Stop Piracy? Legal Alternatives Beat Legal Threats, Research Shows (torrentfreak.com) 134
An anonymous reader writes: Threatening file-sharers with high fines or even prison sentences is not the best way to stop piracy. New research published by UK researchers shows that perceived risk has no effect on people's file-sharing habits. Instead, the entertainment industries should focus on improving the legal options, so these can compete with file-sharing. Unauthorized file-sharing (UFS) is best predicted by the supposed benefits of piracy. As such, the researchers note that better legal alternatives are the best way to stop piracy. The results are based on a psychological study among hundreds of music and ebook consumers. They were subjected to a set of questions regarding their file-sharing habits, perceived risk, industry trust, and online anonymity. By analyzing the data the researchers found that the perceived benefit of piracy, such as quality, flexibility of use and cost are the real driver of piracy. An increase in legal risk was not directly associated with any statistically significant decrease in self-reported file-sharing.
The beatings will continue until morale improves (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw you (Score:2)
Long Live torrentz.eu
Viva la revolution !!!!
Just saying (Score:5, Interesting)
I have yet to meet a file "sharer" who thought there was *any* perceived risk. Not audio, not video, not programs...
Seriously. Not one. Since the first digital days. That's anecdotal, but it's a whole lot of anecdotes, as in every adult and teen I've met in the last 40 years.
And speaking as a software developer that decided not to copy protect, threaten or prosecute, but did implement anonymous active copy / IP reporting over the net so I knew what was going on in terms of interest and activity, there have been hundreds of times the number of non-purchased copies of my various software products in use as compared to the number that were purchased during the sales lifetimes of those products.
There's no fear out there. I'm not sure there should be, either. Because the threat level is basically zero. And perhaps it should be, ethically speaking. Legally... well, the law is often wrong.
Re:Just saying (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who has been on all three sides of the fence I can tell you with some credibility that the sales you lost are, relatively speaking, few. The question is not how many have copied, the question is rather how many of those that did copy would have bought instead if they could not copy.
For many it's a bit like the free sample at the grocery. Sure they take a free sample of that wasabi cheese on white bread, but actually buy some?
Re: Just saying (Score:1)
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And if you couldn't use it at the library, you would probably still go and try to find free or cheap alternatives, as long as they don't inconvenience you too much, I guess.
I'm dead serious: Enforcing copyright with a heavy hand only accomplishes that more and more people move towards cheaper alternatives that do what they need. Do you need MS Office? Unlikely, your chances are pretty good that LibreOffice can do what you need. Yes, MS-Office may have a few functions more (I honestly don't know, let's humor
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And still the free sample is worth it, because there are people, who will buy it.
Used Zip, skipped RAR, now Zip/7z (Score:2)
I can't speak for the other anonymous contributor. But once I graduated from college in 2003 and had to buy my own software instead of relying on my institution's site license, I had already tasted the proverbial Kool-Aid of the free software movement, having replaced NeoPaint with GIMP as my primary paint program on Windows. So I didn't buy WinRAR in part because of the author's active refusal to document the RAR format. I guess I was spoiled by Phil Katz's full documentation of PKZIP's format (APPNOTE.TXT
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You mean 7zip?
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It doesn't seem to make any difference if you pirate or not. My ISP sends me "someone said you downloaded such and such, if you did please stop or otherwise just ignore this" a few times a week. It's always for crap I have no interest in. They keep coming even when I'm out of the country and the WiFi is physically powered off.
Re:Screw you (Score:5, Insightful)
I "know someone who" wanted to rent a 5 year old movie on iTunes not long ago. He was ready to pay for it. The rights holders, however, had decided that this particular movie was only to be made available for purchase, not rental. More than twice the price of a rental. So guess what he did...
Other example, same guy, rented a movie on iTunes then decided he liked it so much he wanted to purchase it. Do you think they would let him convert the rental into a purchase? Nope, full price on top of rental. So guess what he did...
Bad service turns potential customers into pirates. In both examples above the rights holders missed out on the money someone was willing to spend because they were simply too greedy. It's easy to blame the pirates, though.
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At least he had the option to view it legally at all.
I'm a fan of J-POP and K-POP. Every year or so, I do a search, they either say it doesn't exist at all or not available in my country.
At least Youtube normally allows me to listen to it, but wouldn't it be nice if I were to be legally allowed to buy^Wlicense a copy to put on my MP3 player?
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It baffles me that the rights holders won't allow a discounted price for a movie purchase after you rent it. I'm sure it's on Apple's radar. They'vs been doing something similar for Music for years with "Complete My Album". You get a discount for the album based on the amount that you've paid for each song.
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It baffles me that the rights holders won't allow a discounted price for a movie purchase after you rent it. I'm sure it's on Apple's radar. They'vs been doing something similar for Music for years with "Complete My Album". You get a discount for the album based on the amount that you've paid for each song.
If not, you just put it on their radar. Of course, they have prior art and email chains to cover patents and copyrights. {Hold on a sec... gotta modify a character in an email chain at work.. ok there, done. Now it's shown I proved I told the company about this new proof of concept on 2015-09-22. Sweet.} /sarcasm
I'm not criticizing you, BTW. Just pointing fingers in their direction. 7:)
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I love your examples! What the ID-10-T execs don't realize is that their consumer base could (if we had a "movement" other than bowel) completely destroy them. All of them. Their actions that scare, set limits for, and piss off those that can destroy them are narcissistic at best (oh, there are so many more words).
Oh, well. People just repeat the same mistakes again expecting different results because they're "different" than the ones before (more powerful or smarter). Funny how that process repeats an
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Yup, this.
I've got a lawn for peopel to get off because I've been saying it for years. More like over a decade: Provide a reasonable cost, easy to use, LEGAL alternative and people will use it.
When Netflix had a reasonably full catalog (instead of focusing so much on their own content) the number of downloads "a friend of mine" did was severely reduced. It was quick, easy, cheap, and had much of what he was looking for. Fast forward a bit and now there's a half dozen major and a few dozen minor streamin
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On the other hand, a threat you don't carry out is no real threat at all.
The problem we have at the moment is that we have this bizarre situation where the law says creators have certain rights as an incentive, and a lot of people do create and share work on that basis, yet actually enforcing your rights is impractical in many circumstances so there's no real deterrent.
This naturally results in a situation where people who are honest and can afford to pay for works do so, but they are effectively subsidisin
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I don't know about your country, but in mine, for transgressions being elevated to "crime" started, something called "public interest" has to be at stake. With murder, there is public interest. Because everyone has a life and doesn't want it been taken. With robbery, there is public interest. Because everything has something that belongs to him and doesn't want taken. With physical injury, there is public interest. Because everyone has a body and doesn't want it harmed.
As soon as everyone has something copy
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I don't think your implication that it's only in the public interest to make behaviour criminal if everyone can be a direct victim really holds up under scrutiny.
The entire premise and justification for copyright is (or at least used to be) that it was in the public interest to incentivise creating and distributing new works. The fact that such an incentive is necessarily beneficial to creators is just a side effect.
Moreover, copyright is not an isolated case. For another example, most people don't run a bu
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The public interest of copyright is in its limitation, not in its establishment. The establishment is, from a public point of view, the necessary evil to promote creation.
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I'm not arguing that the current copyright rules aren't excessive in some (perhaps most or all) jurisdictions today. On the contrary, I would be the first to agree that they are and that copyright should be brought back to a reasonable level that is justified as an incentive but does not go excessively far beyond that.
However, that is a different point to whether infringement of reasonable copyright protection should be treated as a criminal matter to allow effective enforcement, which is my "devil's advoca
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How is the imaginary property of content more "crime-worthy" than the imaginary property of honor? To explain, if I am being slandered, I have to drag the slanderer to court myself, too, no general attorney gives a shit about it.
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It's a matter of degree.
Obviously legal systems differ from place to place, but in my country civil suits can normally only result in compensation for actual losses. In a defamation suit, if say a celebrity loses a lucrative sponsorship deal after an libelous allegation that they take illegal drugs, the court might take the value of that sponsorship deal into account when determining those losses. That means a big pay-out, usually enough to justify the cost of bringing a civil legal action. However, in the
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Then I have to wonder where the insane compensation demands come from if you can only sue for whatever amount the damage actually was.
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What insane compensation demands? Almost no-one, at least in my country, is being sued for large amounts of money for copyright infringement, even if they've ripped thousands of pounds' worth of content. Unless you're actually running a major piracy site or large-scale DVD cloning farm or something like that, your chances of suffering any penalty under the law for copyright infringement are extremely low. That's the point.
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Not all industrialized countries recognize the same sort of statutory damage awards as the United States.
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So someone who didn't cause damage cannot be sued for ridiculous amounts of money?
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Not in much of the world, no. As far as I'm aware, the US is alone in offering such staggering punitive damages in this context. The US also has an everyone-pays legal system, allowing for rather transparent barratry in various copyright-related actions, so it's not as if the legal system there being heavily stacked in favour of wealthy rightsholders is surprising. Fortunately, most of the world is not the litigious absurdity that the US is in these respects.
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Logically speaking you're begging the question here: if people can't enforce their rights, you can't say that the expectation of enforcement is the basis of their creative activity, because if they really couldn'
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Unfortunately, we've wound up with a system where enough people are honest and pay for content that some of it is commercially viable to create, yet those honest people are effectively subsidising the freeloaders who benefit from the same content without contributing anything to support it.
Then to address the freeloaders we've wound up with a kind of pseudo-enforcement system through the likes of takedown notices and DRM. From the point of view of Big Media, these moderate the perceived damage from copyrigh
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Again, begging the question: you still accept the theory that it is enforcement of rights that motivates people to create. You just shift the goalposts a little by saying that there are enough honest people to make it work.
The simpler model is that people like to create things, and given decent access to creation, enough people are willing to pay that this is a viable living for creators. The commercial artists who experimented with a low-threshold access to material (by not enforcing copyright) showed us e
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The commercial artists who experimented with a low-threshold access to material (by not enforcing copyright) showed us empirical data that this is in fact a more likely explanation of reality.
Really? Most of the experiments I've seen along those lines seem to have found results that were far less positive about people paying for work just out of good nature, and most of the exceptions were situations where the artist was already very well known thanks to earlier work supported by the usual payment model. Did you have any specific examples in mind where that was not the case?
Of course there are always those who will give money to support creative work that they believe in, entirely voluntarily. C
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If you are going to ignore the example I gave you, while asking for examples, I am going to assume you are arguing in bad faith. So do your own homework, I'm done with you.
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So, playing devil's advocate for a moment, maybe copyright infringement should be a crime, treated similar to other financial crimes like fraud
It is, if conducted at a commercial level.
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Yes, in some places that is true, but I am talking here about "minor" copyright infringement. If stealing a $1 chocolate bar is criminal theft, I'm suggesting (as a basis for discussion) that perhaps downloading a movie instead of buying a $10 DVD should be criminal copyright infringement, and therefore something that public authorities are responsible for policing in the same way that they would prosecute someone caught stealing a chocolate bar from a store.
is this (Score:2)
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"really a surprise to anyone not affiliated with the **AAs." I disagree. I don't think it is really a surprise to anyone not affiliated with the **AAs.
Re:Gaben was right (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at Steam and how much it gets from making so many titles available...
I think this is a very good example. I have bought several older titles from Steam because it's easy and priced correctly ($3 for an old game is fine by me). Steam also makes it easier than pirating.
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As well as greatly reducing the risk of trojans...
Little edit for ya... They'll be compromised or miss something some day. Dormant trojans are a bitch (insert [heh] joke here if you desire [hehe]).
Red Dead Redemption (Score:2)
The games that aren't available are in the usual publisher rights hell, like NOLF
That or they were never ported to the PC in the first place. Even games that aren't first-party often get ported to multiple consoles, such as the PS2 and Xbox, PS3 and Xbox 360, or PS4 and Xbox One, with no PC version. This could be caused by a lack of resources, by greater infringement rates of the publisher's past PC releases compared to its past console releases, or by the game focusing on local multiplayer (though this last reason has started to diminish with Steam Link). Or do you consider lack of a P
Distorted justice (Score:1)
How about we jail all the CEO's and Bankers who have gotten away with scamming the Public out of billions and gotten a slight slap on the wrist FIRST?
my observation (Score:1)
Based on my observation, the greater then crime, more minor the punishment.
Nazi war criminal serves relatively few years in prison for industrialised murder of six million.
IP piracy according to FBI warnings on all the DVD discs will land you 10 years in Federal prison + 250k in fine, per incident.
Politicians launched wars of aggression against a few third world countries and causing deaths of hundreds of thousands and dislocating millions are still enjoying the protection of Secret Service on tax payers' d
Re:Distorted justice (Score:5, Insightful)
People tend to think others will behave as they do (Score:5, Insightful)
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I still remember the day I found out just how little of the ~15-20 bucks I spent on a CD actually went to the band. I felt robbed. I felt bad for the bands. I hate rent seekers who use their position of power and influence to take far more than their fair share as an fiefdom tax.
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I still remember the day I found out just how little of the ~15-20 bucks I spent on a CD actually went to the band. I felt robbed. I felt bad for the bands. I hate rent seekers who use their position of power and influence to take far more than their fair share as an fiefdom tax.
OMG, I know.. If it weren't for the psycho fan risk, it would be nice to be able to give money to the band members directly to ensure it isn't going to get a[n] [over]weighted fee pulled by someone else. Tax reporting isn't brought into this thought, anyone who reads this. That's the band members' responsibility to do what they wish in terms of evasion or reporting.
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I would gladly give every music exec exactly what he deserves, but murder is illegal in my country.
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I would gladly give every music exec exactly what he deserves, but murder is illegal in my country.
How about an alternative... Freeze all assets, strip them of their belongings, give them an apartment and food for a month, and go make them learn to play a musical instrument. Like Trading Places [wikipedia.org]; get other execs to back it for a reality show. Heck, they'll gain from it so why not screw one of their own over? ;)
Re:People tend to think others will behave as they (Score:5, Interesting)
It's an interesting situation, because "intellectual property" and the fact that people actually pay for it, is at complete odds with modern economic theory.
The general understanding of market economics is based on fundamentals like, "Supply and Demand" - and these are easily described using mathematical models: The greater the supply and the lower the demand, the lower the price will be, and vice versa.
If we look at intellectual property and software in particular, we find the following characteristics to be true:
1. It is difficult to create
2. Can be easily copied
2a. For little cost or effort
2b. An infinite number of times
So in a free market you end up with a product that is expensive and time consuming to create, but which once created, can be reproduced as much as anyone happens to care for. If someone wants 5,000 copies of your IP, they CAN and it wouldn't cost them a dime. This means the supply is infinite; in which case the demand doesn't matter and the going price for your product is: Zero! Zero dollars!
The rational economist / businessman see this and knows per their rational / purely selfish point of view, that they can never make money in a market where rational actors will simply "steal" their product by copying, sharing, and distributing it with each other. If you walked into a business class in the 1950's with videogames that can be freely copied past the first sale as your business model, you'd have been flunked out and laughed at.
Their solution? Artificial scarcity! Using the threat of violence against their own customers, these economists and businessmen impose DRM, fines, lawsuits, jail, and even death (should you actually defend yourself from police enacting these legalized threats) in order to limit the supply and force customers to pay for the product.
YET
We see today that games with limited or no DRM restrictions - in fact even games that are literally and intentionally given away for free - still attract profits, and not just small profits, but enough profits to continue running a business. Because the public irrationally supports people creating intellectual property in spite of the fact they can or have, obtained that intellectual property for free.
Ironically I often see in arguments about this (particularly at the hands of business-owned "news"), that it's the pirates, gamers, consumers who are being entitled and demanding. In spite of the fact these are the very people who pay money for things they can have for free to begin with. Meanwhile the publishers go out of their way to actively attack their own customers and spend millions on thwarting the copying and sharing of information. It's like living in a world where the buggy-whip makers have won and outlawed all automobiles. Actually - it's worse than that. It's a case of having automobiles already, and then monied interests outlawed them in order to sell their buggy-whips. It's so farcical I almost can't believe it's the way our modern economies function.
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We see today that games with limited or no DRM restrictions - in fact even games that are literally and intentionally given away for free - still attract profits, and not just small profits, but enough profits to continue running a business. Because the public irrationally supports people creating intellectual property in spite of the fact they can or have, obtained that intellectual property for free.
DRM-free games are still protected by copyright - it is possible but illegal to copy them. If you give away games for free, you need another revenue source: donations and merchandise (which relies on copyright and trademark protection, at the end of the day) can only bring in enough money if your game is extremely popular. In most cases, giving away your product for free means that you need to have a day job to cover living expenses.
Re:People tend to think others will behave as they (Score:4, Insightful)
Not necessarily. As the grandparent posted, and I've said many times before, creating is hard, copying is easy. You need a business model where people pay for the creation, not the copying. For example, you release a beta version of the game with most of the game world missing for free, then you ask for funding to finish it. Once you've received enough to cover your development and distribution costs and make a decent profit, you release the game for free. Then you start asking people to contribute to developing the next one.
This sounds weird, but it's actually exactly the business model that many TV shows use. They produce a pilot and send it to the networks for free. The networks watch it and if they like it then they fund the development of the first season. If the first season does well, they start asking the network for money for the second, and so on. The only difference is that you'd ask the customers directly, rather than having a middleman who wants to sell adverts.
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It's also, for example, precisely how many video games used to be sold - this is the model of shareware that id Software used for Doom and Quake, for example! (You get Episode 1 for free: now give us money for Episodes 2 through 4!)
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Unfortunately this is why so many games that get funded by the consumers through Kickstarter and Steam Early Access end up never getting finished, while the developer keeps all the money.
I do see your point though, and this has worked well for some developers that have delivered good products multiple times through crowd funding.
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... It's so farcical I almost can't believe it's the way our modern economies function.
You have a very interesting and enlightening post here. Gives people something to think about, except for the execs that make the decisions. They're older and HATE changing business models because they're scared of it not turning out where they're in the same tax bracket (sorry for the bad use of terms, but hell...) than they are now. Not to mention the investors, those freaking scumbags that put pressure on the execs to do what THEY, the investors, want to ensure they have a return+++ on their investme
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Just as it is probably inconceivable to you that a lot of people, when given the opportunity to pay more for something than they consider it to be worth, just walk away and do without. No twisted justifications for stealing. They simply do without. Weird, eh?
That's me.
I could pay for any movies, books, music, etc that I want, but in most cases I'm just not that interested. I'm not the average "consumer", driven to see every movie, every album, every whatever. I'm not terrorized by the urge to buy. On the rare occasions I do want something and feel it's worth it, I'll pay for it but most of the time I'm just not interested.
If there was a service that I could pay to screen out the endless stream of mindless pop-culture horseshit out of my awareness, I'd fuckin'
Re:People tend to think others will behave as they (Score:5, Insightful)
Just as it is probably inconceivable to you that a lot of people, when given the opportunity to pay more for something than they consider it to be worth, just walk away and do without. No twisted justifications for stealing. They simply do without. Weird, eh?
Oh. I've heard this idea before. It's the "boycott X store by not shopping there" method of protest.
That's fine, but I have two responses (not arguments, just responses):
First, boycotting doesn't deliver any message to a place or business. If you just "do without", then there's no way for the business to be aware that the product they're selling is desired but that the packaging is offensive. Piracy is a long-standing issue that's been discussed and increasingly made known to be a symptom of a distribution and pricing model that is incompatible with obtaining maximized profits. Business will eventually learn, which wouldn't happen if people just "did without". Understand, I want to pay for digital stuff. Problem is the distribution model makes it artificially impractical to do so.
Second, just because a law is on the books doesn't make it moral, or even right to defend. There is a long history of lawmaking that is eventually viewed as silly or morally wrong. Being lawful isn't necessarily a good thing. In the case of digital piracy, depending on the individual involved and the product involved, it is in many, many cases a victim-less crime. Indeed, I'll admit to having pirated a few e-books which have then inspired me to spend ridiculous amounts of money tracking down physical copies of all of the author's works. Same for music. I "stole" a costless copy of a product I was never going to independently purchase, only to discover I liked it, and then spent lots of money doing so. So yeah, while it's an anecdote, keep in mind that digital piracy isn't theft because the copy we "steal" doesn't have a cost associated.
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Just as it is probably inconceivable to you that a lot of people, when given the opportunity to pay more for something than they consider it to be worth, just walk away and do without. No twisted justifications for stealing. They simply do without. Weird, eh?
What you say makes sense and is a very good way to live life in a mentally healthy state. There are a couple of things you can't put into that blob, though - communications (arts) and protective instincts (child-rearin').
You can't expect your wife, mother, or other directly tied one who had a child to one day decide they can do without. It's something the species needs to continue and instinctively it's a protected behavior. Communications is another - arts of music and visual; we have those embedded as
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You nailed that right on the head. Bravo!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Translation: drop song prices to 25 cents (Score:1)
Drop movie prices to a fraction downloaded to the superior version at the theater.
That works.
Fining some poor kid's family $100,000 cause he stole anime movies from some ultra-rich CEO?
Nope, zero impact.
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Translation: DRM and forced ads suck donkey balls.
I am really tired of all the DVD's and Blu-Rays making it hard to just play my movie without obnoxious previews and introduction animation crap, or get it onto an iPad for my kid/wife/me to watch on a long trip. I don't pirate, but I have come really close to giving up the legit route for even the movies we bought. Pirated content stripped of all the BS gives a far better experience than legit buyers get. WTF?
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I agree that the obnoxious extra material on discs is annoying, but that's down to a somewhat different problem: too many jurisdictions allow IP rights to be used to restrict interoperability. If it were not possible to legally restrict competitors from making players that declined to respect the "unskippable" flags so users could go straight to the content they actually wanted to watch, I think we all know what kind of players the market would be buying almost immediately, and I think it's safe to assume t
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This is exactly the problem. It's not the price, it's the value. The problem legal content is facing that its value is LOWER to the consumer than the copied value. Why? Because it forces him to do things he does not want to do.
What would you value higher? A video that you can simply watch how you want, where you want, whenever you want, with the option to start, stop, forward, rewind and repeat whatever you please, or one that forces you to first sit through ads, only works on certain players and maybe does
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Back when DVD burners were all the rage, and Hard drives expensive, I remember copying DVDs from the Library or video store for my personal collection. I always thought it was funny with DVDShrink / DVDDecrypter how in a couple clicks I could create a copy of the movie to burn on a single layer disc with the options of:
a) Disabling prohibited operations so you can FF through anything
b) Deleting previews / etc so the feature film won't have to be shrunk as much.
Software is the same. I always like to point ou
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Legal Alternatives that don't suck work but when (Score:2)
Legal Alternatives that don't suck work but when Piracy get a better ver that is bad. When you have to re buy the same stuff for you phone and for you pc that is bad.
When you have to rebuy the same content on ios and google play that is bad.
Steam get's it right and you don't have to rebuy the same games just to run them on mac and windows and Linux.
not the point (Score:5, Interesting)
The industry is very aware that if they provided better alternatives that piracy would be drastically less. However, their interest is not in stopping people from pirating, it's to maximize the amount of money they can make. They know that keeping prices inflated will ultimately earn them more money from the people that do by it than if the lowered the price and almost everyone obtained music legally. Complaining about pirates also gives them a specious reason to lobby for all sorts of bullshit laws they don't need and people don't want, all in the pursuit of higher profits.
They know the evil they do and they do it gladly because the only thing they love is money.
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They know the evil they do and they do it gladly because the only thing they love is money.
Which ironically is exactly the reason piracy exists in this industry. Blinded by greed isn't just some kitschy saying.
And if piracy is a side effect to your business based on this ignorant behavior, you likely earned it. That ignorance extends to wasting money lobbying for harsher piracy laws too. Clearly that hasn't done fuck-all to curb piracy any more than it's done fuck-all to curb industry greed.
There's a reason Netflix continues to have such a monumental impact on greedy cable companies; it's call
Its been said before (Score:1)
People are paying for convenience (Score:3)
Ponder how many things are free or cheap, and then ponder how many people are willing to pay, or pay a premium, for getting it more conveniently. Yes, convenience is a commodity in our society and it has a value. Getting crap delivered to you instead of having to go to the store, pick it up and carry it home is at the very least a reason to pick the delivery service over the one that doesn't deliver, and most likely even a good enough reason to pay more than you would at the place where you'd have to pick it up yourself.
The same applies to the convenience of "just works". People are very willing to pay for the convenience of not having to jump through various hoops to crack this and copy, move and alter that, rewrite this or that registry entry, and instead just click something and it works.
If you need proof, look at Apple. Then look at any Linux distribution of your liking. What exactly IS the difference? Convenience.
This does work for Steam. But often, it does not work for a lot of AAA titles. Why? Because they lack convenience! If I have to be "always on" and the Servers cannot be reached at launch, that's the opposite of "just works" convenience. If, on the other hand, the cracked version is easy to install and "just works" because it doesn't give a fuck about the Servers not working, that IS convenience. And that, not the price, is then the reason why people give the legal copy the finger and go for the rip.
requires lowering prices (Score:2)
While logical, sensible, and straight forward in its reasoning and conclusion, this will require the rights holder to lower thier prices while increasing availability.
this is unpopular.
here is why.
1) more downloading at lower pricepoints increases distribution costs in terms of supplying the needed bandwidth.
2) more downloading at lower pricepoints reduces the per transaction profit margin.
that is both more money going out, and less money coming in.
the grim reality that thier product is overpriced in the ma
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Modding and can't promote, but I especially agree with your piece about being the storytellers of culture. Feelings of power and control. Narcissism. Rich narcissist = good if distracted with holiday and fun-fun activities. Rich narcissist = bad if they think they are losing control.
Insufficient evidence (Score:2)
I think that there's a good probability that this claim is true, but all that this shows is that people who pirate or don't pirate believe it to be the case that having legal options for accessing content is a better deterrent. Unfortunately, humans very often do not understand their own motivations.
What you'd need to do to actually tease out the causation here is to do actual policy trials. This is exceedingly difficult, unfortunately, as it's not so easy to just mandate that some number of people be giv
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Interesting point.
Additionally, I submit that the deterrent effect comes from the likelihood of punishment and not merely the severity of the penalty.
possibility of legal threats != actual legal threats != actual prosecution != actual conviction.
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When copyright becomes reasonable (Score:2)
And prices less insane, the pirates will play. Well, most of them. see: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime.
Bonus points for not attacking your customer base.
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And prices less insane, the pirates will play. Well, most of them. see: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime.
Bonus points for not attacking your customer base.
...yet. Not being a jerk, just adjusting to the common collective behavioral process of top decision makers at large companies. One will probably attack with feelings of grandiosity, the others will follow suit but stay $1 behind, thinking "Ah, what the hell. Eeeeeeasy money*."
I hope I'm wrong.
* Copyright held by whatever owns rights to Terminator 2 this hour of today
Legal options? Are you nuts? (Score:3)
Stating the Obvious (Score:1)
Wasn't song piracy cut immensely with iTunes legal model of 99 cents per song?
If the MPAA/entertainment industry only got their heads out of the sand, and afforded easy access to their content; most would happily pay $4-$5 conveniently to click and watch a high quality version of the media. Even at the price of half of the movie ticket, the volume from legalized offering and the relatively inexpensive infras
haha (Score:2)
> They were subjected to a set of questions regarding their file-sharing habits
I'm sure the resuts give statistically significant predictions over how people would fill out such questionnaires
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Well, if you just offered a legal alternative of walking into a shop and buying anything you wanted for $1, it's a safe bet that theft of TVs would be reduced...
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Criminals steal music and movies which cost $1 by claiming they cost too much.
People think everything should be free and this study shows it. No one wants to pay for anything except when it comes to their work then they expect to be paid for their effort.
They're hypocrites, pure and simple.
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We are already at the point where the punishment for copying left any semblance of sanity. What do you suggest? Death penalty for copying? We are already at multiple years in prison. Something is wrong with a society when the penalty for copying a game where you rob a bank is punished more severely than actually robbing a bank.
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Except that we're not really at multiple years in prison for copying, because other than in extreme cases of large-scale commercial infringement almost no-one actually gets penalised for copying at all, even if they've benefitted from what should have been thousands of dollars' worth of content without contributing a dime to support it.
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Already forgot the ridiculous fines for imaginary damages?
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(a) Not all countries allow punitive, statutory damages in civil cases.
(b) Whether awards of such damages are possible, how many people ever actually pay them, as a proportion of those committing copyright infringement?
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There's not that big a difference between getting a crippling debt tossed onto you and being locked up. Essentially, the second at least leaves you with food and shelter.
Just to ask the question again, you don't think it's a bit out of touch with reality to put the punishment for, say, doing physical harm to a person on the same level as imaginary financial damages?
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You keep writing "imaginary financial damages", which is begging the question. The economic damage from copyright infringement may be difficult to quantify exactly -- no-one sensible is arguing that everyone who infringes would really have bought everything they copied illegally if the infringement were somehow prevented -- but the idea that copyright infringement causes no significant damage is silly. The damage is no more imaginary than the damage from fraud because the money was just 1s and 0s in a bank'
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Fraud is not imaginary. When I have money in my bank today and none tomorrow, I can no longer use the money as if I still had it. How much is the damage of someone listening to a song he wouldn't buy? You can't sell it anymore 'cause that guy listened to it?
Sorry, but the idea to prop up a failing business model with laws is already bad enough as it is, we needn't throw taxpayer money behind it as well.
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You're ignoring many kinds of fraud, particularly all the ones that involve deceptive practices such as misleading insurance sales or insider trading. In such cases, frequently no-one has literally lost money that was previously in their bank account, yet the law makes reasonable assumptions about future money that should have been in their bank account if the normal economic and legal rules were followed.
The business model is failing and the damage is hypothetical only if you disregard all those pesky prin
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Yes, and in all these cases, at least in my country, you need to actually sue if you want your damages recognized. And with insider trading you can actually see a financial, immediate gain for the perpetrator and an immediate financial loss for other traders. Not quite the best example to support your case, if I may say so.
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Apparently your country has very different fraud laws to a lot of places, then, because in many countries serious fraud is a criminal act that often carries heavy penalties.
Also, can you really not see any parallel between insider trading (someone exploits the system for personal gain at the expense of other investors who lose out on money they were expected to have but for that exploitation) and copyright infringement? Seriously?
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No, I honestly cannot see the parallels of insider trading, where the culprit actually gains something financially while harming others directly along with their ability to do business with another party due to the lost revenue, with copyright infringement, where the one copying does not influence the copyright holder or his ability to sell that content to a third party.
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OK, I'll take you at your word and ask you this, then: why is insider trading considered a bad thing? It's only acting rationally based on true facts. Regardless of the outcome for the inside trader, no other investor was ever guaranteed any particular value for the shares they hold. The business itself is still there and has still issued the same number of shares. So why has anyone lost out in insider trading, and why does the law prohibit it, in your view?
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I'm not sure which country either of you two is in, except apparently not the US.
In most systems the criminal courts only deal with the question of "Did J Random commit fraud?"-- not the question of "How much damage may J Random have done and to whom?" beyond what might required for the specific type of fraud J Random is charged with. That part would require the law have the charges and penalties be different depending on the victim and/or financial amount defrauded. The am, from what I can tell, always
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I don't really know much about the stock market, so I could at best make a guess about why insider trading is forbidden. Most likely because law makers noticed that they have stocks but are usually not working in a position where they could get some insider information easily.