I'm not sure about this, this would be a very hard thing to prove. How do you isolate the direct effects of piracy from normal market trends?
I've only browsed most of the studies, so I can't give a good answer. But it seems like many studies look at differences between consumers, and try to find correlations between pirating behaviour and purchasing behaviour. For example, the one by Industry Canada. Or this British one.
Generally, the people who pirate the most also spend the most money on music, if we include concert-going and merchandise.
So far, I've only found one (1) study which confirms the thesis that piracy adversely affects sales, and that's the study sponsored by the American recording industry.
Also, I'd like to point out that maximising the revenue from music/movie/software sales is not optimal for society. Quite to the contrary, if the same amount of music/movies/software can be sold to the public at a lower price, it's better for the economy. A market which can produce a music CD for $5 is more efficient than one which can produce the same CD for $10. From an economic standpoint, an industry's revenues should be as small as possible, as long as it stays profitable for it to produce its goods.
A much smaller amount of pirates, though, would have bought the content if it wasn't for a free alternative being around. These ones do result in at least a theoretical loss for creators. This group hurts smaller artists more than large publishers, since small sums of money matter much more starving musicians than those covered by the big, rich, greasy, wings of old publishers.
I think it's the other way around, since the smaller artist's music is harder to find online, they benefit more from the free advertising which piracy provides, and they tend to have a larger percentage of dedicated fans who are willing to go to concerts, buy merchandise and donate directly.
Many small bands have found that it's most efficient to just offer the music for free download, for example, the ones at jamendo.com.
I mostly agree with you, I just objected to the judgemental attitude of the grand-grand parent. I'll just respond to some minor things.
Also don't confuse not feeling sated or feeling hungry with starving. We, as human beings, have the ability to rationalize our decisions in a way that other animals don't. We can logically determine that we're done eating even when our bodies are telling us that we haven't eaten enough. Hunger is a sensation that can be unpleasant, but it's not detrimental if we've eaten the right amount of food.
Hunger sensations aren't the problem - they're just uncomfortable. The problem is the fatigue and inability to think and act which occur when the body goes into energy-saving mode, especially if you have duties as a spouse, parent or employee.
f you're willing to make losing weight your primary life goal, everyone can do it. But most people aren't willing to make that commitment. Most people aren't willing to quit a stress-causing job that doesn't allow time for meal preparation, exercise and the correct amount of sleep. [...]
Not all people have the choice to do so, either. Depending on your background, IQ and social situation, it may not be practically possible to get a job which allows you to care for your health.
If everything else in your life is fine - you have a good job, disposable income, good relations to friends and family, good self-esteem, is generally healthy, and so on - conquering a problem like overweight doesn't need to be so hard, even if you have a genetic propensity for obesity. For someone who has to devote most of their energy towards making their economy and marriage work every day, the same task can be practically impossible.
I'd take the 70% figure with a huge grain of salt, though. Diet and its health effects is one of those areas where science is really uncertain and the conventional wisdom changes every second decade.
Contrary to popular belief, obesity caused by glandular or metabolic problems is pretty rare.
The reason most people gain weight is that they simply do not realize how many extra calories they're eating.
There are also other reasons - many people who suffer from obesity have reduced sensations of hunger and fullness. The feedback system which tells them when to start and stop eating is impaired. This isn't psychological - it can be seen in infants soon after birth.
Of course, that's a little harder for outsiders to understand, so it's easier to just blame it on "metabolic problems". Many people don't realise that everyone - even themselves - are controlled by instincts, and that eating or not eating is not a free choice, for them or for anyone else. The people who got lucky and were born with better instincts believe they just chose to act that way.
Of course, in a situation where food is scarce and starvation common, the obese ones are the ones with the best instincts.
Naturally, I don't believe people chose to have diabetes - I was just trying to show how you can apply the same type of reasoning to other types of medical problems, and how absurd it sounds.
First, just because it's easy for you, it doesn't mean it's easy for everyone else. You're the kind of person who'd hit a left-handed child because they "chose" to use the wrong hand.
Second, it's a medical fact that there are biological and hereditary components to obesity. If your metabolism doesn't convert fat to usable energy, it doesn't matter how little you eat. You'll just get weaker and weaker without losing any weight.
Of course, almost everyone will lose weight if they literally starve themselves every day of their lives, but that will not only require enormous will-power, it will also make you extremely tired and unable to concentrate, and be detrimental to your health. Someone with metabolic problems may be able to lose weight in theory, but the price in terms of health may be so high it's more rational to just stay fat.
Of course there are people who just rationalise their obesity, but that doesn't justify assuming that everyone with weight problems chose to be that way. That makes you just as bad as them. It's prejudiced, bigoted and ignorant.
The assumption that everything is a choice clashes with facts. That means the assumption must be false, even if it means you have to change your world-view. You can chose to stay ignorant, or you can chose to face the facts.
Of course DRM isn't the cause of piracy. But if a supposed anti-piracy measure doesn't do anything to reduce piracy, and in fact may increase its slightly, I think it's worth noting.
Unless the game publishers are total idiots, it could mean the main purpose of DRM is not to stop piracy, but to stop legal lending and reselling.
There's a third option, besides making a pirate go legit or making a legit customer go pirate: making a legit customer abstain from the game because of the DRM. Those are the people the game publishers lose money on.
Yes, piracy is big with or without DRM. But I think the point is how many people simply abstain from a game because of DRM. Those are the ones which represent a loss to the game publishers.
I think DRM is a pain in the ass and I can understand people who won't buy games that use it, but you don't have an innate right to own a game.
Does the game producer have an innate right to stop me from copying the game?
If not, the game producer can put as much DRM on the game as he/she wants, and I can remove the DRM and copy the game as much as I want.
Personally, I think copyright should be balanced to maximise the benefit for society as a whole, not to maximise the profits of the creators, artists or publishers. And I believe the most beneficial for society would be something like five years commercial copyright, and free copying for private, non-commercial use.
Actually, I'm advocating pirating games without paying for them.
I'm reasonably well off financially, and buy most games I play for more than an hour, but I still think people should pirate games if they need to. It's better if you get the game without paying, than don't get the game AND don't pay. The game publisher is not better off because you abstained from making a copy.
Not using a piece of software you could easily and cheaply copy is a form of economic waste. It reduces the total amount of goods produced in society. As long as piracy doesn't hurt the production of new software, it's only beneficial for society.
Now, if we could only legalise private, non-commercial copying, we would also get rid of the unnecessary guilt and legal hassles.
I'm not a socialist, so I see nothing wrong with a scenario where commercial companies produce culture for the rich, while the poor still benefit from it through copying.
Private, non-commercial use should be legal, though.
Nobody would have benefited if he had done without games. He'd have been poorer for it, and the game publishers would have been neither poorer nor richer.
If private, non-commercial copying is legalised, kids, students and other people with little money can benefit from all the software available, and the software publishers can still make money from selling a convenient, safe product to those for whom price is not a big issue.
Yes, people pirate games because of self-interest. I believe they do it mainly because it's convenient and allows them to sample a wider range of titles, though, not to save money.
Take yourself as an example. You bought the games you could afford, and pirated the rest, so you didn't really save any money. You just got more games for the amount of money you were prepared to spend in the first place. The game publishers didn't really lose anything on you - they wouldn't have been better off if you spent the same amount of money and refrained from pirating.
That's the main reason I believe piracy is good for society and should be legalised - it allows people to benefit from a wider range movies/music/software, without adversely affecting the production of new movies/music/software. The mentioned industries continue to increase their revenues year after year, so there's no risk they'll stop producing them in the foreseeable future.
Simple: most people download a lot of games they never play, and would never have bought anyway. It's so simple and convenient to just click a link on Pirate Bay, and then delete the torrent when your disk gets full.
And even if someone actually plays the game, it doesn't automatically mean they represent a lost sale. There are people who would rather play a freeware game than spend $1 on software.
I don't care if the parent is an FBI agent, since it's still legal to circumvent access protection in order to play a game here in Sweden. How would I play games on my CD-less netbook without no-cd cracks?
Piracy came first, but DRM may very well make it worse.
Then why do game publishers still use DRM? Well, it could be because it stops you from (legally) lending the game to your friends, and from (legally) reselling it when you're done with it. It allows the publisher to circumvent your fair use rights and get paid more times for the same game. Game publishers have been trying to squash the used game market for one or two decades - they've (unsuccessfully) argued in court that the reseller is infringing their copyright when he/she sells a used game!
The article also mentions, that another data point, a game with DRM, suffered exactly the same piracy figures. The point isn't that 90% of the population playing the game will pirate it, if they can do it easily. It is that 90% will pirate it. Period.
Doesn't that prove TFA's point? There's no use in DRMing a game; it has no effect on piracy, and makes the game more of a hassle for the paying user.
The "90% piracy" figure doesn't include the people who decided to not play the game at all because of the DRM. Those are the ones which represent a loss to the game publisher.
In addition to the cost of implementing the DRM, of course.
It's just that you constantly hear the same refrain from certain people: "Oh, I'd buy it if it weren't for the DRM", "I'd buy it if it were cheaper", "I'd buy it if it were ported to Linux" -- and I don't doubt that many of the people who say these things are being truthful -- but for the vast majority, it's just an easy rationalization for their entitlement complex.
Well, I know for a fact that I have original games sitting on my shelf which I first pirated and then decided to buy legally, when I saw how good they were. But you may very well be right - a lot of people may just rationalise.
The question is if it matters. Would the cheapskate with a $2000 gaming rig and only 3 legally bought games have bought more games if there weren't pirate copies available? Would he have bought a $2000 gaming rig at all if he didn't know he could get games for free? If "no", the game creator hasn't really lost anything.
I'm glad that kids, students and other people with little money can get pirate copies of the software they like. What's the point keeping it from them if they wouldn't have been paying customers anyway?
I'm not sure you win more users during the first few hours before the game is cracked, than you lose by making the game inconvenient to use.
In the case of music DRM, the music clearly sold better without DRM, and the music publishers eventually had to abandon the whole DRM scheme, despite having spent millions and millions on the technology and infrastructure. It proved the point that people ARE willing to pay for music as long as it's the same quality and as convenient as pirating.
Because most people pirate dozens of games and only play one or two of them. It's just so easy and convenient to pirate - just click a link on Pirate Bay, and then click OK on the dialog box that your BitTorrent client pops up. When you're out of disk space, just delete the games you tired of after five minutes, or, in most cases, didn't even bother to install.
I can honestly say there's no chance in hell I would have bought most of the games I downloaded. But since I became an adult and got a steady income, I've bought most of the games I've played for more than an hour.
It's meaningless to compare the number of sales to the number of pirate copies. The number of pirate copies has no relation to the number of potential customers.
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I'm not sure about this, this would be a very hard thing to prove. How do you isolate the direct effects of piracy from normal market trends?
I've only browsed most of the studies, so I can't give a good answer. But it seems like many studies look at differences between consumers, and try to find correlations between pirating behaviour and purchasing behaviour. For example, the one by Industry Canada. Or this British one.
Generally, the people who pirate the most also spend the most money on music, if we include concert-going and merchandise.
So far, I've only found one (1) study which confirms the thesis that piracy adversely affects sales, and that's the study sponsored by the American recording industry.
Also, I'd like to point out that maximising the revenue from music/movie/software sales is not optimal for society. Quite to the contrary, if the same amount of music/movies/software can be sold to the public at a lower price, it's better for the economy. A market which can produce a music CD for $5 is more efficient than one which can produce the same CD for $10. From an economic standpoint, an industry's revenues should be as small as possible, as long as it stays profitable for it to produce its goods.
A much smaller amount of pirates, though, would have bought the content if it wasn't for a free alternative being around. These ones do result in at least a theoretical loss for creators. This group hurts smaller artists more than large publishers, since small sums of money matter much more starving musicians than those covered by the big, rich, greasy, wings of old publishers.
I think it's the other way around, since the smaller artist's music is harder to find online, they benefit more from the free advertising which piracy provides, and they tend to have a larger percentage of dedicated fans who are willing to go to concerts, buy merchandise and donate directly.
Many small bands have found that it's most efficient to just offer the music for free download, for example, the ones at jamendo.com.
I mostly agree with you, I just objected to the judgemental attitude of the grand-grand parent. I'll just respond to some minor things.
Also don't confuse not feeling sated or feeling hungry with starving. We, as human beings, have the ability to rationalize our decisions in a way that other animals don't. We can logically determine that we're done eating even when our bodies are telling us that we haven't eaten enough. Hunger is a sensation that can be unpleasant, but it's not detrimental if we've eaten the right amount of food.
Hunger sensations aren't the problem - they're just uncomfortable. The problem is the fatigue and inability to think and act which occur when the body goes into energy-saving mode, especially if you have duties as a spouse, parent or employee.
f you're willing to make losing weight your primary life goal, everyone can do it. But most people aren't willing to make that commitment. Most people aren't willing to quit a stress-causing job that doesn't allow time for meal preparation, exercise and the correct amount of sleep. [...]
Not all people have the choice to do so, either. Depending on your background, IQ and social situation, it may not be practically possible to get a job which allows you to care for your health.
If everything else in your life is fine - you have a good job, disposable income, good relations to friends and family, good self-esteem, is generally healthy, and so on - conquering a problem like overweight doesn't need to be so hard, even if you have a genetic propensity for obesity. For someone who has to devote most of their energy towards making their economy and marriage work every day, the same task can be practically impossible.
Which is why I'm very reluctant to judge someone.
Then tell me this: if you realised how bad it was, why did you do it? Doesn't it prove your baser instincts DID control you?
Did the concept of personal responsibility help you eat any better?
I'd take the 70% figure with a huge grain of salt, though. Diet and its health effects is one of those areas where science is really uncertain and the conventional wisdom changes every second decade.
Contrary to popular belief, obesity caused by glandular or metabolic problems is pretty rare.
The reason most people gain weight is that they simply do not realize how many extra calories they're eating.
There are also other reasons - many people who suffer from obesity have reduced sensations of hunger and fullness. The feedback system which tells them when to start and stop eating is impaired. This isn't psychological - it can be seen in infants soon after birth.
Of course, that's a little harder for outsiders to understand, so it's easier to just blame it on "metabolic problems". Many people don't realise that everyone - even themselves - are controlled by instincts, and that eating or not eating is not a free choice, for them or for anyone else. The people who got lucky and were born with better instincts believe they just chose to act that way.
Of course, in a situation where food is scarce and starvation common, the obese ones are the ones with the best instincts.
Yes, thanks for pointing it out.
Naturally, I don't believe people chose to have diabetes - I was just trying to show how you can apply the same type of reasoning to other types of medical problems, and how absurd it sounds.
You're so ignorant it scares me.
First, just because it's easy for you, it doesn't mean it's easy for everyone else. You're the kind of person who'd hit a left-handed child because they "chose" to use the wrong hand.
Second, it's a medical fact that there are biological and hereditary components to obesity. If your metabolism doesn't convert fat to usable energy, it doesn't matter how little you eat. You'll just get weaker and weaker without losing any weight.
Of course, almost everyone will lose weight if they literally starve themselves every day of their lives, but that will not only require enormous will-power, it will also make you extremely tired and unable to concentrate, and be detrimental to your health. Someone with metabolic problems may be able to lose weight in theory, but the price in terms of health may be so high it's more rational to just stay fat.
Of course there are people who just rationalise their obesity, but that doesn't justify assuming that everyone with weight problems chose to be that way. That makes you just as bad as them. It's prejudiced, bigoted and ignorant.
The assumption that everything is a choice clashes with facts. That means the assumption must be false, even if it means you have to change your world-view. You can chose to stay ignorant, or you can chose to face the facts.
Of course DRM isn't the cause of piracy. But if a supposed anti-piracy measure doesn't do anything to reduce piracy, and in fact may increase its slightly, I think it's worth noting.
Unless the game publishers are total idiots, it could mean the main purpose of DRM is not to stop piracy, but to stop legal lending and reselling.
There's a third option, besides making a pirate go legit or making a legit customer go pirate: making a legit customer abstain from the game because of the DRM. Those are the people the game publishers lose money on.
Yes, piracy is big with or without DRM. But I think the point is how many people simply abstain from a game because of DRM. Those are the ones which represent a loss to the game publishers.
I think DRM is a pain in the ass and I can understand people who won't buy games that use it, but you don't have an innate right to own a game.
Does the game producer have an innate right to stop me from copying the game?
If not, the game producer can put as much DRM on the game as he/she wants, and I can remove the DRM and copy the game as much as I want.
Personally, I think copyright should be balanced to maximise the benefit for society as a whole, not to maximise the profits of the creators, artists or publishers. And I believe the most beneficial for society would be something like five years commercial copyright, and free copying for private, non-commercial use.
Actually, I'm advocating pirating games without paying for them.
I'm reasonably well off financially, and buy most games I play for more than an hour, but I still think people should pirate games if they need to. It's better if you get the game without paying, than don't get the game AND don't pay. The game publisher is not better off because you abstained from making a copy.
Not using a piece of software you could easily and cheaply copy is a form of economic waste. It reduces the total amount of goods produced in society. As long as piracy doesn't hurt the production of new software, it's only beneficial for society.
Now, if we could only legalise private, non-commercial copying, we would also get rid of the unnecessary guilt and legal hassles.
I'm not a socialist, so I see nothing wrong with a scenario where commercial companies produce culture for the rich, while the poor still benefit from it through copying.
Private, non-commercial use should be legal, though.
Nobody would have benefited if he had done without games. He'd have been poorer for it, and the game publishers would have been neither poorer nor richer.
If private, non-commercial copying is legalised, kids, students and other people with little money can benefit from all the software available, and the software publishers can still make money from selling a convenient, safe product to those for whom price is not a big issue.
Yes, people pirate games because of self-interest. I believe they do it mainly because it's convenient and allows them to sample a wider range of titles, though, not to save money.
Take yourself as an example. You bought the games you could afford, and pirated the rest, so you didn't really save any money. You just got more games for the amount of money you were prepared to spend in the first place. The game publishers didn't really lose anything on you - they wouldn't have been better off if you spent the same amount of money and refrained from pirating.
That's the main reason I believe piracy is good for society and should be legalised - it allows people to benefit from a wider range movies/music/software, without adversely affecting the production of new movies/music/software. The mentioned industries continue to increase their revenues year after year, so there's no risk they'll stop producing them in the foreseeable future.
Simple: most people download a lot of games they never play, and would never have bought anyway. It's so simple and convenient to just click a link on Pirate Bay, and then delete the torrent when your disk gets full.
And even if someone actually plays the game, it doesn't automatically mean they represent a lost sale. There are people who would rather play a freeware game than spend $1 on software.
Um... the point is that ALL DRM is ineffective, since it's cracked within a few days.
*raises hand*
I don't care if the parent is an FBI agent, since it's still legal to circumvent access protection in order to play a game here in Sweden. How would I play games on my CD-less netbook without no-cd cracks?
Piracy came first, but DRM may very well make it worse.
Then why do game publishers still use DRM? Well, it could be because it stops you from (legally) lending the game to your friends, and from (legally) reselling it when you're done with it. It allows the publisher to circumvent your fair use rights and get paid more times for the same game.
Game publishers have been trying to squash the used game market for one or two decades - they've (unsuccessfully) argued in court that the reseller is infringing their copyright when he/she sells a used game!
You have a very good point. Do you have an article or something which can give the argument more substance?
The article also mentions, that another data point, a game with DRM, suffered exactly the same piracy figures. The point isn't that 90% of the population playing the game will pirate it, if they can do it easily. It is that 90% will pirate it. Period.
Doesn't that prove TFA's point? There's no use in DRMing a game; it has no effect on piracy, and makes the game more of a hassle for the paying user.
The "90% piracy" figure doesn't include the people who decided to not play the game at all because of the DRM. Those are the ones which represent a loss to the game publisher.
In addition to the cost of implementing the DRM, of course.
No, because most pirates download games without ever playing them. It's just so easy, and disk space and bandwidth so cheap, it doesn't matter.
It's just that you constantly hear the same refrain from certain people: "Oh, I'd buy it if it weren't for the DRM", "I'd buy it if it were cheaper", "I'd buy it if it were ported to Linux" -- and I don't doubt that many of the people who say these things are being truthful -- but for the vast majority, it's just an easy rationalization for their entitlement complex.
Well, I know for a fact that I have original games sitting on my shelf which I first pirated and then decided to buy legally, when I saw how good they were. But you may very well be right - a lot of people may just rationalise.
The question is if it matters. Would the cheapskate with a $2000 gaming rig and only 3 legally bought games have bought more games if there weren't pirate copies available? Would he have bought a $2000 gaming rig at all if he didn't know he could get games for free? If "no", the game creator hasn't really lost anything.
I'm glad that kids, students and other people with little money can get pirate copies of the software they like. What's the point keeping it from them if they wouldn't have been paying customers anyway?
I'm not sure you win more users during the first few hours before the game is cracked, than you lose by making the game inconvenient to use.
In the case of music DRM, the music clearly sold better without DRM, and the music publishers eventually had to abandon the whole DRM scheme, despite having spent millions and millions on the technology and infrastructure. It proved the point that people ARE willing to pay for music as long as it's the same quality and as convenient as pirating.
Because most people pirate dozens of games and only play one or two of them. It's just so easy and convenient to pirate - just click a link on Pirate Bay, and then click OK on the dialog box that your BitTorrent client pops up. When you're out of disk space, just delete the games you tired of after five minutes, or, in most cases, didn't even bother to install.
I can honestly say there's no chance in hell I would have bought most of the games I downloaded. But since I became an adult and got a steady income, I've bought most of the games I've played for more than an hour.
It's meaningless to compare the number of sales to the number of pirate copies. The number of pirate copies has no relation to the number of potential customers.