I think the most important thing about what I'm saying here is the trend. I've noticed over the last year, and continue to notice, a dramatic increase in the amount and types of piracy by my peers. I think any college student (at least at my school) would agree with this assessment. It is actually getting easier and more common to pirate copyrighted materials - music, movies, tv, even books. If this trend continues, piracy will move more and more towards having a significant negative financial impact.
In fact, one of those articles you linked to, "Music Sales in the Age of File Sharing" by Eric S. Boorstin, seems to corroborate this:
My findings suggest that file sharing is not the cause of the recent decline
in record sales, and that file sharing decreases the record purchases of younger people
while increasing the purchases of older people. Right now, file sharing may not be bad for sales. People are creatures of habit - the older generation is more used to buying CDs, and they're more opposed to technology in general, so it is natural that file sharing may not affect their consumption patterns. But as the younger generation becomes the older generation, they will bring their habits with them too, and I don't think they are likely to abandon file sharing in favor of buying records. And forget about the generation that are the kids now - they'll probably never even see a CD in a jewel case.
Basically, I'm saying that I think piracy is going to become a bigger and bigger issue, until it actually begins to have real, measurable, negative financial impact on content producers.
And I really don't think lawsuits or DRM is going to be a solution. I think 10 or 15 years in the future the media industry will be dramatically different - but how, I'm not exactly sure.
I certainly don't have any studies - and I doubt it's very feasible to do a real, independent study on this. I mean how can you accurately measure the viral marketing benefit of watching a downloaded movie?
I only say this based on my intuition and personal experiences. And I've come to believe this more strongly lately. Not because my views have changed - but because my personal experiences have. I go to college, and I've definitely noticed an increase in piracy among students. Specifically in new forms of piracy - more people than ever before students watch downloaded tv shows and movies - but importantly, its an increasingly popular trend.
But lets assume that you're right - that the marketing benefits of piracy outweigh any lost revenue. If this really is a revenue generating strategy for media companies, it is not the communities' right to implement it (especially given the media companies expressly forbidding it). In a capitalist market, if this were true, someone should use it to create their own company that would topple the media empires:)
Maybe its time to admit that as much as we want everything to be free (software, music, movies) it just doesn't work on a large scale. Sure, us slashdot geeks can download copyrighted content all we want, but it DOES have a negative financial impact on the producers of that content. How big is that impact? I don't know - maybe marginal, maybe significant. I'm sure a lot of people justify this by reasoning that the only people losing money are rich overpaid content producers. But I'm not sure if that though process is correct...
Your post really annoys me. I don't mean to flame you, but its just wildly inaccurate and strikes me as incredibly pretentious. There is no way slashdot IQ's are typically 160-220.
Please read about IQ scores (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ). Look at the distribution - 100 average with a standard deviation of 15. Even 160 would be 4 SD's above the average! That would mean that the AVERAGE reader on slashdot is in the smartest.001% of the population!! Bobby Fischer has an IQ of 184, which, according to your statement would make him only as smart as the average slashdot reader. Sure, slashdot readers are geeks, above average intelligence, but shit, the average reader is as smart as someone in contention for world's greatest chess player.
Lie detectors are not accurate. Somebody can be nervous because they're afraid of not being believed, and a well-rehearsed lie is easy to pass by a lie detector.
Thats why lie detectors are not admissable evidence in court.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly don't have any studies - and I doubt it's very feasible to do a real, independent study on this. I mean how can you accurately measure the viral marketing benefit of watching a downloaded movie? I only say this based on my intuition and personal experiences. And I've come to believe this more strongly lately. Not because my views have changed - but because my personal experiences have. I go to college, and I've definitely noticed an increase in piracy among students. Specifically in new forms of piracy - more people than ever before students watch downloaded tv shows and movies - but importantly, its an increasingly popular trend. But lets assume that you're right - that the marketing benefits of piracy outweigh any lost revenue. If this really is a revenue generating strategy for media companies, it is not the communities' right to implement it (especially given the media companies expressly forbidding it). In a capitalist market, if this were true, someone should use it to create their own company that would topple the media empires :)
Maybe its time to admit that as much as we want everything to be free (software, music, movies) it just doesn't work on a large scale. Sure, us slashdot geeks can download copyrighted content all we want, but it DOES have a negative financial impact on the producers of that content. How big is that impact? I don't know - maybe marginal, maybe significant. I'm sure a lot of people justify this by reasoning that the only people losing money are rich overpaid content producers. But I'm not sure if that though process is correct...
Your post really annoys me. I don't mean to flame you, but its just wildly inaccurate and strikes me as incredibly pretentious. There is no way slashdot IQ's are typically 160-220. Please read about IQ scores (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ). Look at the distribution - 100 average with a standard deviation of 15. Even 160 would be 4 SD's above the average! That would mean that the AVERAGE reader on slashdot is in the smartest .001% of the population!! Bobby Fischer has an IQ of 184, which, according to your statement would make him only as smart as the average slashdot reader. Sure, slashdot readers are geeks, above average intelligence, but shit, the average reader is as smart as someone in contention for world's greatest chess player.
while oswd.org is down, you can browse the designs at my mirror: http://www.alteredbeast.org/oswd
Lie detectors are not accurate. Somebody can be nervous because they're afraid of not being believed, and a well-rehearsed lie is easy to pass by a lie detector. Thats why lie detectors are not admissable evidence in court.