Study: Dutch Piracy Rates In Free Fall Due Mostly To The Availability Of Legal Alternatives
from the you-don't-say dept
The claim that the best way to combat content piracy is to offer good legal alternatives and make them widely available isn't exactly breaking new ground. Case studies made out of several nations' piracy rates, such as in Australia and Norway, demonstrate the severe impact creating good digital marketplace alternatives to piracy can have. Techdirt's think tank arm, the Copia Institute, produced the definitive report highlighting this in multiple countries nearly two years ago.
And, yet, the copyright industries and their mouthpiece organizations typically choose to beat the punishment drum instead, going the route of litigation against pirates that ultimately ends up being a PR nightmare, or instead going the route of wholesale censorship on the internet that is equal parts ineffective and alarming to those of us that think such censorship ought to have a high bar to hurdle in order to be implemented. It's with that in mind that any new example that simply offering legal alternatives is a better route is useful to highlight.
Which brings us to the Netherlands, long assumed to be a hotspot of piracy. And, indeed, as recently as 2013 a study put out by Telecompaper indicated that 41% of the Dutch people were downloading copyrighted content for free. But that same study also suggests that this piracy rate has dropped all the way to 27% as legal alternatives have emerged.
In November 2013, when services such as Netflix and Spotify were still new, 41% of Dutch people were downloading illegal content. In January, that percentage fell to 27%. From this group, 77% say they plan to download less pirated content; the remaining 23% claim they will increase illegal usage.
Of the group that still downloads, 8% say they have reduced their activities because it is becoming harder to find what they are looking for. Of the people who have increased their pirate activities, 6% said in January that it was easier to find what they were looking for, compared to 13% in 2013.
Now, the post makes a point to note that BREIN, the anti-piracy outfit in the region, has also stepped up its efforts in this time. But if you look at the data in the respondents, it's clear that BREIN's attempts to make pirated content less available isn't much of a factor for those that have ceased pirating that content. Less than one in ten of the people still downloading content illicitly are finding it harder to do so. That's much less a factor than the piracy rate in the country dropping by a third.
Which leaves us with the wider availability of legal alternatives being the main impetus for the change. That jives well with what we've seen in other countries too. All of which leaves us to ponder once again why the content industries don't seek to ramp up the legal alternatives instead of going to war with them or, worse yet, trying to wage some unwinnable legal fight with all of piracy everywhere?
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Filed Under: copyright, innovation, netherlands, piracy
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Because piracy is the excuse they are using to try and gain control over the Internet, and restore their position as the gatekeepers to all published content. Politicians are likely to gone along with them, because that gives them backdoor censorship.
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"Less than one in ten of the people still downloading content illicitly are finding it harder to do so." -- You don't understand margins and chilling effects, then.
Overall, this is cold hash, same old feeble claims against copyright enforcement, supported by nothing.
The obvious conclusion, by the way, which non-thieves don't need, but I'm reminded that you pirates DO: is that enforcement = less piracy. You're simply taking two data points and leaving out highly relevant factor which is shutdown of Pirate Bay and generally more enforcement.
But nicely fawning plug for the "think tank arm" -- HA, HA! that's a Google and other corporately funded SHILL front -- and its silly pro-pirate "report".
https://copia.is/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/sponsors.png
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Re: "Less than one in ten of the people still downloading content illicitly are finding it harder to do so." -- You don't understand margins and chilling effects, then.
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Re: "Less than one in ten of the people still downloading content illicitly are finding it harder to do so." -- You don't understand margins and chilling effects, then.
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Re: "Less than one in ten of the people still downloading content illicitly are finding it harder to do so." -- You don't understand margins and chilling effects, then.
You need to evict whatever brain slug you have residing within your skull; it clearly has not paid the rent in a long while.
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Re: Re: "Less than one in ten of the people who's sure all that glitters is gold and she's buying the stairway to heaven.
On a related topic, I spent a few minutes writing up a Greasemonkey script to hide all comments from Anonymous Cowards or MyNameHere. It makes things awfully quiet around here, but maybe it'll finally give the grownups a chance to talk without being pestered by paint chip enthusiasts.
I'd paste it here but apparently Techdirt's version of Markdown doesn't include code blocks. So here's a jsfiddle until I get a chance to give it a more permanent home.
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Re: Re: Re: "Less than one in ten of the people who's sure all that glitters is gold and she's buying the stairway to heaven.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: "Less than one in ten of the people who's sure all that glitters is gold and she's buying the stairway to heaven.
I agree; it's a blunt instrument and I hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I just need some damn peace and quiet. If they show up on the Most Insightful or Funniest list, I'll see it in that post.
There are better potential solutions -- some sort of scoring system looking for, say, subject lines longer than 30 characters, phrases like common law, sycophantic, crickets, or George Washington's farewell address, and assigning weights to them. I bet you could get a program to recognize a post from the Paint Chip Brigade with a pretty high degree of accuracy. Better still would be to feed every flagged post through a machine learning algorithm.
But I've already devoted more hours of my life to dealing with these nitwits than they deserve. Five minutes in a text editor is about what I'm willing to spend on them at this point.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Less than one in ten of the people who's sure all that glitters is gold and she's buying the stairway to heaven.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Less than one in ten of the people who's sure all that glitters is gold and she's buying the stairway to heaven.
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Because piracy is the excuse they are using to try and gain control over the Internet, and restore their position as the gatekeepers to all published content. Politicians are likely to gone along with them, because that gives them backdoor censorship.
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Agreed. As I've noted before if the goal is to stamp out piracy the methods used are incredibly stupid. If on the other hand the goal is to stamp out competition then they make perfect sense.
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It wasn't about piracy; it was about only the big established players having the financial resources to license the DRM, and the server and communications infrastructure to implement it. Allowing them to remain gatekeepers.
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Aaaand I see EME has been officially accepted.
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This connects back to the AMC story from a few posts ago. Which is really the better value for the average consumer: a $5-per-month surcharge on an already-high cable bill that lets you watch commercial-free shows from a single cable network, or a standalone $10-per-month charge that lets you watch thousands of hours of commercial-free movies and TV shows?
Pricing is important. Making people feel like they have received a fair trade for what they have paid is just as important.
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"it's clear that BREIN's attempts to make pirated content less available isn't much of a factor for those that have ceased pirating that content. "
Story says:
"The popularity of free downloading for content has fallen sharply in the last few years, as more streaming alternatives become available, as people get better access to pay services and amid a sharpening fight against illegal downloads."
Even the story points directly at the fight against illegal downloads.
Availability of legal services is very important (duh!), but at the same time making the illegal source less attractive is a real boost as well. If fewer people are using P2P, and those who do use it are seeding less / leaving their connection open less then the general availability of torrents drops. That in turn makes the legal alternatives look better.
There will always be piracy, someone people will always go down that road. Changes in the landscape means that the vast majority (those in the middle ground) are more likely to use legal services and avoid the hassles and risks of P2P.
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The best way to make the illegal source less attractive is to make the legal source more convenient and valuable for the average person. Just look at Netflix.
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Somehow despite how unattractive piracy was being made out to be the problem only started getting solved when legal alternatives were being produced.
Either you're romanticizing antipiracy as usual, or the measures took over a decade to start having any effect. Which really says a lot about how effective they are.
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The lnock on effect in P2P is that as fewer people use it fewer people find the content they want and they as a result use it less meaning less peers and less available content.
So yes it takes time.
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Meanwhile people are turning to streaming instead, and copyright enforcers are busy gnashing their teeth as a result.
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Streaming is also a way easier target to take down, as it always depends on someone with a server somewhere actually serving the stuff. Unlike P2P, the root source of the stream can almost always be traced down. That is why most of them have been hiding in haven countries, such as Spain. Now Spain isn't interested in being that idiot anymore, so streaming sites are being shut down.
it's sort of like what has happened with Roku boxes - as soon as someone shows up and starts applying a little heat, the guys who were profiteering off of other people's work quickly disappear.
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Fair use conundrum
In spite of what "they" claim, it isn't so much actual copyright infringement-- it is objections to fair use. Fair use says you can do a backup/ working copy, use portions and snippets publicly, not use parts (i.e. block out that f-bomb so the kids can watch) --
That is clearly demonstrated by their successfully getting DRM breaking criminalized.
Frankly, P2P is an easy convenient way to get clean editable backups.
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carrot and stick approach, but...
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Re: carrot and stick approach, but...
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Yeah, it's true.
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