Oh this god damn fucking stupid "95% piracy rate" again. As glad as I am seeing Ubisoft change their mind they are still insisting on using a number that makes no god damn sense to support it.
Let me explain, piracy rate is made by taking the number of people who brought the game and adding that to the number of people who pirated it and then working out the ratio. Make sense right? Well, no, because what you are doing is matching two different and distinct sets from the market.
Note: For the sake of keeping things simple I'm going to presume that no pirate buys anything and no paying consumer pirates. It has no real impact on the point but helps make it easier to explain. I'll address this and other things towards the end.
Put simply people who pirate games can easily pirate more games than people who buy them. Pirates on a whole have such a higher rate of use than the average paying consumer. The logic here is not hard to follow, people have a given budget they spend on games and likely means they can't afford to buy all the games they'd like to. They have to make choices between which games they are going to buy in a period and which games they are not going to buy. A pirate is only limited by bandwidth and time.
What this means is simply that each individual pirate will be counted against far more games "piracy rate" than each individual paying consumer will be. So when you move from trying to astatine what percentage of a market is made of people who pirate to looking at the sub set of who buys and who pirates a given game the people who pirate are disproportionally represented.
Pirates have a higher rate of use of games than paying consumers so compeering any given rate of use is only going to inform you of how greater that rate is.
What's remarkable about all this is that this is not just theoretical. We have a huge real life market that we can look at for which we have a good guess at the amount of pirates in the market. That market is iOS devices.
This is an old blog post from a indie dev responding to this exact issue. It goes in to more detail than I'm about to but it's likely also out of date. Still it's premise is where I first came across the ideas shown above and it's provides the factual base on which I rest them. Some of the links are dead but for the most part it's easy to find sources for he kind of numbers used in the post. The one exception to that might be piracy rates for apps but I've personally been in discussions with app devs who track use and who have backed up the 90-95% pirate rate numbers.
The first thing to do is note that to pirate apps you need to have a jail broken Iphone. While not all jail broken Iphones are used to pirate we'll use their numbers as the upper limit and as such the worst case scenario. I'm even going to boost the estimated percentage of jail broken phones from the 10% seen in the blog post to 20% to be on the safe side.
Now the astute among you will have already noticed the disparity between the piracy rates and that figure so the next thing to do is ask "If only 20% of the market can be pirates how does that represent a 90% piracy rate?" Well we already answered this question in the opening of this post. That 20% of the market can and does use more apps than the average consumer that makes up the other 80%.
Out of 100 people 20 pirate and 80 buy. In a period in which a 5 games are realised pirates pirate a copy of each while the paying consumer buys 1. This gives the pirates 100 "votes" and the paying consumers 80 "votes. Assuming the consumers are evening spread out across the 5 games you get about a 55% piracy rate from only 20% of the market. And that is a very restrictive set up that is very unfavourable to the actual reality. If we want to make a guess for how much higher rate of use is between pirates and users, well, as it turns out we already have one. Pirates then to consume 95% more than paying consumers.
So what does that all really mean? Well firstly it's factual proof that one download cannot equal one lost sale, secondly it gives some perspective on how damaging piracy can actually be. If we are producing 95% piracy rates out of iOS devices where only at worst 20% of the market can be pirates then it's reasonable to presume that it's the same everywhere. Thirdly we can actually use this, in the case of iOS, to asses the damages done.
I've talked to iOS devs who said that if 1 in 10 of the pirates had brought the game he'd have doubled his revenue. Which is fine but meaningless unless he was selling to 1 in 10 of people in the iOS market for his app. I proposed that he works out his rate of sale to 80% of the total number of iOS devices and then apply that rate to the other 20% and he'd have a worst case for the sales he might have made maybe in a world in which people didn't or couldn't pirate. This of course would have to tempered by the fact that one of the major reasons for piracy is often lack availability and that a lot of pirates comes from places that can't afford given tiers of pricing. In the EU there are places that boxed copies of games are sold for less than others to help combat the piracy those poorer places produce. This is often why sites that sell you the keys from boxes can sell those keys cheaper than you can get in retail.
Now to loop back to Ubisofts "10-15% of f2p players but" rubbish, I hope you can see why that number is meaningless and the connection pointless. I applaud Ubisoft for looking at the people who pirate their games as people who want to play them and seeking to find way to get money from that market via F2P the line of reasoning here does not sit well.
Every one who plays a given F2P game exists in the same set, every one has only one "vote" to put towards the buying or not of items with in the game. It's it's own discrete set unlike the mismatched sets from the piracy rate mess.
This all gets vastly more complex when you mix in the fact that a lot of users are both pirates and paying consumers and that often they are spending just as much money as they would have but only on the products they feel have value.
Now I know I've gone off on a rant about this but I'm hoping that I can simply link back to this comment in to the future if these numbers are ever raised by any one ever again. I also thing that it's relevant to the over all discussion to have an sense of what we should be thinking about when we think about "piracy damage".
Looking at any individual media item is irrelevant, you must base your judgements on the market as a whole. Ignoring the actual act of piracy to focus on the decision to buy is a hell of a lot less scary to people who may not understand that market when you are thinking in terms of 20 percent rather than 95.
Those artist need to eat, they can either do that by getting a job or using their talent in a way that lets them practice and improve. Getting an unrelated job may pay better but if they want to do something "meaningful" (I'm not even going to bother commenting on that) it's still going to require unpaid time and effort on their part until they build a fanbase or get enough backing to be paid to do that full time.
Your ability to ignore the reality of the situation based confirmation bias is honestly remarkable. I just wish you'd use it to do something more meaningful than troll techdirt.
You really don't understand this do you? There is a difference between the scarcity of content and scarcity of the availability of that content. The first is irrelevant in this discussion and you are either wilfully misusing it or under such a remarkable false impression that your argument has to be fundamentally flawed.
The issue here is that writers unlike, say, musicians don't inherently produce anything to which the availability has to be scarce. Musics on the other hand have live performance, which is scarce and for which your argument above would actually make sense, they can only play so many live shows before they die, they can only tour so much. So if a fan wants to see a musician perform they are faced with a scarcity of that product.
Books are like recorded music but a author can't make a living play them "live". Yes, before you say it, I know people will often go to see an author read their work but it's not a piratical way for people to consume a book for any number of reasons.
Anyway point is that with out something that is inherently scarce and inherently valuable authors are trying to find ways to add value to each copy of the work in the face of those copies not having to be scares at all. The most common and easy of these is to create artificial scarcity like limited special edition prints.
In this case Pruden is trying to both create scarcity while also connecting with his fans and promoting his writing. It's a really interesting move because it combines the PR he should be doing anyway (the best writing in the world is pointless if no one reads it in the first place) while giving fans a reason to buy.
In a world where every one who is in the market for my writing could easily get hold of a digital copy of it the fact is that no matter how unique or special that writing any given copy of it is not.
Your comment to my comment about your comment is bad, you should feel doubly as bad.
Or triply given the subtle hint about the pointlessness of stating a blanked conclusion with out explaining the reasoning behind it seems to have been to subtle. Or maybe I should feel bad for that, I may have expected too much from you.
Republicans, all for smaller government and deregulation unless it's to do with sex, marriage or religion. It's such an obviously contradictory set of ideas that I'm utterly amazed that such a level of cognitive dissonance does not cause the brain to melt and dribble out the ears.... wait... that would actually explain a lot.
If you are not willing to even bother to learn enough about something that is so deeply effecting your business to feel like you could understand why you'd be hiring some one to try and deal with it then you should realise that you shouldn't be in charge and step down.
Not, like you said, you actually have to understand something to be able to effectively hire some one to do it. I also find it amazing that some one in his place, who felt they personally couldn't hire some one, has no one he could trust with the task.
That's a hell of a sentence, I may pirate it off you for future debates. I honestly think this really needs to be more of a talking point, that the social contract on which modern copyrights are founded has been broken. By lobbying for extensions to copyright that have left us with a century that has a ghost town of public domain works.
NC is the point at which I can feel my gut kicking in, while I want any one to be able to share and freely adapt and use work I create I feel my self having a simple emotional reaction to the idea that some one can be making money in part by using my work with out me getting something out of it as well. Now don't get me wrong I'd want any of my work to go public domain with in a reasonable time but before then if my work is doing work I'd like some money.
I'm battling with my self about logic of this and I've still not fully come to a conclusion. That said however the only way I've been able to get the rest of my band to agree to use CC at all is with the NC item. They are vastly more conservative and honestly much less interested and informed about this stuff than me and while they understand the benefits of giving out our stuff for free they do not want to see other people use our stuff to make money.
CC still needs the option and trying to force the change in the market by removing it is only really going to marginalise CC use to those who are already converted. In the case of my band they are people who likely wouldn't even think about this stuff but who are learning about it and actively using parts of it because of the NC.
NC is a safety net for people who are being caught up in a change they didn't see coming and don't yet fully understand and I think CC will weaken it's self by losing it at this point.
At this point I think the studios understand that DRM does not story piracy but that's not it's main function any more. Since they've got laws passed that make it illegal to break locks on content they effectively have a veto on any new technology. If they don't like something all they have to do is add a flimsy lock that breaks the system and that system becomes illegal.
All the talk about piracy is just the excuse to try and maintain this level of control in the hopes they can codify their current business models into law. Which means that as crazy as it may sound I don't think the people on the other side of this debate are as stupid as they come across when it comes to these issues.
I think they now understand that piracy is effectively a none issue but they've learnt just how much of a powerful tool the fear of piracy is in advancing their goals. Which are sadly based on the idea that they will do anything to get their way and not caring about the fall out of their actions. If they go down they are willing to take everything down with them.
It's at times like these I feel like giving up and/or going in to politics. I tend not to want to go in to politics because I'm very afraid I'd be good at it.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Conservatives lack the ability to turn shit off
I'm "pro-life" until it's popped out at which point the mooching unproductive little parasite better be able to look after it's self! I got what I got with not help from any one else (except the endless help I got from every one else in any number of ways I will pretend didn't happen or don't count) so why should that little baby get a free ride on my hard work? I got it in to this life alive and if it's too stupid to be rich it's it own fault.
Excuse me while I go throw up. Even jokingly faking such levels of cognitive dissonance has given me a hell of a head ache.
So let me get this straight, you are attempting to say that because a description of the service (not a contract or agreement or terms of service) that uses the generic term "friends and family" means that Lendink is doing something wrong?
Let's run with this stupid idea and ask "when would it be right?" do you have to use Lendink more like a dating service? It puts you in contact with some one who has the book you'd like to lend but before you can lend anything you have to spend time getting to know each other? Do you then have to pass some kind of "friendship" test? What makes you some ones friend? Do you have to meet up in real life or is "internet friends" good enough? Who is the grate arbiter of who counts as your freinds? You? Lendink? Amazon?
Nope, copyright law as it exists today is to benefit the public. It grants content creators a state monopoly to produce copies of their work for a given term as an incentive to increase the number of works that end up in the public domain. The original US term was 14 years (I think) and was set as that as another incentive to the production of new works as it meant that a creator could not simply live off the production of one great work.
The protection of the creator was the means not the intent and that has been utterly forgotten. The public interest that was the reason the public are asked to give up their rights for is now ignored. Copyright as it is is not ethical in the slightest and holds no resemblance to the intent in which these monopolies were first granted.
No, they didn't, because they didn't have the legal right to. What the did instead was pass the "Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987" in response to what happened that would allow them to in future.
In other words the law the UK is saying gives them the rights to enter the embassy now is a direct result of what happened at the Libyan embassy then. They felt so deeply about what happened then they passed a law to make sure it would not happen again. Using it to try and spin a point is lazy and uninformed rubbish and should be ignored.
Now there are big questions regarding the Act and if it can be used in this situation but there is an argument to be made that it does so the UK is not really throwing out legal president or anything.
What they are doing is using it as a bullying tactic and likely don't intend to actually test the legal or diplomatic issues that would come as a result of doing so. They can simply sit outside and wait for the guy to come out.
The whole thing stinks and it makes me feel sick to be British right now but please do not be misleading about the legalities at play.
Actually 90% piracy rate seems reasonable but what you have to remember is that a 90% piracy rate is not the same as 90% of the people in the market.
Iphones prove this point, app devs claim 90% piracy rates but only about 20% of phones are jailbroken and able to pirate. The upshot of this is that at most 20% of the market is pirate (there are lots of reasons to jailbreak so actual number is likely lower) but that part of the market consumes VASTLY more apps than the other 80%.
People forget that pirates have effectively unlimited buying power when compeered to people who are limited by the money they have to spend. Any given game has a HUGE potential market but turning that potential in to actual sales has a very high attrition rate. People have their budget for buying media for the month and you are competing to get them to spend money on your product rather than some one else's. So only a relatively small number of the people who might buy the game actually do for any number of reasons.
What you get when you put that number up against the number of people who pirate is a statistical mismatch of sets. The pirates are not limited in what they download so they can be a "consumer" of vastly more content than some one who pays for the game. Pirates are in effect a set that represents that initial potential market, rather than the people who have paid who represent a set of actual market share.
Most of us here are of a mind that piracy does not really effect sales that much so we naturally look at a 90% piracy rate and think "that can't be right? can it?" but we need to stop trying to downplay these rates because we really need to start building a better understanding of what these rates actually mean.
Less than 20% of a market can drive 90% rates of use if that 20% use a lot more than the other 80%. That is actually a relatively simple concept once you wrap your head around it. What's really important about it is that it's an argument that supports the idea that piracy is much less damaging than the industry thinks with out having to argue with them over the numbers.
If we make them think differently about what those numbers mean and find ways to prove it to them (such as more research in to the whole iphone thing) then we defuse the most powerful data they are throwing around with facts rather than an assumption that they must me making it up.
" but a sucky marketer would make much more on higher priced e-books with a publisher, because they would do what he sucks at - marketing the damn thing."
For the rest of your post I'm don't understand statistics well enough to comment on most of it but I will talk about platform because you are really and very clearly trying to reach for something to back up your point an fail to deliver anything.
"Third, the emphasis on the ethereal "building the platform" is a bit misplaced. There is no proof of any one to one relationship between books sold and "platform" built. In reality, it could be argued that the very low price e-book makes the author almost irrelevant in the discussion, that people are often buying because it's too cheap not to, and MIGHT be okay. In those cases, it's almost a given that there would be little relationship between units sold and "platform" size."
Not a single thing here makes sense, firstly no where does any one say more books sold = a bigger platform. What they say is that with more books sold you have advanced in building a platform. If you don't understand that dissection then no wonder the whole point is lost on you.
Secondly you say "it might be argued" and then do nothing to argue it. You state people are more likely to pick the book up because at that price they can risk the book being bad, that's fine but that's an advantage to an unknown author so I fail to understand what you are driving at. If I bend my mind out of shape I can make a guess that you think the decision to buy a book is more important than what some one thinks of a book after reading it but it hurts to do so.
I could see you arguing that because some one brought a book 'cus it was a cheap punt that they may not engage with it.. which is making vast assumptions, or that they may not give it priority reading... but none of this actually changes the basic fact that the book is in the hands of a person that it wouldn't have been if it was more expensive.
Any sale of a book creates the potential to build your fan base no matter what the price. It's just that when you sell at a lower price you will sell far more copies to people who are not already part of your platform and that give you a bigger potential in adding people to that platform. The fewer people who buy a book and the higher the likely hood that a given person is already part of your platform that is the result of a higher price puts you at a disadvantage in terms of growing your platform than some one selling at a lower price.
Nothing that you've said makes it seem you understand what is being presented let alone have a valid counter point to make about it.
There are blog authors who write whole posts that are purely bait for a vocal group of people. The are places that are well know for letting people write posts on their sites that exist purely to drive page views by enraging a group who will want to debate and talk about what was said.
That said I do think Bob is written by one of the Techdirt guy :)
Re: No, trolling is worse. IT's a way to live in denial
It's true, people are some time so wrong in their ideas and yet so arrogant and sure of those views that they will never once coincide that they are wrong that they are confused for trolls.
This happens because dispute confirmation bias the pain of having to rethink a view and admit when you are wrong most people are open to having their views changed. So when they run in to some who so clearly isn't open to that change it can be confused for trolling because they find it hard to accept that some one can be so wrong in often none objective and factual ways and yet refuse to see it that it must be some one having a joke.
It's more comforting to think that such people are fake than that they are real and have a vote that means just as much as yours.
On the post: Don't Focus On Why People Pirate; Focus On Why They Don't Buy
Re: Re: Re:
Let me explain, piracy rate is made by taking the number of people who brought the game and adding that to the number of people who pirated it and then working out the ratio. Make sense right? Well, no, because what you are doing is matching two different and distinct sets from the market.
Note: For the sake of keeping things simple I'm going to presume that no pirate buys anything and no paying consumer pirates. It has no real impact on the point but helps make it easier to explain. I'll address this and other things towards the end.
Put simply people who pirate games can easily pirate more games than people who buy them. Pirates on a whole have such a higher rate of use than the average paying consumer. The logic here is not hard to follow, people have a given budget they spend on games and likely means they can't afford to buy all the games they'd like to. They have to make choices between which games they are going to buy in a period and which games they are not going to buy. A pirate is only limited by bandwidth and time.
What this means is simply that each individual pirate will be counted against far more games "piracy rate" than each individual paying consumer will be. So when you move from trying to astatine what percentage of a market is made of people who pirate to looking at the sub set of who buys and who pirates a given game the people who pirate are disproportionally represented.
Pirates have a higher rate of use of games than paying consumers so compeering any given rate of use is only going to inform you of how greater that rate is.
What's remarkable about all this is that this is not just theoretical. We have a huge real life market that we can look at for which we have a good guess at the amount of pirates in the market. That market is iOS devices.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy
This is an old blog post from a indie dev responding to this exact issue. It goes in to more detail than I'm about to but it's likely also out of date. Still it's premise is where I first came across the ideas shown above and it's provides the factual base on which I rest them. Some of the links are dead but for the most part it's easy to find sources for he kind of numbers used in the post. The one exception to that might be piracy rates for apps but I've personally been in discussions with app devs who track use and who have backed up the 90-95% pirate rate numbers.
The first thing to do is note that to pirate apps you need to have a jail broken Iphone. While not all jail broken Iphones are used to pirate we'll use their numbers as the upper limit and as such the worst case scenario. I'm even going to boost the estimated percentage of jail broken phones from the 10% seen in the blog post to 20% to be on the safe side.
Now the astute among you will have already noticed the disparity between the piracy rates and that figure so the next thing to do is ask "If only 20% of the market can be pirates how does that represent a 90% piracy rate?" Well we already answered this question in the opening of this post. That 20% of the market can and does use more apps than the average consumer that makes up the other 80%.
Out of 100 people 20 pirate and 80 buy. In a period in which a 5 games are realised pirates pirate a copy of each while the paying consumer buys 1. This gives the pirates 100 "votes" and the paying consumers 80 "votes. Assuming the consumers are evening spread out across the 5 games you get about a 55% piracy rate from only 20% of the market. And that is a very restrictive set up that is very unfavourable to the actual reality. If we want to make a guess for how much higher rate of use is between pirates and users, well, as it turns out we already have one. Pirates then to consume 95% more than paying consumers.
So what does that all really mean? Well firstly it's factual proof that one download cannot equal one lost sale, secondly it gives some perspective on how damaging piracy can actually be. If we are producing 95% piracy rates out of iOS devices where only at worst 20% of the market can be pirates then it's reasonable to presume that it's the same everywhere. Thirdly we can actually use this, in the case of iOS, to asses the damages done.
I've talked to iOS devs who said that if 1 in 10 of the pirates had brought the game he'd have doubled his revenue. Which is fine but meaningless unless he was selling to 1 in 10 of people in the iOS market for his app. I proposed that he works out his rate of sale to 80% of the total number of iOS devices and then apply that rate to the other 20% and he'd have a worst case for the sales he might have made maybe in a world in which people didn't or couldn't pirate. This of course would have to tempered by the fact that one of the major reasons for piracy is often lack availability and that a lot of pirates comes from places that can't afford given tiers of pricing. In the EU there are places that boxed copies of games are sold for less than others to help combat the piracy those poorer places produce. This is often why sites that sell you the keys from boxes can sell those keys cheaper than you can get in retail.
Now to loop back to Ubisofts "10-15% of f2p players but" rubbish, I hope you can see why that number is meaningless and the connection pointless. I applaud Ubisoft for looking at the people who pirate their games as people who want to play them and seeking to find way to get money from that market via F2P the line of reasoning here does not sit well.
Every one who plays a given F2P game exists in the same set, every one has only one "vote" to put towards the buying or not of items with in the game. It's it's own discrete set unlike the mismatched sets from the piracy rate mess.
This all gets vastly more complex when you mix in the fact that a lot of users are both pirates and paying consumers and that often they are spending just as much money as they would have but only on the products they feel have value.
Now I know I've gone off on a rant about this but I'm hoping that I can simply link back to this comment in to the future if these numbers are ever raised by any one ever again. I also thing that it's relevant to the over all discussion to have an sense of what we should be thinking about when we think about "piracy damage".
Looking at any individual media item is irrelevant, you must base your judgements on the market as a whole. Ignoring the actual act of piracy to focus on the decision to buy is a hell of a lot less scary to people who may not understand that market when you are thinking in terms of 20 percent rather than 95.
On the post: Kickstarter Campaign To Fund New Short Stories For The Public Domain
Re: Re: Re: Re: Thanks!
Your ability to ignore the reality of the situation based confirmation bias is honestly remarkable. I just wish you'd use it to do something more meaningful than troll techdirt.
On the post: Kickstarter Campaign To Fund New Short Stories For The Public Domain
Re: Re: Re: Re: Thanks!
The issue here is that writers unlike, say, musicians don't inherently produce anything to which the availability has to be scarce. Musics on the other hand have live performance, which is scarce and for which your argument above would actually make sense, they can only play so many live shows before they die, they can only tour so much. So if a fan wants to see a musician perform they are faced with a scarcity of that product.
Books are like recorded music but a author can't make a living play them "live". Yes, before you say it, I know people will often go to see an author read their work but it's not a piratical way for people to consume a book for any number of reasons.
Anyway point is that with out something that is inherently scarce and inherently valuable authors are trying to find ways to add value to each copy of the work in the face of those copies not having to be scares at all. The most common and easy of these is to create artificial scarcity like limited special edition prints.
In this case Pruden is trying to both create scarcity while also connecting with his fans and promoting his writing. It's a really interesting move because it combines the PR he should be doing anyway (the best writing in the world is pointless if no one reads it in the first place) while giving fans a reason to buy.
In a world where every one who is in the market for my writing could easily get hold of a digital copy of it the fact is that no matter how unique or special that writing any given copy of it is not.
On the post: Russia (Yes, The Country) Looking To Enter The Tablet Market
Re: Re: Re:
Or triply given the subtle hint about the pointlessness of stating a blanked conclusion with out explaining the reasoning behind it seems to have been to subtle. Or maybe I should feel bad for that, I may have expected too much from you.
On the post: Russia (Yes, The Country) Looking To Enter The Tablet Market
Re:
On the post: Far Beyond Filtering: Is The GOP Looking To Shut Down Porn Producers?
On the post: Universal Music CEO: We're Not In This To Make Art
Re: Re: Re:
Not, like you said, you actually have to understand something to be able to effectively hire some one to do it. I also find it amazing that some one in his place, who felt they personally couldn't hire some one, has no one he could trust with the task.
On the post: Want To Know How Weak The GOP's Internet Freedom Platform Is? The MPAA Loves It
Re: Re: Re: Uh, creators are voters too
That's a hell of a sentence, I may pirate it off you for future debates. I honestly think this really needs to be more of a talking point, that the social contract on which modern copyrights are founded has been broken. By lobbying for extensions to copyright that have left us with a century that has a ghost town of public domain works.
On the post: Should Creative Commons Drop Its NonCommercial & NoDerivatives License Options?
Re:
I'm battling with my self about logic of this and I've still not fully come to a conclusion. That said however the only way I've been able to get the rest of my band to agree to use CC at all is with the NC item. They are vastly more conservative and honestly much less interested and informed about this stuff than me and while they understand the benefits of giving out our stuff for free they do not want to see other people use our stuff to make money.
CC still needs the option and trying to force the change in the market by removing it is only really going to marginalise CC use to those who are already converted. In the case of my band they are people who likely wouldn't even think about this stuff but who are learning about it and actively using parts of it because of the NC.
NC is a safety net for people who are being caught up in a change they didn't see coming and don't yet fully understand and I think CC will weaken it's self by losing it at this point.
On the post: HBO Go Goes Everywhere... Except Your TV Set
Re: Re: Re:
All the talk about piracy is just the excuse to try and maintain this level of control in the hopes they can codify their current business models into law. Which means that as crazy as it may sound I don't think the people on the other side of this debate are as stupid as they come across when it comes to these issues.
I think they now understand that piracy is effectively a none issue but they've learnt just how much of a powerful tool the fear of piracy is in advancing their goals. Which are sadly based on the idea that they will do anything to get their way and not caring about the fall out of their actions. If they go down they are willing to take everything down with them.
On the post: US Chamber Of Commerce Launches Ad Campaign For Son Of SOPA
On the post: The Aftershock Of Stupidity: Lendink Reopens Only To Receive Trolling DMCA Notices
Re: Re:
On the post: GOP Platform May Include Internet Freedom Language... But Also Wants Crackdown On Internet Porn
Re: Re: Re: Re: Conservatives lack the ability to turn shit off
Excuse me while I go throw up. Even jokingly faking such levels of cognitive dissonance has given me a hell of a head ache.
On the post: The Aftershock Of Stupidity: Lendink Reopens Only To Receive Trolling DMCA Notices
Re:
Let's run with this stupid idea and ask "when would it be right?" do you have to use Lendink more like a dating service? It puts you in contact with some one who has the book you'd like to lend but before you can lend anything you have to spend time getting to know each other? Do you then have to pass some kind of "friendship" test? What makes you some ones friend? Do you have to meet up in real life or is "internet friends" good enough? Who is the grate arbiter of who counts as your freinds? You? Lendink? Amazon?
Try a little harder please
On the post: The Stupidity Of The 'Just Go Without' Argument
Re: Re: Let's talk
The protection of the creator was the means not the intent and that has been utterly forgotten. The public interest that was the reason the public are asked to give up their rights for is now ignored. Copyright as it is is not ethical in the slightest and holds no resemblance to the intent in which these monopolies were first granted.
On the post: US, UK Betray Basic Values To Get Assange At Any Cost
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
In other words the law the UK is saying gives them the rights to enter the embassy now is a direct result of what happened at the Libyan embassy then. They felt so deeply about what happened then they passed a law to make sure it would not happen again. Using it to try and spin a point is lazy and uninformed rubbish and should be ignored.
Now there are big questions regarding the Act and if it can be used in this situation but there is an argument to be made that it does so the UK is not really throwing out legal president or anything.
What they are doing is using it as a bullying tactic and likely don't intend to actually test the legal or diplomatic issues that would come as a result of doing so. They can simply sit outside and wait for the guy to come out.
The whole thing stinks and it makes me feel sick to be British right now but please do not be misleading about the legalities at play.
On the post: How Having A Good Sense Of Humor Helps Cope With Piracy And Succeed Despite It
Re:
Iphones prove this point, app devs claim 90% piracy rates but only about 20% of phones are jailbroken and able to pirate. The upshot of this is that at most 20% of the market is pirate (there are lots of reasons to jailbreak so actual number is likely lower) but that part of the market consumes VASTLY more apps than the other 80%.
People forget that pirates have effectively unlimited buying power when compeered to people who are limited by the money they have to spend. Any given game has a HUGE potential market but turning that potential in to actual sales has a very high attrition rate. People have their budget for buying media for the month and you are competing to get them to spend money on your product rather than some one else's. So only a relatively small number of the people who might buy the game actually do for any number of reasons.
What you get when you put that number up against the number of people who pirate is a statistical mismatch of sets. The pirates are not limited in what they download so they can be a "consumer" of vastly more content than some one who pays for the game. Pirates are in effect a set that represents that initial potential market, rather than the people who have paid who represent a set of actual market share.
Most of us here are of a mind that piracy does not really effect sales that much so we naturally look at a 90% piracy rate and think "that can't be right? can it?" but we need to stop trying to downplay these rates because we really need to start building a better understanding of what these rates actually mean.
Less than 20% of a market can drive 90% rates of use if that 20% use a lot more than the other 80%. That is actually a relatively simple concept once you wrap your head around it. What's really important about it is that it's an argument that supports the idea that piracy is much less damaging than the industry thinks with out having to argue with them over the numbers.
If we make them think differently about what those numbers mean and find ways to prove it to them (such as more research in to the whole iphone thing) then we defuse the most powerful data they are throwing around with facts rather than an assumption that they must me making it up.
On the post: Traditional Publisher Ebook Pricing Harming Authors' Careers
Re:
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20120717/22485119738/if-this-is-what-bi g-publishers-call-promotion-no-wonder-theyre-trouble.shtml
Yay for assumptions!
For the rest of your post I'm don't understand statistics well enough to comment on most of it but I will talk about platform because you are really and very clearly trying to reach for something to back up your point an fail to deliver anything.
"Third, the emphasis on the ethereal "building the platform" is a bit misplaced. There is no proof of any one to one relationship between books sold and "platform" built. In reality, it could be argued that the very low price e-book makes the author almost irrelevant in the discussion, that people are often buying because it's too cheap not to, and MIGHT be okay. In those cases, it's almost a given that there would be little relationship between units sold and "platform" size."
Not a single thing here makes sense, firstly no where does any one say more books sold = a bigger platform. What they say is that with more books sold you have advanced in building a platform. If you don't understand that dissection then no wonder the whole point is lost on you.
Secondly you say "it might be argued" and then do nothing to argue it. You state people are more likely to pick the book up because at that price they can risk the book being bad, that's fine but that's an advantage to an unknown author so I fail to understand what you are driving at. If I bend my mind out of shape I can make a guess that you think the decision to buy a book is more important than what some one thinks of a book after reading it but it hurts to do so.
I could see you arguing that because some one brought a book 'cus it was a cheap punt that they may not engage with it.. which is making vast assumptions, or that they may not give it priority reading... but none of this actually changes the basic fact that the book is in the hands of a person that it wouldn't have been if it was more expensive.
Any sale of a book creates the potential to build your fan base no matter what the price. It's just that when you sell at a lower price you will sell far more copies to people who are not already part of your platform and that give you a bigger potential in adding people to that platform. The fewer people who buy a book and the higher the likely hood that a given person is already part of your platform that is the result of a higher price puts you at a disadvantage in terms of growing your platform than some one selling at a lower price.
Nothing that you've said makes it seem you understand what is being presented let alone have a valid counter point to make about it.
On the post: Is Trolling Just A Form Of Practical Jokes?
Re:
That said I do think Bob is written by one of the Techdirt guy :)
On the post: Is Trolling Just A Form Of Practical Jokes?
Re: No, trolling is worse. IT's a way to live in denial
This happens because dispute confirmation bias the pain of having to rethink a view and admit when you are wrong most people are open to having their views changed. So when they run in to some who so clearly isn't open to that change it can be confused for trolling because they find it hard to accept that some one can be so wrong in often none objective and factual ways and yet refuse to see it that it must be some one having a joke.
It's more comforting to think that such people are fake than that they are real and have a vote that means just as much as yours.
Next >>