Piracy Rates Plummet As Legal Alternatives Come To Norway 261
jones_supa writes "Entertainment industry groups in Norway have spent years lobbying for tougher anti-piracy laws, finally getting their way earlier this month. But with fines and site-blocking now on the agenda, an interesting trend has been developing. According to a new report published by Ipsos, between 2008 and 2012 piracy of movies and TV shows collapsed in Norway, along with music seeing a massive drop to less than one fifth of the original level. Olav Torvund, former law professor at the University of Oslo, attributes this to good legal alternatives which are available today (Google translation of Norwegian original). Of those questioned for the survey, 47% (representing around 1.7 million people) said they use a streaming music service such as Spotify. And of those, just over half said that they pay for the premium option."
Re:US rental industry is insane (Score:4, Informative)
Plus, there's not a scrap of entertainment media on the fucking planet I'm willing to risk bankruptcy over.
That says more about the sad state of the US legal system than anything else... yes, it's illegal in Norway too but we don't have crazy statutory damages or even crazy damages in general. A guy who released a studio copy of a movie on TPB at the same time it premiered at the cinema was convicted to 15 days suspended sentence and about $8000 in fine. A guy who ran an illegal subtitle site for years with over a million downloads got $2500 in fine. I've never heard of a regular seeder or downloader ending up in court but my guess is that it'd be a "parking ticket" size fine.
Re:still too expensive (Score:5, Informative)
Which is completely opposed by this study, where both iTunes and Spotify are huge popular. Maybe in the US the market is different, but here in Norway most people are well off and don't mind paying. What has driven piracy has been a lack of alternatives and online being treated as second class citizens. The music industry has been choking it to preserve their CD sales but finally clued in that this market was going to die one way or the other and have finally embraced it, online streaming+sales now far exceed physical sales.
TV series have also at least started with Netflix and HBO Nordic, the latter arrived like pompous asses and their interface needs work but at least they are delivering within 24 hours of the US release in a pure streaming service. For any other TV series though it's pretty bleak, Netflix only has old series. The movie industry is still clinging to the cinemas and physical discs though, there's still no online equivalent of a BluRay even though my side of the Internet is ready (90 Mbit now).
Going back to music, what this study mainly shows though is that offline playlists are huge for those that use them. Those who listen to a lot of music don't want to stream, they want to load up their player and use it as if they had a bunch of MP3s on their phone and this provides a good substitute. I wish the TV and movie industry could also take a clue from this, there's no such thing as an "offline TV series" or "offline movie", I guess because they're still afraid of TPB. As if everything wasn't there already.