P2P File Sharing Ruining Physical Piracy Business 192
TorrentFreak has a short post up talking with a former physical data pirate, who sold his wares in flea markets and made buckets of money in the 90s. By the end of the last decade, his money flow had dried up, and he places the blame squarely on the shoulders of P2P file sharing. "Tony is very clear about why his rags to riches story has gone back to rags again. 'File-sharing, P2P - call it what you like. When you asked a customer why he wasn't buying anything, 9 times out of 10 it was BitTorrent this, LimeWire that ...' P2P is a very powerful machine and although Tony could see that his operation was feeling its effects, he admits that he sat back and did nothing about it and consequently, his business has paid the ultimate price. Other industries affected by P2P should take note: Don't be a Tony. Overhaul your business model. Quickly." One would imagine overseas media sellers will have similar issues, as P2P networks become more common outside of the Western world.
Re:Nonsense. (Score:2, Interesting)
bread and cheese for the whine? (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod parent up (Score:5, Interesting)
The situation outlined in TFA is interesting precisely because it runs contrary to what you might expect, namely that people would be too lazy to actually download multi-GB files themselves. But the story shows that this indeed is the case; at least the people who are cheap enough to buy pirated software at flea markets put a low enough value on their time to download the stuff themselves in order to avoid even the minimal cost of pirated discs.
I'm not sure what the lesson is here. There's a big question in my mind whether lessons from the 'grey (or black) market' can be taken as indicative of movements in the regular 'white market' -- online distribution probably is a lot more attractive to the kind of low-rent geeks who are buying hot software at flea markets than to very busy middle-classers with little time to spare or technical expertise.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:3, Interesting)
Physical piracy still evident in far east Asia (Score:1, Interesting)
I've noticed a big fall in warez sold in Japanese, Korean and and Taiwanese flee markets over the last 3 years but again I'd bet it would be there if you knew who to ask you'd have no issues procuring it.
As a student (Score:3, Interesting)
Never really made any money, but came out the other end of two degrees with only a modest amount of debt (not that I'm defending it) and am now a good tax paying little legit drone.
I was never part of the scene, so all my stuff used to come in as trades and I still remember the joy of opening jiffy bags with foreign stamps to see what weird and wonderful contents they would contain. I'm sure part of it was an aspergers like desire to try to collect everything there possibly was available - whether or not I or anybody else actually wanted/needed it.
Had a fun time and it's left me with all manner of fond memories - playing a pre-release version of MGS throughout the night as we couldn't work out how to save the game, or what was actually going on (I've still not quite grasped Japanese), realizing ThrillKill wasn't released as it 'wasn't actually any good' to nervously opening my door to a car-load of scarey looking people in the small hours and them asking very sweetly if I could chip their PS.
I stopped (assuming I'd started) all this many years before the guy in the article threw in the towel (I never made it onto DVDs). The premise of the article that P2P killed physical piracy is probably right. I doubt it's that everybody has know learnt how to download whatever they want and make their own copy - it's more that pretty much everybody knows a friend or colleague that can. Towards the end I used to temp in offices over the holidays - and every single one of them would have the guy who'd come in with a pile of disks in the morning for people (and get a pint if anything returned to him at lunch).
Death of LikSang reminded me of their initial incarnation as supplier of DrV64s (I could never afford a Z64) and the fun I'd had resoldering the guts of what they delivered into a working machine and trying to track down a CD drive that didn't gulp enough power to max out the piss-poor PSU it came with. Dug out my old folders of disks and had a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Most of them were dead, cheap ones had flaked and I'd managed to eat through a load using a big solventy magic marker.
All in the bottom of a landfill now.
The truly big time for profit "pirates" (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Allofmp3 is almost in a league of its own. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not certain where you live, though based on your attitude I will surmise you live somewhere in the developed world.
There are places in the world where the price of software is quite disproportionate - for instance, here in Croatia Photoshop costs about two or three monthly salaries IIRC. And even in the richer parts of the world, there is quite a lot of software which costs a great deal of money, and is still relatively easy to find in the gray/black market.
If the price of the software runs up to several hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and the probability of you getting caught is slim, buying from a pirate is putting a rather high value on your time - it doesn't take more than a few hours, and the savings are vast.
But then, what do I know... from where I stand, capitalism seems to be based on the principle of getting something for nothing as much and as often as you can.
Re:when (Score:2, Interesting)
If nobody is able to sell software, that's a very, very good thing. If the incentive to make proprietary software goes away FLOSS will have won, liberty will be restored, the Dilbertization of IT http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/17/175 256 [slashdot.org] will stop and Microsoft will die. Party like it's 1999.
Tony should move to Ukraine (Score:4, Interesting)
Newsflash: most of the people in the world don't even own a radio never mind a computer.
Re:Nonsense. (Score:3, Interesting)
And there is something called a middle class. They might not be that large in numbers, but they go shopping at Carrefour (the one I was talking about had a defective last "r", thus converting the shop into a Carrefou or Crazy Car) Supermarkets, they have their home with a little garden around (and a high wall with glass shards on top to ward off burglars), they work as attorney, clergyman, consultant, banker...
I was staying with a 70 year old woman (a distant relative of my wife), who was still working as attorney. She had her computer (about one year outdated compared with the U.S. or Europe) for her files, she was using it everyday, and I doubt that all the software was fully licensed from Microsoft.
Of course there is a market for computers and discount software licenses in Brazil. And Brazil has nearly 190 mio inhabitants, so if only 10% of them fall anywhere in the "middle class" range, it's still a market of 19 mio people for a portugese version of Microsoft Products.
Re:Tony was not a pirate, just a leech. (Score:3, Interesting)
Tony won't have been cracking anything, creating anything, "value added" anything, Tony is a leech.
Unlike those who crack something, thereby creating "value"; who aren't leeching off of the original producers whose work they cracked.
I applaud the fact that another leech has bitten the dust, and can no longer make an easy living selling the fruits of other people's works to noobs and lusers.
That's fine, but those who's efforts you applaud are no different - instead of creating something of value they leech off of those who do, and then delude themselves into thinking they are superior because they do it for free; in the end they are no different than Tony except maybe that Tony was smart enough to make money.
Re:when (Score:3, Interesting)
It gets better, even. I'm very sure Adobe realizes very well that
a) lots of students copy Photoshop
b) many of them will buy it later because they're used to it
Looking around, there's a lot of software that is strong in its segment and one of the reasons is that it is pirated so often. Photoshop, 3D Max, Windos... if there were absolutely no way to get windos without paying for it, OSX and Linux would at least double their market shares within the week.