Suppressed Report Shows Pirates Are Good Customers 291
An anonymous reader writes "The movie and music industry think pirates are criminals and parasites who cost both industries billions of dollars in lost sales. In order to prove this fact a number of studies have been commissioned to help demonstrate the effect a pirate has on sales of entertainment. GfK Group is one of the largest market research companies in the world and is often used by the movie industry to carry out research and studies into piracy. Talking to a source within GfK who wished to remain anonymous, Telepolis found that a recent study looking at pirates and their purchasing activities found them to be almost the complete opposite of the criminal parasites the entertainment industry want them to be. The study states that it is much more typical for a pirate to download an illegal copy of a movie to try it before purchasing. They are also found to purchase more DVDs than the average consumer, and they visit the movie theater more, especially for opening weekend releases which typically cost more to attend."
First to say (Score:3, Insightful)
The MPAA/RIAA lying about stats to justify unjust laws? Never.
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They probably justified burying this report as "It doesn't prove that piracy is good. Think of how much MORE they'd pay back into the economy if they didn't pirate ANYTHING!!!" If they justified
Re:First to say (Score:5, Interesting)
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Are we really that dense slashdot? It didn't say "this is perjury" it gave an analogy of how serious some contexts consider lie of omission (specifically the context of a court of law). The original post was saying the act wasn't the same as lying and the response simply pointed out that in some contexts it is considered equivalent to a lie. I'm pretty sure it's time for you to pull out a Hitler analogy to prove you're point though so I'm sure I'm wasting my time trying to explain the use of logical cons
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True. However, the rebuttal was pointing out that the context didn't apply.
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But it is false. Lie by ommision is definately NOT perjury. Perjury is out and out lying. However if anyone ommits to say something in court... well that is built into the court proceedings with map
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If this document was ever covered by any of the various discovery orders in any of the various filesharing lawsuits, then the failure of the media companies to release it is at very least contempt of court, not to mention prejudicial reason to overturn the results of any and all similar cases in favor of the defendants.
Re:First to say (Score:5, Informative)
It's a lie. "Not publishing a report" is still a lie. When you testify before congress that you are presenting facts revealed by studies and you omit anything that you want to conceal, it's perjury. "... to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth..." I'd say that's a violation of the oath they take prior to giving testimony to not at least make available ALL information collected as that fits within the "...the whole truth..." part of the swearing in.
I'd like to see a congressional investigation into the matter -- not that I expect one to happen -- just that I'd like to see one. And who knows, perhaps if some government scandal comes up, they will need "some distraction" to draw the public's attention away from themselves. This might be a good one though it might result in lower campaign contributions.
Re:First to say (Score:5, Informative)
To play devil's advocate, they didn't exactly lie here. This "GfK" just didn't publish a report that came to the opposite conclusions they were paid to reach.
This has been widely discussed in scientific circles, too, including here on /.. Organizations that fund research often let the researchers know what results are expected, and if the science shows otherwise, the reports are very often suppressed. This is considered a major problem in a number of scientific fields.
It's especially problematic that "no significance" reports are often suppressed. It can be useful to know that X and Y have no relation. But, for example, drug manufacturers don't usually like to hear that their profitable "miracle drug" actually has no effect on the conditions that they claim it will cure. Admitting this publicly means they'll no longer get income from the suckers who have been buying the "drug" to cure their condition.
In general, it may be true that not telling everything you know isn't exactly a lie. But that's not exactly what's going on here. Continuing to say something is true when you've done studies showing that it's false is definitely a lie. This is what companies do when they suppress "no significant effect of X on Y" results, and it's what the **AAs do when they claim something they don't like is hurting sales when their study shows that it doesn't. It's a lie regardless of whether the claimed "piracy" actually helps or has no effect on sales.
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From the article it doesn't appear that the company actually withheld the study.
"Unfortunately, we will never get to read the official version of the study as the unnamed client who paid for it to be created has decided it should not see a release. The reason given for shelving it was that th
MAFIAA requires no justification (Score:2)
They are after all, above the law. [youtube.com]
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Re:First to say (Score:4, Insightful)
How are the laws unjust? The piracy is still happening, the fact that the pirates also buy stuff shouldn't be a mitigating factor.
Its up to the rights holder to decide if the piracy is something they can live with or not, not you or I - although its great fun watching people try to justify it on Slashdot...
Also, the entire basis for this story is "an anonymous person says..." - thats great, a fantastic headline with no way to corroborate it at all.
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How are the laws unjust?
They were written for the publicly stated purpose of protecting copyright holders. If this story is true, then those copyright holders know that they actually benefit from piracy, as common sense would expect. In that situation, it's apparent that the media industries would have ulterior motives for such legislation. The most obvious such motive would be to concentrate all distribution control with themselves and killing of pesky indie distributors by cutting off their only competitive advantage.
Wouldn't it
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How are the laws unjust?
How are copyright laws just? Why can I plagiarise from the Grim Brothers or William Shakespeare but I can't release a dubbed parody of Star Wars? Or post night driving videos of Montreal to the music of Richard Clayderman or fucking sing Happy Birthday on TV?
Which of these works of art are cultural heritage and which private property?
The law is: "the ones which someone is paying the government for protection are private, the ones which aren't are public domain".
So I refuse to discuss copyrights in terms how
And... (Score:5, Insightful)
They also lie on surveys about pirating and purchasing.
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lying is irrelevant if the study is decent and asks for proof of purchase, like this did [guardian.co.uk].
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Almost makes you wish for a stockholder lawsuit claiming a dereliction of fiduciary duty by management. It can't be in any companies' best interest to continually and very publicly sue their best customers.
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How about just show them the original DVDs that they/you have purchased? I have probably about 400+ DVDs I have bought that I could show a survey person without any problem. I could take pictures and attach it to a survey if they wanted. It's isn't all that hard to prove that you actually own a crap load of DVDs.
Re:And... (Score:4, Insightful)
I know one person doesn't make a majority, but I would not be running a label and partering with two others if not for all the a.b.mp3 floods and multi-gigabyte "best of $genre" torrents. There is simply no way the mainstream media could have turned me onto 99% of what I listen to. Fifteen years ago I got all my music news from radio and TV, so you can imagine how awful my selection was. My only reprieve back then was the university radio stations that prided themselves on playing the weirdest niches of electronic and experimental music. Then one day, I downloaded a Slayer album. I didn't really know who they were, but the dumb thing grew on me. Now I'm a huge metalhead, I even have Slayer on vinyl, plus about 550 other artists of all genres, including a big chunk of Scandinavian metal. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe they play any Katatonia, Pagan's Mind or even Ayreon on MTV.
Had it not been for some altruistic soul on Usenet, posting his personal toplist for everyone to sample, I would never have heard of any of those acts, and if it weren't for online music stores, I would never have found copies to buy. Perhaps most importantly, I would never have attended any of those bands' concerts, and I sure as shit would not have nurtured the passion to launch a not-really-profitable business promoting indie bands beyond the local scene. Having access to that variety of music is what turned an idle hobby into an obsession.
My music spending before piracy: $10/month for one odd techno CD.
My music spending after piracy: $500/month for an artist's back catalogue, a concert ticket + travel, and a dozen open mic nights at the local bars. I'm not even counting all the hours I invest into my protégés.
The problem is the RIAA probably doesn't see much of that $500, because it's often going to indie bands, small online stores, or foreign dealers for the hard-to-find stuff. The RIAA simply does not sell a product I wish to buy, not even consume for free. I swear, if I hear that stupid J.Lo Lambada rip-off one more time !@^&#!@
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It may be that pirates who don't purchase the material they pirate are not willing to participate in the study or declare not being interested in that material.
On the other hand, people that pirate stuff and then buy it may be more than willing to participate in the study, thinking they did the right thing and wanting to show it to the world.
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Do we have to bring up "correlation does not imply causation" again?
What else happened in 2000?
The bottom dropped out of the economy.
Record companies reduced their catalogs (fewer things released.)
Radio stations reduced their playlists, partly as a result of the above item, but also related to increasing consolidation of radio station ownership and thus "scientificly" targeted demographics.
There are lots of things that correlate. Which is the cause?
short version - (Score:2)
Consumers don't want to be suckered into buying a lemon. MAFIAA much rather that they do.
This should be evident when film industry sued to suppress negative film reviews on opening weekend, knowing that the suit will never hold water. They just wanted the negative reviews off line long enough to sucker a few more people into paying 12 bucks a head to waste a few hours of their lives in a theater.
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Similarly I played Diablo 2 without purchasing it for a couple of years. Subsequently I paid for my own WoW subscription for 4 years, and that of my girlfriend's for 3. That's got to be the best return on 'investment' ever.
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When you were a kid, though, I'd wager that you'd just borrow a cartridge from a friend to play it. It's getting a fair bit more difficult to do that sort of stuff nowadays, and in 10 years it might not even be possible.
They're the ones that started escalating the war, not us.
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No big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
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this would presumably indicate that allowing piracy would increase revenue.
Not necessarily, they could still be better costumers even without the possibility of piracy, and hence killing piracy could still raise profits.
But personally I bet that those organizations are afraid of losing control of the advertisement and distribution channels, which currently lets them force bands to sign with them. They don't want to have to compete with independent distribution systems that give a greater piece of the pie to the artist.
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You are making way too many assumptions there with absolutely no foundation of facts. You have not proven that if you remove "piracy" that sales would increase. Why you even think that would be true I have no idea. DRMed e-books have not increased book sales. In fact if you look at Baen Books the opposite is true. If you release e-books without DRM your book sales for those authors will increase dramatically across their entire current and back catalog. So in fact this is one clear example that completely d
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I, for one, would not be a "better consumer" without piracy. I would simply not consume at all. I do not like the stuff they play on the radio or on MTV. I really can't stand what they dare call hip-hop these days, this top-40 one-note tone-deaf-droning garbage with no message. I don't fit the mold because I have triple-digit IQ and damn critical hearing.
It used to be, you could go to a record store where people didn't wear stupid blue uniforms, and they could spell their own name without a tutor whispe
Re:No big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
While I think a lot of the anti-piracy stance of the media groups is still driven by the assumption that piracy hurts sales, demonising pirates has turned into a great way to justify a kind of balkanisation of the market.
Regional restrictions allow them to sell the same product at the price that the local market will bear without diluting the higher markets with product sold in the lower.
Encryption and laws against circumventing it that are supposed to stop piracy also act to stop you buying one copy of something and then transcoding it to the form most useful to you.
Ultimately, the cost of distribution for purely digital material is drastically smaller than for physical items, but media companies are still claiming costs for breakages associated with LPs in the CD age. If they can blame 'pirates' then they don't have to let competition drive the price of a digital copy down to reflect the reduced cost of distribution.
It's oddly long-sighted of them. They have a monopoly and are fighting to keep it that way. This isn't about short term profit. It's about keeping control of the entire profit-making industry.
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The problem with trying to show "piracy" hurts sales, "piracy" by the individual rather than commercial piracy, does not effect sales. There are many many examples of this and many many reports that prove this is in fact false. It is an attempt at a straw horse by the entertainment companies (games, movie, music, books, etc) that is completely false. They spend far more money on trying to stop "piracy" than they will ever recover in sales if there was absolutely no "piracy". It is a stalking horse that has
Re:No big deal (Score:5, Informative)
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This is so very true. RIAA and MPPA and book publishers have become the buggy makers and whip makers of the modern era and they are being phased out and it scares them to death. They add absolutely no value to the created product other than controlling who get promoted and at what level and then that is charged back to the creator of the work. You could hire an advertising company to do that yourself. Media corporations are no longer needed in the age of the Internet and they know this and it scares the cra
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Have you ever heard of the Malay Monkey Trap. You put a piece of fruit in a hollow log the bore a small hole where the fruit is. The hole is just large enough for the monkey to reach in and grab the fruit, but too small to get the fist full of fruit out. Logic would dictate the monkey would drop the fruit and leave. Instead, the greedy little monkey will hang onto the fruit even in the face of mortal threat.
It would appear that the corporate controllers of our music and motion picture entertainment have des
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Because it has absolutely nothing to do with profits in reality. Instead it is about whining to congress that they aren't making enough money because of the "pirates". So they get copyright length extentions. They get laws passed that try and force everyone to buy through them. MPAA and RIAA don't even like used products to be sold and have several times tried to talk congress into limiting used sales. The gaming industry is doing the exact same thing. They are just greedy and want to kill used sales becaus
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You are correct. All the blathering about 'control' and stuff are borderline conspiracy theories. The study is being suppressed because MPAA/RIAA and movie studios, believe or not, are different entities. This requires just basic understanding of bureaucracy. MPAA/RIAA do not want to release the study. They are afraid that movie studios and record labels execs would read it; afraid that they conclude that MPAA/RIAA are a waste of time and good money.
Believe me, this report is read with great interest in hea
Let me be a customer (Score:5, Insightful)
So I go out of my way to pay. If you still think I'm a pirate, fuck off.
Re:Let me be a customer (Score:4, Interesting)
Likewise, many times when I have missed an episode of a TV show, I will download it.
I always forego the tv companies online "Catch Up" service as the quality of the streams are crap. Yet this is seen as me being an evil pirate by those in the industry.
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The industry needs to wake up and license these movies and televisions shows to anybody who wants to show them online and make it available in a non-hostile format. Wack a mole doesn't work terribly well and mostly just costs them money. It justifies the actions of pirates and let me be the one who says. I don't respect the copyright although I do respect peoples demand for money when they provide a service. That is to say I'll pay for the movies. I'll pay for the ridiculously expensive pop corn and soda. S
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fair point, and one I've been a part of many times.
But to some extent we also should attempt to understand the nature of regional business, and why we have to find these workarounds, and justify to ourselves that it's "not bad". Despite our globalized 21st century world, the 19th-20th century nature of licensing (be it patents, copyright, or contract law) makes it very apparent that companies simply are not permitted to sell their product everywhere and to everyone. That's not our fault as consumers, and it
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You do know why there are region locks on movies right? I has nothing at all to do with export and import restrictions or anything like that. It is because movie studios only make X number of prints of the film. They claim it is due to expense of the film stock because of the amount of silver actually used in film stock. I can kind of believe this but not 100%. So a movie company will make say 200-300 copies and ship them around the US to theaters. Once it has it run in the US, they get all 200-300 film cop
Pirate? (Score:3, Interesting)
Correction (Score:5, Interesting)
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And this matters... why?
Someone who goes to see 1 movie/year, and purchases 1 DVD/year vs. someone who pirates 50 movies/year and goes to see 25/year and buys 25 DVDs/year. No matter how you correct for the person who consumes less, the "pirate" who downloads 50% illegally is 25 times more gross revenue for them.
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How is it not a good thing?
They did not lose anything for that material that was pirated and going after the pirate might cost them the money he spends on legal entertainment.
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But there is an opportunity cost that is indeed lost
That depends on the person. And whether losing an opportunity for a sale (but only potentially) could be considered harm can be debated.
Someone spent money, time, and creativity making that movie/song.
Their own fault.
You aren't entitled to get it for free just because you can copy it for free.
Because of current laws, yes. But, really, you aren't inherently "entitled" to anything; including life. So, I think that's a rather pointless statement.
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Just so we're clear on this, disliking the way artists advertise their music does not give you the right to pirate it.
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You can't just load a VEVO video, let it buffer, and watch it when it's ready.
I've never had that problem. I pause immediately and go surf something else for a wee bit. When I come back it's fully loaded and ready to go. Every now and then the server has a hiccup and I need to refresh the page, but it's seldom. I'm in Norway if that matters.
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Statistically, they are buying things. In fact, more than the average person.
But it doesn't say that they pirate less as a fraction of their total media consumption. A person that watches 10 movies a year and pays for 80% buys less than a person that watches 100 movies a year and pays for 20%, but the last guy is much closer to being a "freeloading, non-contributing jerk".
I think the reason it's pulled is that it shows that people use it as their own price gouge. By pirating some things and buying others you can make the cost be whatever you feel is "right". Or whatever you can just
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It's not a good thing? I don't know if it ultimately is, but how would you know either way? I wouldn't say that the potential loss of potential profit harmed them in any way whatsoever (regardless of what the laws says). They never had the money to begin with.
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As someone who consumes very little media, and I mean VERY LITTLE. I wonder if by having a large quantity of media readily available for pirating doesn't actually encourage the habit of consumption. I know that often my media purchases (almost exclusively CDs and books) almost always follow an influx of new media loaned or given to me by a friend. I'll listen to some new music and think "this is good stuff" and frequently go out and purchase a few cd's or a couple books as a result, usually tangentially
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The whole of copyright is basically a despicable, evil lie. And it's time for it to die.
Personally, I doubt that's going to happen as long as we live in a capitalistic society where new content is created by actual humans.
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Capitalist societies have existed for thousands of centuries without entertainment or media being paid for by the common person. The artists still created and the people got their culture. It is only a very modern idea that people must pay for their culture. How people were ever convinced that this was acceptable I have no idea. It is one of the greatest scams ever foisted on the public that I know of in recent times. That corporations think they can control the public's culture and sell it back to us over
Hardly Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
People who torrent lots of media tend to enjoy being consumers of media. Many want to support artists but love the convenience P2P gives them, so they utilize it to try products and then support the artists they think deserve funds by purchasing DVDs/CDs/Games, or they simply want a physical copy as a result of wanting to collect things.
I'm not discounting that some pirates are purely leeches however. There's no reason to believe that all pirates are so generous, just that it makes pretty good sense that a majority are willing to pay for quality entertainment. Hell, I've purchased each volume of MegaTokyo religiously since picking up the first one randomly in a bookstore, regardless of the fact that the comics are all available for free online (And not illegally either).
Re:Hardly Surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
I consume shitloads of media.
If things were more reasonably priced, I'd probably buy everything I wanted. As it is I need to guarantee its not crap before I buy it.
At $10 per DVD, I'd buy everything. At the $25+ per DVD that I have to pay for most things I end up downloading the stuff then buying copies when they go down into my price range.
I have probably in excess of 1,000 movies and maybe 20 full tv series downloaded. Of those I own about 600 movies and 18 of the 20 tv series.
So yes, I pirate, a lot. However at the same time I'm one of the best customers the media industry has.
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Point of order: You don't "own" anything except a bit of plastic and foil, the bits burned into the foil's surface are not what you purchased but merely have a license to extract in the particular order that they were burned in with a very specific set of restrictions. You didn't "buy" anything but a license.
In that case, the distributors are flat out engaging in false advertising when plugging a new release where they say "Own it on DVD or Blu-Ray today!"
You do actually own that particular copy of that movie that you shelled out good money for. And you are free to do with it as you please ( within the bounds of your country's copyright laws. ) If that was not the case, then it would be a crime to resell used DVDs once you decide you no longer want them. A license is revokable. So in order to revoke your ri
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I have this funny feeling like some of the prominent MAFIAA members are going to have to start leaving places in body bags before they actually give in.
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Yes, the media server is a definite huge advantage. Thats how I view most things. Storage was starting to become and issue but with the huge availability of 2tb+ drives for under $100 its no longer a problem.
If the media companies would put a cap on movies of $15 and put everything up DRM free for sale somewhere I'd probably never pirate anything ever again.
As it is, they can't expect me to dish out the cash for everything I consume. I have over $30,000 worth of movies by current pricing standards, and have
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Music for Me (Score:3)
half agree (Score:3, Insightful)
No, and yes.
They aren't the idiots that they play themselves to be, that are blindly trying to sue everyone and don't understand how things should work. They are completely aware of the situation, and understand that they are playing the game in the most profitable way possible, and have absolutely no reason to change their ways.
But yes they do recognize pirates (and customers, and little green men, and everyone else on and off the planet) as a threat to their bottom line, and will take any action they can find that will further to maximize their profit. Be it legal or illegal, moral or immoral, sensible or nonsense. They'll run the numbers and follow the compass to the $outh, past whatever it leads them through.
Can't blame them really. They're experts at their job, and I'm sure their shareholders would agree, they're doing quite well at their job. (otherwise they'd have been fired long ago)
Re:half agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't blame them really. They're experts at their job, and I'm sure their shareholders would agree, they're doing quite well at their job.
They hell I can't! If they were robotic automatons that were preprogrammed with the single goal of generating a metric fuckton of profit for their shareholders and that were lacking the free will to reevaluate their values, then you would be correct, I couldn't blame them.
However, the record companies are not run by robotic automatons. They are run by humans and, quite frankly, as human beings, they should have the cognitive capacity to understand complex mental abstractions such as morality, healthy social balance, empathy, and temperance. Trying to earn a profit is not a morally corrupt quest. Trying to earn a profit at the expense and livlihood of your fellow human beings, and at the disruption of the society that you, yourself, are part of is downright stupid, if not flagrantly evil.
So you bet your ass I can and will blame these lying, piss-poor pieces of shit that were raised with such a moral apathy that they hardly even resemble a shell of what a thinking, intelligent, contributing member of this species is.
You may think it is okay to be an apologist for sociopaths, but I, personally, hold my fellow human beings to higher standards than that if they are going to continue calling themselves human.
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as human beings, they should have the cognitive capacity to understand complex mental abstractions such as morality, healthy social balance, empathy, and temperance.
Perhaps they do understand morality but don't have the same morals as others.
Some Notes (Score:4, Interesting)
It's also worth pointing out that saying, "pirates buy more than the average consumer" is not actually an argument for piracy, since pirates tend to be disproportionately from a class of people who were originally big fans. Thus, it's possible that "big fans" who start using piracy end up buying 1/2 as much as they used to, but still out-buy the "average consumer" who was never all that interested. (For example, I don't pirate and I own zero DVDs or BluRay disks, which makes it easy for pirates to buy more than me.)
* "Total revenue from DVD, Blu-ray and digital sales and rentals of movies and television shows in the U.S. declined 3% to $18.8 billion in 2010, according to new data from industry trade organization Digital Entertainment Group. Although the drops, particularly of DVD sales, are worrisome for the entertainment industry, studio executives can at least take some comfort in the fact that the picture isn't worsening as quickly as it did in 2009, when total home entertainment revenue plunged 7.6%."
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/01/home-entertainment-market-shrinking-slower-as-blu-ray-and-digital-make-up-for-more-of-dvd-decline.html [latimes.com]
Re:Some Notes (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the economy has more to do with that then piracy. Also legal methods of watching movies as well. I don't buy movies now that I have netflix unless I really love them. In the past I did not buy many movies, certainly less than I spend on netflix. This means while I might be spending less on DVDs I am spending more on entertainment.
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Maybe the economy has more to do with that then piracy.
I think you hit the nail on the head there.
I don't get it. It's like the MAFIAA thinks that an economic downturn is not allowed to affect them or something. Wake up, people! You provide entertainment services. That is a frill, not a necessity. If people have to choose between gas for the car or clothes for their kids and buying the newest (or even pre-owned) movie you're trying to milk for moar profitz, guess which one they'll choose?
Overall, it seems to me that the entertainment industry has been hit
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Yeah, I know there were a couple of movies lately I'd have loved to go see, but the shekels just aren't there any more.
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To add to h4rr4r's insightful comment, people have spent a few years building a DVD collection. Many of my purchases have been films from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. I now own those films, so no, I'm not going to buy them again. I'm only going to buy more recent films. I imagine many people are in this situation.
The other factor is the quality of the output. Hollywood really does create a very large volume of very low quality work. Not only do people prefer to avoid paying for shit, but it's discouragin
"It's the internet stupid" (Score:3)
The MAFIAA are seeing their revenue drop because they are no longer the gate keepers to popular entertainment. Instead of buying CD's of artists signed to members of the RIAA, people can buy songs from tens of thousands of other artists who would never get signed by the big studios. Instead of watching a movie people are watching YouTube videos, chatting via social media, or playing games.
The reason the MAFIAA want to lock down the Internet and PC's isn't to stop piracy, it is to get back their position as
This is nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)
A while back I came across a copy of Modern Recording magazine (this was a trade magazine aimed at people who worked in recording studios) from 1981 and there was an article about "piracy" of music. In those days there were no personal computers or internet. The villain, according to the record companies, was the cassette tape recorder. People were borrowing albums from their friends and making a copy on cassette tape. So the RIAA commissioned a study that they hoped to take to the government and get some sort of law passed to halt this terrible crime (much like the MPAA tried to stop the VCR).
According ot the article, the RIAA study was shelved and never widely distributed because it revealed -- surprise -- that people who owned cassette tape decks bought an average of 75% more albums that people who didn't own any recording equipment.
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Sadly AFAIK no quotables came out of the RIAA's work to match Valenti's over-the-top offensive "Boston Strangler" line.
I live these studies (Score:3, Interesting)
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Either way it's going to be used as skew. (Score:2)
Yes, the argument that pirates buy a lot as well as downloading makes them 'good' customers is inherently flawed.
If we presume good customer to mean one who spends the most possible, then we have to ask this question: Are pirates buying more than they would have, or less? The kneejerk reaction the studios have is 'they are buying less than they would have, as they would have bought the items they are pirating' - the response from the other camp is 'more, because the pirates are trying new stuff they then go
Stands to reason: If they are motivated enough to (Score:2)
pirate, they are motivated enough to buy. I know I can get tons of free stuff off the internet but I don't care enough to bother. Almost all mainstream music, video, movies, novels, etc, are completely worthless. If I had to spend time trying to find it, I'm literally wasting my time.
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Lies, I tell ya! (Score:2)
I always try to make sure that none of my money goes to the MAFIAA!
Doesn't match my experience (Score:2)
The pirates i know are in the 30 to 50 age range, and make enough money to buy lots of fancy audio video equipment and media centers, but for some r
Pirates (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we please stop calling people who engage in copyright infringement pirates?
Real pirates are scum who need to be wiped off the planet.
Copyright infringers are breaking one or more laws in certain jurisdictions, and their moral status is more of a gray area.
The content industry needs to grow up (Score:2)
The content industry after decades is still in a childish state. Take Nintendo and Sony, both of them just reversed their region encoding. The 3DS uses region blocking, the new PSP won't. WTF! Surely by now you expect a standard approach to have been proven the most viable and to be used? But no, content companies keep flip-flopping around on whether a piece of content should simply be available at the same time around the globe or not.
Yakuza is a good game series from Japan, you might compare it to GTA but
So why continue on the same course? (Score:2)
I don't understand this from the labels' perspective... if they find that "piracy" actually helps their sales, then why do they insist on paying huge amounts to fight it?
I suppose I can see two options:
1. Political momentum / Saving face. "We've sunk so much into this for so long, that we'd look stupid and open ourselves up to counter claims if we admitted that we've been wrong all this time."
2. There are different types of distribution. For example: BitTorrent is not the same thing as selling $2 copies i
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Only dumb people use the Law as a replacement for their own moral code. I only need to justify criminal acts when I'm before a court.
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Re:Try before you buy (Score:4, Insightful)
No, but you may get modded down for excessive use of hyperbole in a public place. Who is this Slashdot you speak of?
Piracy does affect artists, but then so do the dubious actions of record companies. It's difficult to appreciate an impact though on artists when their slice of music sales is typically so low that record deals become more about trying to build enough popularity to earn enough from merchandise and touring. Piracy hurts artists, but it hurts everyone else in the chain far more. Unlike this curious Mr. Slashdot I don't think that all piracy is good. I instead opt to buy far fewer discs than I did in the past. DRM fucks up my ability to enjoy the content I buy, and money given is being used against me in the belief that I am by default a criminal. I'd rather buy from indies and go gigging. If I buy a DVD I cant rip then it's returned as faulty to the store.
You're flamebait, and also a dick for playing the martyr to the mods card. Despite appearances to the contrary, it's dicks that are not welcome here.
Re:Try before you buy (Score:4, Insightful)
Conveniently, the artists who aren't getting paid are left out of that equation, because they're a reminder that piracy has a negative effect, which dismantles the ideology that pirates are the good guys.
Which part of "people that pirate spend more on media" leads you to believe that piracy has a negative effect?
Are you suggesting that the extra revenue generated from pirates isn't reaching the artists? I'm not sure that would be attributable to the pirates, in their role of consumers.
Shit, you'll get modded down because you're spouting illogical bullshit, and that's something the Slashdot community picks up on, not because you're anti-piracy. Many people on Slashdot dislike freeloaders; it just happens that many more recognise the reality that there isn't a binary situation here, and that (as recognised in the survey) people that consume more media will pay more for it, even if they don't pay for all of it.
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