Cutting Prices Is the Only Way To Stop Piracy

Stoobalou writes "The only way to stop piracy is to cut prices. That's the verdict of a major new academic study that reckons copyright theft won't be halted by 'three strikes' broadband disconnections, increasing censorship or draconian new laws brought in under the anti-counterfeiting treaty ACTA. The Media Piracy Project, published last week by the Social Science Research Council, reports that illegal copying of movies, music, video games and software is 'better described as a global pricing problem' — and the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares."

Repost

[aBaldrich]

This is a dupe, links to an article that links to a study that has already been posted here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/07/180210/Piracy-In-Developing-Countries-Driven-By-High-Prices [slashdot.org]
Basically, music and software are priced to USA's average wage. Since the cost of life in other places is lower, and wages are lower, then it becomes prohibitively costly. Hence piracy.

Re:Why many turn to piracy

[ElectricTurtle]

Dude, if you don't own a region free player (which are certainly not illegal to produce/sell/import/buy and all the big manufacturers make them), you're a n00b. Further it's not illegal to change your DVD player's region code.

Re:Why not DRM?

[kimvette]

While a jailbroken iPhone, iPod, or iPad prevents people from using the App store while in broken mode,

No, it doesn't prevent people from using the app store. My iPhone is jailbroken and I use the App store (for both paid and free-as-in-beer free apps. I have exactly zero "pirated"[sic] software on my phone. I use the jailbreak for:

BSD userland
OpenSSH
SBSettings (and all the free plugins)
Action Menu
Nagios (no joke - I monitor servers on the go!)

NO pirated software. I use my phone a LOT, and my very highest 3G bandwidth usage to date (on my unlimited plan) is 1.8GB, when I used netflix a lot while on a trip.

There are reasons to jailbreak which have nothing to do with "piracy"[sic].

Re:Why not DRM?

[Dyinobal]

You'd be surprised how much better pirated versions of games can be due to buggy or invasive DRM. Even as simple as not needing to put in the DVD each time you want to play the game can be enough drive for someone to download a no CD hack if not outright pirate the game.

Re:Be prepared for creativity armegeddon

[hjf]

That thing you mention doesn't happen in countries where piracy is high. I live in Argentina, and I WISH I could get the matrix trilogy for $9. Or even $50 (the trilogy would cost me $100). I know they don't have $5 bins (except really truly bad crap like a macarena remixes CD).