is that it's simply more hassle than it's worth," says Vocus Group NZ executive Taryn Hamilton said in a statement. "The research confirms something many internet pundits have long instinctively believed to be true: piracy isn't driven by law-breakers, it's driven by people who can't easily or affordably get the content they want," she said.
got to be the most profitable company in the world by selling relatively small amounts of product at very high prices. I don't think the content creators care. Right now the goal seems to be for Disney to buy literally everything and sell it back to us at a premium. Not sure if that'll work or not.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Charging $40 for one movie on a Blu-Ray is ridiculous and anyone trivially stealing from such ridiculous gougers doesn't feel bad about it at all. The threat of a DCMA letter is low enough to be disregarded as a deterrent.
Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. -- Gabe Newell
Didn't we already have this discussion 8 years ago ???
"The research confirms something many internet pundits have long instinctively believed to be true: piracy isn't driven by law-breakers, it's driven by people who can't easily or affordably get the content they want," she said.
No, the pundits are misunderstanding. Piracy is driven by the convenience of the piracy. Its merely the inconvenience necessary to get them to go legit is proportional to the affordability. However if piracy is convenient enough affordability offers little prevention.
... similar thing. Nearly anyone will do it if easy enough and the consequences low enough.
Once upon a time I had some software bundled with a university textbook, molecular modeling and visualization software. Think a digital version of the plastic ball and stick kits, now add geometry cleanup and various 3D renderings. Not wanting to deal with the hassle of copy protection I did not use any. The textbook included a coupon that let the student buy the software at the university bookstore for US$30. The software was required for the class, software sales were 10% that of the textbook. The publisher said to add copy protection. I selected the simplest, crudest, least like to generate customer support problems copy protection that I could find. Cracks were quickly produced and widely distributed for other software using this copy protection. I didn't care, I wanted to minimize customer support calls. This copy protections software worked. Sale increased to 80% that of the textbook despite cracks being immediately and readily available. This was in a university environment, where many are technically competent or can find someone who is quite easily. Yet the simplest crudest easily defeatable barrier to piracy caused the piracy rate to drop from 90% to 20%.
People will pirate if it easy to do so, regardless of how low cost a software product is. In other words people will break the law if it is easy enough to do so. Traffic laws, piracy
The study clearly says people won't steal if you give them shit to them for free.
It's a whole new concept in fighting crime!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I mean, I'm one of the unfortunate people who ran a BBS back in the late 80's and early 90's who got raided by Federal agents over copyright violation accusations. (Ultimately, they just wound up sitting on all my equipment for over a year, keeping it in a storage locker someplace, until deciding to drop the case and return all of it to me. But as we all know with computer gear, a lot of it had already depreciated considerably by then -- so I was left with a lot of stuff I couldn't resell for much of anything.)
But way back THEN, we kept trying to tell everyone who would listen that software piracy was a big waste of time for anyone to chase after and try to prosecute. The SAME people guilty of pirating were the BEST CUSTOMERS or ADVOCATES for buying stuff made by the companies trying to squash it!
For example? One of the "big issues" they had with my BBS was that someone had uploaded a cracked copy of a version of AutoCAD to the "New Uploads" folder. While it's true that's a really expensive piece of software? It's also true that the users on my BBS were mostly kids who could never afford to buy AutoCAD, nor would they ever have a real cost justification to buy it, if they DID have the money. By them pirating it around though, it encouraged some of them to buy a book on how to use it, and they spent some time learning the application. That, in turn, means there's a whole self-taught generation of people who could grow up to work for companies who DO legitimately buy the software, the maintenance agreements, and all of the upgrades and add-ons for it. That's a big win for AutoDesk, whether they admit it or not! Those people aren't going to be happy if the company buys a competitor's CAD product. They want the one they're comfortable with!
When you challenge most software firms with this kind of logic, they typically turn around and give a lecture on there being a "right and a wrong way" to go about learning their products -- perhaps throwing in the fact that they sell "student versions" much cheaper for students. And you know? That's all true, technically. If you're purely a "letter of the law" and "show no mercy" type, I guess there's your answer? But I bet the "pirates" on BBS's like mine, back then, OFTEN got a career in I.T. or in using one or more of these business apps thanks to having a way to download it for free, on their own terms, to use on their own PC, on their own schedule. And it just wouldn't have ever happened if you expected them to opt to pursue it in college (when they're already cramming their brains full of other course content they need to get through to graduate).
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
The proof is in the proverbial pudding. "Prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become [Steam's] largest market in Europe," Newell said.
From: http://www.escapistmagazine.co...
Design software that does many things.
Break up the software into shareware type products at a low price.
That link together as a work flow but can be stand alone.
Find the impulse buy level for each seperate software product.
Sell as parts, as a bundle. Add in how to ebooks.
Use version drift to further keep people buying back in with steep discounts for the next version.
Discounts for buying into more of the software.
Keep innovating.
Listen to your users. Add features as needed due to OS, GPU, CPU support as needed.
Always thank people for reported security issues. Tell them when the problem is getting worked on and when it is ready. Thank them again.
People can only spend so much on software, find that amount and sell at the point.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
A study into how a comment will sell :)
"Make" with "male" and enjoy the comments.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Thanks for the non-sequitur. Really, you should be a comedy writer.
I buy lots of virtual content because the price is decent so it's a factor but that doesn't mean that the other claim of piracy bring a hassle isn't one too.
Finding ebooks and comics and such take time and effort which you have less of if you just pay.
Price isn't everything. Lack of easy access to pirated content is one too.
Plus getting caught. Torrenting using random free VPN service at least may not work.
Typical content from 8.0 years ago, though was just as whacky, and the Space Shuttle Discovery docked with the the Space Station for the 1st time.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If you sell the stuff for cheap enough, they will buy it.
SPECIALLY if you get around retarded horrible taxes in the country, and sell this product for a price the local population can actually buy.
There's a reason why steam is pretty much the king of brazil when talking about selling games.
s/Best/Worst/
No profit in that cheap-assed approach to solving the piracy "problem". Dare I say "crisis"? The greedy bastards certainly dare.
The ACTUAL solution approach that I favor would be to focus on cost recovery and accountability without the unending quest for obscene profits. That's a fake problem because there is NO amount of profit that can solve the problem, in start contrast to all the actual problems we have to deal with.
I still can't figure out why such approaches have so little appeal on Slashdot. Must be my attitude. Ergo, I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Exactly, not everyone here has an attention span that
... Oooh, shiny!
Or over 15 years ago - when the iTunes music store first opened and started selling music for 99 cents.
Like who would pay 99 cents for a music track they could pirate for free? Yet, the convenience of just finding it and clicking buy was much easier than Napster and friends and hoping it wasn't a mislabeled track. Plus the convenience of having it in a minute after purchase.
And the impressive sales of that caused music to go DRM free a few years later, when the music industry was being crushed by Apple and their music store - there was no way for them to get DRM music via any other store, and Apple was too big and powerful, so the music industry let Amazon sell music DRM free just so that they could break the iTunes monopsony.
This has been clear for a long time now. The stupidity, greed, arrogance and authoritarian mind-set of the content "owners" is the reason they are incapable of seeing this. They still believe entertainment data is somehow "theirs" and that, of course anybody copying it without their say-so is "stealing" and that without a doubt this must hurt their revenue.
Nothing of that is true. It is an antiquated mind-set suitable for cave-men where physical goods are the main type of good, but not reflecting actual reality in the digital age at all. Fortunately, quite a few content creators have understood what was clear for a long time: If you provide entertainment, your customers decide what they are willing to pay for it, not you. And that if you provide good value, enough of your customers will be willing to pay even if not forced to do so at all that your business will turn a reasonable profit. If you try to force your customers to pay, on the other hand, they will either go away or circumvent your measures, which will hurt you the most.
It is good to see that some people that some people (those doing these studies) continue to see the actual facts here, instead of the "obvious", but deeply wrong claims of the copyright mafia, which in addition, are dangerous to society as their aggressive efforts to push draconian laws hurt individual freedoms and fair-use.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Study after study done by actual scientists are "hogwash"? When they dished out intelligence, you must have gone to the wrong queue...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I want to buy Aliens:Special Edition in a way that I can play it any time I want to, as it's my favourite movie.
- If I buy online, it's literally impossible to buy legitimately. None of the stores have the special edition. Only the ordinary. I've sat and compared running times for all the big box-sets as well, in case it was hiding in one of those. Nope. I just can't buy it in the UK online, whether from Google Play, Amazon, Netflix or anyone else.
- If I buy it on Blu-Ray it comes wrapped up in a shitty menu that takes me ten minutes to navigate in order to start the movie. I can't play that on anything other than a Blu-Ray player, and it seems to want to go on the Internet. It's also "DVD-resolution" no matter what the box says (and I'm not even into HD, let alone a resolution-nerd)... it's blocky, grainy and horrible - especially in the dark scenes, which kinda ruins the movie.
No good for, say, taking on a long plane journey which is where I would be most likely to want to watch my favourite movie to pass the time. I can't copy it to the laptop, I can't even play it sometimes as the copy protection has decided to just spin that disk forever on that laptop several times.
- If I buy it on DVD, I have similar problems. It would literally be the only movie I have that I need to turn on another device for in order to watch (yes... I rebought all my movies to stream online via official services... what a horrible person I am!).
However:
- The movie is shown on TV all the time, meaning I'm one-click away from a perfect DVB recording of it, minus the adverts, stored in a standard format, that plays everywhere, for free.
- I can download it in *minutes* from a Google search from people donating their bandwidth and time and effort in order to let me watch my favourite movie.
Now... I don't pirate. I've been firmly of the opinion for the last twenty years that if I have to break the law to consume a product, then I just won't consume it. As such, the only copy of my favourite movie that I have is a VHS (and I don't own any VHS players any more), an ancient DVD someone bought me and a Blu-Ray boxset that I bought at a bootsale. Meaning that "the TV/movie industry" has seen precisely zip from me for that movie for over 20 years.
Since then, I have put way more hours into trying to GIVE SOMEONE MONEY for the damn thing legitimately than the entire series of movies would have cost me if it were available.
It was after several such instances (Aliens: Special Edition, the British TV sitcoms The Two of Us, Just Good Friends and The Good Life - the latter is available up to series 2 on Amazon, it was available on the BBC store at one point but that closed down and removed all their content. JGF is available only on DVD but is played on UK channels ALL THE TIME. The Two of Us published one series on DVD and the other series has been "coming soon" for the last ten years. It's played on UK TV all the time) that I decided that I need to stop bothering. They've had their chance and obviously don't want my money.
The BBC archives are all digital now... I understand that there are rights issues with some things but literally two of these above are BBC works, one of those is ITV (which is still broadcasting it and runs online streaming TV channels!): Honestly, just work out how much you'd have to pay people to air the show, put it online, charge that. If people want it at that price, they'll get it, if they don't, they won't. By contrast Channel 4 (the next biggest UK TV broadcaster) put every single episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway (the original UK version from the 80's/90's) online, for free on a streaming service and on YouTube.
I know for certain - because someone did it once to prove the point - that ten minutes online, on any torrent site, or on Kodi plugins that search for illegal online content will get me all the above, in a format that "just plays" forever.
I consider it extremely rude and stupid that a genuine, paying customer, who only wants to
There were maybe two or three companies that tried and were shut down quickly. Then there were a few where you needed to have mac roms to even make them work and they never amounted to much either.
The closest thing to a mac clone has always been Windows. (Viable or not is in the eye of the beholder on that score)
A friend sent over instructions for ripping a bluray to HDD just yesterday. Took him years to get the process prefect. Still, it involves multiple complex steps, having just the right hardware and software, and at the end of it you get something you could have pirated with a fraction of the time and effort.
If they catered to people like me they could actually make more money. For example, when I buy CDs they are usually second hand. The older ones tend to sound better, from back before the loudness war started. Anyway, I put them in a box and never play them, and then download a "pirate" copy with all the tagging and artwork taken care of.
So the record label gets nothing, because it was second hand. But I'd pay them used CD prices for the opportunity to download those same FLAC files that I "pirated". I expect the same quality as the the warez groups, i.e. standardized tagging and artwork formats, standard file names, MD5 checksums, option to grab as one big FLAC file with a .cue for gapless playback.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
We are having this discussion all the time, to be more correct.
Defender's Quest programmer Lars Doucet has an excellent series of articles on what is at stake when a customer, or would-be customer, decides to buy or to pirate a computer game. In sum, there are, not one, but four currencies: literal money, time, pain-in-the-butt and integrity.
Pirate sites can make you feel dirty (it costs integrity) and make you fight viruses and false download links (paint-in-the-butt), but usually makes the game available in days or even instantly (low time cost) and cost zero dollars. Legit game stores have to compete with that.
So, if the game's DRM is obnoxiously hard on legit customers (high pain-in-the-butt cost) and is more expensive than the pirate version, it will lose hard to piracy, because the only "currency" in which the legit version costs less is the integrity currency. It's no wonder Steam, GOG.com and other online stores for PC games nowadays try to make buying and playing the game as seamless as possible. (Of course, there are still AAA games that the publishers insist on having obnoxious DRM).
Music streaming services got this really well. Spotify, iTunes, Deezer and Google Play Music are all easy to use, fast to listen and have each of them an exellent and comprehensive library of songs. You don't have to subscribe to multiple services to listen to the music you want.
Now, video streaming services are doing the exact opposite: do you want to see a particular movie (not any movie, or a movie of a particular genre, a particular and specific movie)? Maybe it's on Netflix. Or on Hulu. Or is it on Amazon Prime Video? Perhaps it will be on Disney+. Or you have to "rent" or "buy" it on Google Play Video or something.If it is an anime, maybe it is on Crunchyroll or Funimation. The cash and pain-in-the-butt currencies skyrocket on that system. It's not feasible to subscribe to every video streaming service on the planet. It is no wonder many of us are returning to the torrent sites.
Without piracy you don't get the full experience of owning content:
- Movies with adverts
- Unskippable logo screens
- The privilege of trying to guess which of the 10 streaming services you subscribe to actually has your movie.
- The benefit of running 10 game store clients on your computer at the same time, all wanting to run at startup, all just dying to sell you their exclusive bullshit.
But wait there's more.
- Wouldn't you rather part with more money being nickle and dimed with DLC?
- That RTX2080 is a bit to fast for you? Well Denuvo will happily drop 5-10fps of your framerate and triple the loading time of your game.
- Got too much HDD space? Well why not download all the things in all the languages with all the content you won't use rather than get one of those crappy "repacks" at 1/2 the size of a retail game. SSDs are cheap now anyway.
For example, when I buy CDs they are usually second hand. The older ones tend to sound better, from back before the loudness war started.
You would need to purchase albums that were produced before the Loudness Wars amplified at the dawn of the consumer digital music era (mid- to late-90s) and were not remastered, but there is no compelling reason to purchase "used" CDs over "new" ones because that is in no way a guaranteed means of sidestepping the dynamic range compression. Where did you hear that?
You can generally look up which releases are overly compressed online.
http://dr.loudness-war.info/
The 80s was a golden age in many ways. I've got an original Brothers in Arms release and it sounds incredible, one of the most dynamic albums ever made. Every subsequent re-release and "remaster" ruined it a little bit more.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Or over 15 years ago - when the iTunes music store first opened and started selling music for 99 cents.
Like who would pay 99 cents for a music track they could pirate for free? Yet, the convenience of just finding it and clicking buy was much easier than Napster and friends and hoping it wasn't a mislabeled track. Plus the convenience of having it in a minute after purchase.
... and not having to worry about malware.
You have your subjective opinion on the issue, and I don't know if any comprehensive study has ever been done that would give us answers to prove you right or wrong? But I can very definitely state that in my 30 years or so working with computers and I.T., I've seen MANY, MANY examples where people went on to drive commercial sales of software products, thanks to them having a way to get their hands on free, pirated copies of the programs first.
In your Gimp vs. Photoshop example? I know many people who try to get into photo editing and touch-up work who DO try "The Gimp" but don't find its UI look and feel to be very user-friendly or inviting. I know there was even a project at one time, at least for the Linux version of Gimp, that bolted a "Photoshop type UI" onto it as kind of a skin? I remember getting really excited that they'd finally done that for it, until I learned it was a dead project.
There are, arguably, a lot of other really good photo editors out there that cost much less than Photoshop. So sure, someone on a budget could buy Pixelmator or something like that instead. But once an application has established itself as a "leading" one for the tasks at hand, most people would rather invest their time and energy in learning and mastering it, vs. another product that you may not be able to get help on from anybody else you know if you get stuck.
Especially when you're still a kid or teenager, you have far more time than money. So it's a prime time of your life to spend a lot of hours of screen time in front of software to really learn it, but it's NOT a prime time at all to come up with many hundreds of dollars to PAY for it.
Even when it comes to video game titles though? Everyone I knew who got hooked on computers as a kid pirated many dozens of game titles. At the same time though? We were the main audience who had any interest in playing them in the first place. With our limited buying power, it was always a combination of spending as much as we could to buy a few games (especially the new releases that you wanted to play ASAP), and pirating a lot of the other stuff as the opportunities presented themselves.
I just can't see a valid reason to feel sorry for the industry selling the games? Even if they succeeded in applying some sort of 100% foolproof copy protection and forced every single owner of the game to have paid for it? They would wind up with, basically, no additional revenue over what they actually got. If a kid can only get 1 or 2 games each birthday a gifts, and another 1-2 each Christmas - and only earns enough money to buy 1-2 others over the rest of a year? That's a max of about 6 titles per year they're ever going to possibly buy. Successful piracy of a selection of the thousands of other choices competing for their dollars doesn't really change that. You'll profit from 6 sales per year off that kid, regardless.
I've seen MANY, MANY examples where people went on to drive commercial sales of software products, thanks to them having a way to get their hands on free, pirated copies of the programs first.
That may be. My question is still, why did they go to the trouble of pirating that specific piece of software to begin with? If it was because they wanted the experience of that program because it was going to be something they needed to know for later, then it is unwarranted to claim that the purchase was driven by the piracy. The purchase was driven by the need to use that program.
I see that many times, where people pay for Word because they need the interoperability with other people, even though they could have "pirated" OfficeLibre and accomplished the tasks without actual piracy. Or they pay for Photoshop instead of using The Gimp.
Now, when you get to less common software where there is competition, I do believe that having low cost alternatives during the learning phase can drive sales later. That's for things like "Matlab", where The Mathworks has a student version for $100 and then requires LOTS of money for the full, professional version later. But if they don't snag the user as a student, they'll use something else (scipy, numpy, C, FORTRAN, R, etc). Very few people who pirate Photoshop are likely to be writing their own Photoshop in C or python when they get into the workplace.
But once an application has established itself as a "leading" one for the tasks at hand, most people would rather invest their time and energy in learning and mastering it, vs. another product that you may not be able to get help on from anybody else you know if you get stuck.
You've just repeated my point using different words. It was the usability of the product that drove the sale, not the fact that it was pirated early on.
Even when it comes to video game titles though?
I was pretty specific in saying that I was talking about "this category of software" (i.e. commercial utility software), not all software ever produced by anyone at any time ever.
If all the cable companies were torh down today, it is likely TV would become a matter of turning on a box, searching on a show name and playing it. The only reason why we can't do this is because these companies insist on clinging to old ways of doing business.
The industry should have fixed this long ago, and I'm getting too old to wait for it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If you spread the content across streaming sources with exclusive licenses; the cost is not your $15/mo subscription. The cost is ALL the freaking $15/mo subscriptions.
I guess I'm not sure how your point really relates to my original argument though?
It seems to me like it's not so relevant to the matter why a person decided to download a pirated piece of software, as long as the financial reality is that they can't afford to buy it?
Usability and capability of a piece of software clearly helps drive its desirability. But that's a universal truth. (Whether you're a company who can afford to buy anything they like, or a pre-teen who doesn't have $10 to her/her name -- you're probably going to gravitate towards the more user-friendly and capable program as the one you want to download, install, and learn to use.)
At least in the case of the computer bulletin board systems like the one I ran, it wasn't really much trouble at all to download a program. You had to have some disk space freed up for it and the time to wait for it to finish. But obtaining it was a matter of a few keystrokes. All sorts of programs got passed around on the BBS's and that was more a matter of some "cracking group" deciding to focus on cracking something they got ahold of at a particular time than anything else. (A BBS didn't typically cherry-pick what was offered. It took whatever someone was willing to share and upload to it. And that content tended to be anything the cracking groups just finished cracking and were trying to get distributed as widely as possible.)