Piracy In Developing Countries Driven By High Prices

langelgjm writes "The Social Science Research Council, an independent, non-profit organization, today released a major report on music, film and software piracy in developing economies. It's a product of three years of work, and the authors conclude that piracy is primarily driven by excessively high prices and that anti-piracy education and enforcement efforts have failed. Still, chief editor Joe Karaganis believes that businesses can survive in these high piracy environments. The report is free to readers in low-income countries, but behind a paywall for certain high-income countries, although the SSRC notes, 'For those who must have it for free anyway, you probably know where to look.'"

That isn't "piracy".

[Seumas]

'For those who must have it for free anyway, you probably know where to look.'"

Piracy doesn't get you something for free. Piracy is when someone makes unauthorized duplicates of something which they don't own the copyright for with the intention of selling it for a profit. Piracy is the guy on the street in New York who is trying to sell you a movie that is still in the theaters for $20 on DVD or is trying to sell you a copy of some software for $5.

Stop perpetuating the misuse of these words. Piracy, copyright infringement, plagiarism, and forgery are all different things. Playing a scene-ripped copy of a game or movie is not piracy. That doesn't justify it if you do it, but it's not piracy.

Wrong DVD Region Codes Are A Problem Too

[cpghost]

The artificial division of the world in DVD regions is also one major reason for piracy. Take for example North Africa: officially, it is in DVD region 5, but culturally AND economically, with all their ties to Europe, they get all their DVDs from Europe, a.k.a. region 2; legally or pirated, if need be. If the players you have there are all region 2 (and almost all of them are, because they're getting them from Europe), there's no point in buying a region 5 DVD there.

Totally Unavailable

[ProfessionalCookie]

I live in Pemba, Mozambique where there is no place to buy legitimate DVDs. It doesn't exist.

The DVDs you can buy are cheap chinese rips on a disc in shrinkwrap with cardboard that advertises 24 MOVIES DVD9 BLURAY MPEG4 XVID H264. Really they're just highly compressed low resolution MPEG2 streams. There's typically 4 movies on a disk divided into 6 or so parts labeled a, b, c, d, etc.

I Don't buy movies here because there's no supply chain. I do buy on iTunes which permits me because I have a US credit card.