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."
And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
The industry will still try and spin this off as being a side effect of their anti-piracy push.
US rental industry is insane (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Use my favorite torrent site, or
2. Check netflix (doesn't have it), check Amazon Instant video (maybe has it), check vudu (maybe has it), find a local Blockbuster store that hasn't shut down (unlikely), Find a redbox (probably doesn't have it), buy it at Walmart (don't want to), return to step 1.
Re:US rental industry is insane (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, it was "1 or 2" not "1 then 2".
For many shows currently being broadcast, particularly on HBO and Showtime, of course the option it "1 or wait 6 months then try 2 because paying now isn't possible"
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
The industry will still try and spin this off as being a side effect of their anti-piracy push.
The industry continues to have faith in their method of exterminating hornets by hitting them with a sledgehammer.
The way the industry has behaved would make great fodder for heroes and villains series.
Re:US rental industry is insane (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't help but notice that you check for a free pirated version before checking legitimate sources.
You missed his point. He wasn't telling you the order he uses, he was giving you the two options for watching content.
One is much easier than the other. Why would he go around to several streaming sites or resort to buying a physical DVD if the movie he wants isn't available for streaming when, for any relatively recent movie, he could just go straight to downloading the torrent. And, unlike with streaming content, once he downloads it, he can be sure that it will still be there in a month when he wants to watch it again, and he can load it on his phone or laptop to take it on the go.
Re:US rental industry is insane (Score:5, Insightful)
http://gowatchit.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=game+of+thrones&x=-594&y=-15 [gowatchit.com]
Re:US rental industry is insane (Score:4, Insightful)
...I'm not a moral-less pilferer.
Sure you are. You just don't 'pilfer' entertainment. And please don't try to separate yourself from what your government and Walmart steal for you so you can enjoy everyday low prices. You simply acquiesce to authority. There's nothing particularly 'moral' about that.
Duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
If music/movie execs owned WalMart, they would have a big board level meeting to try and control shoplifting by:
- Put everything in locked glass cabinets.
- Ask for photo ID before entering stores.
- Strip search everyone on exit.
Then they would be scratching their heads as to why they were going broke, blaming it on the dishonest consumer.
99% of people don't want to steal, they just want convenience at a fair price.
They could have agregated all their contect, with music 10c/track, movies $2, no DRM, problem solved.
still too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:still too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Definitely
For me once steam became a viable alternative and you can find any AAA title thats over 6mo old for 10$ or less, I basically stopped pirating games. The price point was awesome, and to have automatic updates and all the other benefits was worth it.
For movies I still pirate them, there is nothing out there that can match the quality of what pirates produce. ALL streaming services offer shit quality in both audio and video at too high a price compared to what pirates offer for free. If there was a place that charged maybe .5-1$ for rental and maybe 5$ to own a download in 1080p quality with DTS sound, then they would start seeing the money again
Re:US rental industry is insane (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine a grocery store that only sells General Mills products. You'd have to go there to get your cereals and all, then go to the Harrisburg Dairy's store to get milk. People wouldn't stand for that, I have no idea why they stand for the way movies are distributed.
Luckily, the torrents have everything, exactly when I want it
Illicit copying is a response to unequal exchange (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are so many insistent on free exchange of copyrighted material? Content creators don't like the idea, they'd like to earn a living. Publishers hate it even more, they want monopolies to extract every bit of value from their 'properties' as possible. The only people who like it are consumers who must go through the walled gardens publishers have set up. And therein lies the problem, publishers seek to extract perpetual rents, coddling a slim number of creators while sucking up value created for free by the general populace.
Jaron Lanier recently came out with a book, Who Owns the Future? [amazon.com], where he argues that digital networking has had a decimating effect on the middle classes of the world. In this Nieman Journalism Lab interview [niemanlab.org] at the Harvard School for Journalism, Lanier outlines a micropayment solution whereby the general public would be paid back for information collection and content creation directly in a distributed manner, thereby cutting out the centralized collection and distribution points that content monopolies have created.
The point is that people are doing a tremendous amount of work for free all across the 'net, often in ways that don't resemble pure craft work yet represent tremendous value for large companies like Google, Microsoft, Sony, Facebook, and the other big players. Yet those companies want every cent in perpetual rent for the work they perform in creating and distributing their goods. He is not arguing 'income inequality' in the sense of wealth redistribution - say, using government taxation to collect revenue and provide welfare payments to an underclass - but instead to distribute payments to every value add created.
For example, were you to translate a document from one language to the next, and google uses it as part of for statistical analysis in their language translation engine, then every time your work is referenced you should get paid for that effort. If you use a camera to document and tag a new pothole in the street, and Google Streetview uses that as part of a pothole map, you should be paid for that effort every time this is referenced (until the data becomes defuncts). This is similar to copyright in that for content creators, many of whom craft and distribute work for free instead of receiving payment for the work.
It's as if whole populations have decided that because content monopolies are taking all the work out on the net for free they can get to monetize, while demanding enforcement of intellectual property rights in an unequal exchange, that people are justified in taking what they want for free. Yet even if this were the case, the trade is still pretty bad for the people doing so much free work. You can't eat a pirated song or movie. And yet every step we take on the internet is used by the big players to aggregate vast wealth at our expense.
I can see some problems with Lanier's approach. For example, he's like to do away with monopolies and move to a distributed payment system. Yet how is one to handle those payments without a banking monopoly? Bitcoin? How do governments tax those transactions? (Yes, I know many people would prefer they didn't - but that doesn't mean such a system is viable given political realities). How do governments control and track criminal trade? (Yes, I know many people would prefer they didn't - but that doesn't mean such a system is viable given law enforcement realities).
Still, I think Lanier has put his finger on the central problem of inequality between people and these companies. It's not income inequality per se, but that the system provides no payment for value add to the vast majority of people while at the same time monetizing that very value to sell back to us. All while IT systems automate labor that used to be paid work, and companies outsource across national lines to the lowest bidder. People ar
Re:And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
The industry continues to have faith in their method of exterminating hornets by hitting them with a sledgehammer.
It's been an effort to resist change, the problem for them has always been convenience! When the legal method is less convenient than the illegal method (particularly when the illegal method is widely available) people will most often choose the latter. The music industry and - later when higher bandwidth connections became mainstream - the film industry spent so much time fighting the internet rather than embracing it that the piracy culture went mainstream, their lack of vision created a mammoth task of now having to try reverse the effects of their ignorance...hardly trivial when that's also coupled with their dickish behavior toward piracy.
The fact that things are changing is good for everybody but all the piracy FUD needs to be dropped, the RIAA/MPAA caused their own misfortune so it's time to drop that and move on with serving the customer again.
Re:still too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
If there was a place that charged maybe .5-1$ for rental and maybe 5$ to own a download in 1080p quality with DTS sound, then they would start seeing the money again
And yet there isn't online. I can go to Redbox and get a DVD for under a dollar (with regular coupons). I can easily rip the disk and keep a perfect copy. Yet, I can't stream the same movies for that price and even if I could, they wouldn't support Linux, because I might copy the stream. Someone is not thinking things out and it's not me.
Re:still too expensive (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:still too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually it is worse then that. Sometimes I can't even _legally_ BUY the media because it is
a) not available for sale due to bullshit "Region" locking aka PRICE-FIXING,
b) no longer available for sale,
c) outrageously, ridiculously expensive as you mentioned.
Case in point: ST:TNG (Star Trek: The Next Generation) was $125 per SEASON when it came out. For something that I'm _maybe_ going to watch more then once that price is a total rip off. When a season is $20 THEN it is worth "owning." Until then the MPAA can fuck off. Their content isn't THAT valuable so I don't bother but I can certainly see some folks pirating "disposable media."
The MPAA doesn't understand "The Long Tail" at all. Just because old content has little value to the majority it doesn't imply it has no value to the minority! Good luck trying to buy old 80's sitcoms that weren't AS popular. The master tapes have long been lost, the duplicates deteriorated and society suffers because we "lost" a generation of [popular] culture. That alone is almost a "crime" against history.
Why is it against the law to "pirate" software when the original company is no longer offering it for sale, or worse, no longer even in business?
i.e.
* Windows XP -- can't buy it from Microsoft because they refuse to sell it.
* Vivacity - can't buy it because Topaz Labs refuses to sell it. http://www.topazlabs.com/vivacity/ [topazlabs.com]
Re:still too expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
Full stop. Right there. You don't need any further qualifiers.
The notion that the prices are aburdly high is a naive perception that corporations which make entertainment somehow have an obligation to provide the general population with as low a price as is reasonable while still making a profit. When in actuality, like anything else, it is priced as absolutely high as possible that the target demographic is demonstrably willing to pay. And of course, there's the fact that people who do think the costs of movies is too high are not really in their target demographic in the first place, since there are plenty of people who still gladly pay that kind of money for the theater experience, and the corporations are only too happy to separate these people from their money.
Re:US rental industry is insane (Score:4, Insightful)
You cannot subscribe to HBO in isolation.
You have to give a big pile of money to someone else on a monthly basis before you even have the option of subscribing to HBO (even assuming you have that option where you are).
So you cannot in fact "just subscribe to HBO".
Re:still too expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
What they can afford to do is entirely irrelevant to how much they can get away with charging for it.
My point being, that people with money will spend it. And people with less money, I'm afraid, just aren't part of these conglomerates' target demographic, so they don't care if you or I think that the seasons cost too much.
Re:Not piracy, assholes (Score:4, Insightful)
Newspeak is designed to change the language in such a way as to prevent independent thought.
You know, with services like Steam and GOG, I find it very easy to pay for games. Sometimes I throw money at games I am not even going to play. When I was young I lived in Hong Kong, a place where piracy is so efficient there are entire shopping complexes devoted to it, where the counterfeit products sell for the price of a pack of crisps and are indistinguishable from the real thing. Places like China, south east Asia and India have no problem doing things like this, because the prices of things made in the west are set at an extortionate rate compared to the average daily wage, IE compared to things like FOOD and SHELTER. I have exactly no moral reservation about downloading something to see if it works for my computer. How exactly did the game industry manage to save my soul then eh?
Re:US rental industry is insane (Score:4, Insightful)
If I want to rent a movie, I have to either:
1. Use my favorite torrent site, or
2. Check netflix
Not available in my country
check Amazon Instant video
Not available in my country
check vudu
Not available in my country
find a local Blockbuster store that hasn't shut down (unlikely)
Sign up, prepare to pay A$7 only to find out it hasn't been released... In my country. And wont be released for at least 6 months.
Find a redbox (probably doesn't have it),
Not available in my country.
buy it at Walmart (don't want to), return to step 1.
No Walmart in my country, but I'll run with it. I could go down to JB HiFi, Target or Big W, prepare to pay $30 minmum and find out that it's either not released in my country yet or not in stock.
So...
Return to step 1.
Yep, bit torrent. Always available in my country.
Dearest media conglomerates,
You're probably not reading Slashdot but in case you are, I have X dollars to spend per month on entertainment, you can have a share in that but only if I find the price reasonable. Your artificial monopoly is gone and your competition is piracy, Seeing as you cant provide me with a cheaper service, provide me with superior service at a price point I find acceptable AND on a time table I find acceptable. Otherwise I'll go to your competition.
Choke and die, Erm, I mean have a fantastic day,
A regular Australian.