How Do We Know That Piracy Isn't Really A Big Issue? Because Media Companies Still Haven't Needed To Change As A Result Of It
from the calling-their-bluff dept
One of the positive outcomes of the debate that has raged around SOPA/PIPA is that more people have looked at the facts, rather than listened to the rhetoric, surrounding piracy. In particular, the copyright industries' hitherto unchallenged claim that piracy is destroying their business is finally being challenged – not least by reports like "The Sky is Rising" that consolidate industry figures to show that things are really looking pretty good across the board.
Another indication of that new attitude is the incredible response elicited by an article in Forbes entitled "You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You", which has received over 3600 re-tweets on Twitter, and nearly 10,000 shares on Facebook. The basic argument will be familiar enough to Techdirt readers: that the war on piracy can never be "won", and that what is needed is a change of attitude on the part of the media companies. The article concludes:
Treat your customers with respect, and they’ll do the same to you. And that is how you fight piracy.
Pretty obvious, you would have thought, although strangely it isn't to the media companies.
The author of that piece, Paul Tassi, has followed it up with "Lies, Damned Lies and Piracy." Although this has proved far less popular than the first one, I think it's better, because it offers some original insights where the other went over well-trod ground.
I particularly liked his closing thoughts:
If the industry is struggling, I just don’t see it, as their projects are getting bigger and more costly with each passing year. When a movie bombs or a show gets cancelled, no one ever says “oh, well, piracy.” Rather, it’s the quality of the product that accounts for such failures. Even with relatively high piracy rates across all forms of media, we’re still seeing blockbuster films, shows and games released at a higher rate than ever, and profits to match.
There are three really key points packed in there. First, that the media industries just aren't struggling, despite their cries of woe. Secondly, what causes real financial harm to the film and music worlds are bad products that lose huge amounts of money and disappoint audiences. And finally – and most importantly – if piracy really were so life-threatening to the copyright industries, and if their bottom lines really were in danger, then they would have tried something other than begging lawmakers to protect them. The fact that they haven't, as Tassi emphasizes, means that there is no real pressure on them to do so: people still buy lots of stuff, piracy isn't really a problem, things are working.
I think the media industries would love to kill piracy with a quick piece of legislation that blacks out every torrent site on the internet, but I don’t think they want to fight it so much that they’ll change their entire distribution model on a dime, which would actually go a long way toward truly competing with piracy. The reason things are the way they are is because they’re working. Despite the fact that even though yes, every piece of media is available on the internet for free somewhere, people are still buying.
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Filed Under: business models, change, innovation, piracy
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Damned pirate sympathizer
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Re: Damned pirate sympathizer
sure is, go ask Somalia
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Re: Damned pirate sympathizer
Answer...they haven't!
(Prove me wrong, if you can!)
So, there's empirical proof that so-called "piracy' doesn't affect the bottom-line!
Find another excuse for your problems, boys.
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Re: Re: Damned pirate sympathizer
Disclaimer = That 1% should not be considered accurate or an approximate, but an emphasis on a theoretical subject
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Re: Damned pirate sympathizer
Anyway, if any of the real pirate pages go down there will be a whole community of pirates setting up new servers as opposed to just the one. I think that we'll be fine.
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Re: Re: Damned pirate sympathizer
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1) If the bot can spout out an overly broad and extremely inaccurate statement to "prove" it's right, do that.
2) If not, just claim that whoever wrote the article or their sources are all on one side, therefore they're not legit (and ignore that anything the bot says is more 1-sided than any other source can possibly be).
There, I've laid the foundation to make your job no longer needed. Sucks to think that that your job is so useless that you can be replaced with 2 rules like that, eh?
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"Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script."
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/frustrations/374d/?srp=1
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FTFY.
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Wait. Are you saying it's somehow undemocratic to publish your own opinions now?
WTF, are you using Webster's New World Order Dictionary or something for your definitions?
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RIAA Expert #1: The internet is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Congress: What do you mean, "biblical"?
MPAA Expert: What he means is Old Testament, Congress, real wrath of God type stuff.
RIAA Expert #1: Exactly.
RIAA Expert #2: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
MPAA Expert: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
IFPI Expert: The pirates rising from MegaUpload and Pirate Bay!
RIAA Expert #1: Data sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Congress: All right, all right! I get the point!
(Sheepishly stolen from Ghostbusters...)
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Rational Person: You mean you're worried about a disaster which is an unreasonably popular fable functionally indistinguishable from communal fantasy?
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Exactly -- Which is why the RIAA/MPAA never invites said Rational Person to the meetings.
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When all else fails, mindlessly troll and throw out ridiculous accusations, but NEVER reply to any sensible follow-up to those.
There, NOW I've managed to lay the foundation to remove your job from existence.
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They treat you like they want your business.
And that's why I still pay for it.
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/sarcasm
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If it weren't for piracy, I could have made a $15 billion profit last year instead of $5 billion. Piracy cost me $10 billion!
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OT: The Long Arm Of Uncle Sam Just Got Longer
This one's hot off the presses. Just yesterday, our friends at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a press release on its latest ruling related to foreign 'money service businesses (MSBs).'
An MSB is a private company that provides certain financial services like check cashing, money orders, title pawn, payday loans, travelers' checks, prepaid stored value cards, tax refund payments, etc.
Frequently, traditional MSB clients tended to be individuals without bank accounts or access to credit. But increasingly, the US government is looking at companies engaged in electronic payments, crowdsourced funding, and even microcredit finance as money service businesses.
The implication? They should all be regulated. Even if they're not even US companies.
That's right. FinCEN's latest ruling suggests a foreign MSB may now be subject to US regulations AND CRIMINAL PENALTIES "even if none of its agents, agencies, branches or offices are physically located in the United States."
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MP3s and FLAC files are clearly not creations of the content industry which are normally subject to encryption and content control. Piracy has created the whole market here.
You are now able to buy DVDs and Blurays much faster without society going through the PPV phaze, renting phaze, movie station phaze and more first. This is them aiming to beat piracy by getting out into the market early.
Then 3D had been rushed into cinemas much faster to give people a viewing experience that piracy could not.
So thanks to piracy they have made large progress. This now continues with getting media distributed across the world faster.
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Absolutely agree, and wish they would get to work on it. I would like to rent a Blu-Ray copy of the movie the moment it comes out in movie theaters. And here is why ---
Then 3D had been rushed into cinemas much faster to give people a viewing experience that piracy could not.
I went to see my first 3D (RealD, whatever that is) movie last week. I didn't pay for the ticket -- my mother gave me a $15 dollar gift certificate for Christmas, so she bought the ticket, otherwise I would not have gone. And yes, what brought me out, but the worst Star Wars movie ever! I went and saw Jar Jar Binks in his 3D glory.
Now, I actually liked the 3D pod racing -- and unlike what others have said, the 3D in this movie was well done. But even then, the experience sucked! I was in a movie theater of 130-140 people, most of us actually wanted to see the movie, but I still hated every minute of the experience. 5 kids sat behind me throwing popcorn and making stupid jokes during the movie, while their parents sat and did nothing. A good two-thirds of the audience checked their phones every 20 minutes, and I heard a dozen or two phone calls come in and answered during the movie. Had the sound been turned up to a decent decibel, it would have drowned most of this out, but the theater's 6.1 speaker system was soft enough that through many of the parts I was trying to use my memory to fill in the dialog I couldn't hear. And the screen was so dark and flickered quite often.
I want to be able to rent or buy a movie, for a reasonable price, the moment it comes out in the theaters, so I can play it at home on my 7.1 sound system, at the sound level I can hear the movie, on the 10 ft projector screen (which supports 1080p/3D) with my friends -- not with 90-100 people who decided that it was a good deal to waste 2 hours watching a movie they really didn't want to see in the first place.
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So fuck off back under that rock or go pound sand into a glass window.
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Y'know, like in the original intent of Copyright and Patents (which, I might add, were a mercantilistic operation by thew Guilds of the Stuart monarchs' time.
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And iTunes has hosted servers in Iran. I guess that means all iTunes songs must obey Iranian laws, right?
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Even if you deny that damage exists, why would it even be a risk to the tech industry if copyright and the power of "rights" holders had not been inflated beyond reason?
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Wolverine
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Re: Wolverine
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The Potential For Cost-Cutting-- The Historical Parallel of Newspapers.
Just as the union printers, in their desperation, resorted to criminal acts such as throwing bricks at people, Murdock and his friends, in their turn, and out of a similar sense of desperation, eventually resorted to the various acts for which they are presently being investigated.
Well, the same process is about to repeat itself in Hollywood. The economic value of the skills of most of the employees will be liquidated. The movie-industry unions presently worry about "runaway productions," in Canada or New Zealand, but that is only the beginning. The central locus of film production is shifting from the stage to the computer. Instead of making things come together on a stage, in front of a camera, the technologically progressive film-maker causes things to come together inside a computer.
Take as an example, the new Lytro camera. It is essentially a massive array of microscopic cameras, which captures what amounts to a hologram instead of a two dimensional image. This means than focus and exposure do not have to be determined at the time pictures are taken, and it also means that the camera records depth information as well as color and brightness. The first property means that the camera crew does not have to be so large. The second property is more interesting, because it enables something like "greenscreen" technique, only without the green background. The post-processing software can be programed to ignore anything which doesn't fall into focus inside a specified distance range, in a particular direction. An array of Lytro cameras can be built into a cart or a vehicle, very much on the principle of Google Street View, and sent out to inexpensively collect three-dimensional background scenery. So there is no longer any need to film on location, with all the expenses that involves, and likewise, a drastically reduced need for stage carpenters, grips, and similar trades. The cameras and similar equipment in the studio can be built into robots, and operated under remote control from... wherever. Similarly, large arrays of microphone can generate signals which can be processed to extract the desired sound, on much the same principle as the Lytro camera. Of course, all of this results in more post-processing work, but that can take place in India or China. Let us say that the developed-country labor requirements of film-making might be reduced by a factor of ten.
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piracy, funny the price went up because
For Sony it's supply and demand.
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EMI lost billions and was taken over by its creditors.
NBC was valued at zero dollars when sold to Comcast last year.
Meanwhile Google makes $44b a year, Verizon $120B a year distributing WMG, EMI and NBC content and referring people to their content that they pay nothing for.
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So all you are saying is that these organizations without the protection of their monopoly is unable to compete and succeed in a fair and open market.
If they cant compete they deserve to die. Gone the way of the dinosaurs.
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EMI lost billions and was taken over by its creditors.
NBC was valued at zero dollars when sold to Comcast last year.
Meanwhile Google makes $44b a year, Verizon $120B a year distributing WMG, EMI and NBC content and referring people to their content that they pay nothing for.
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EMI lost billions and was taken over by its creditors.
NBC was valued at zero dollars when sold to Comcast last year.
Meanwhile Google makes $44b a year, Verizon $120B a year distributing WMG, EMI and NBC content and referring people to their content that they pay nothing for.
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WTF
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Competition
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Sorry, don't want to take things off track, just wanted to answer the comment, is all. No need to get into a debate or anything.
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I show my customers nothing but contempt, and they still don't pirate my stuff.
*sigh*
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