More Evidence That Piracy Can Increase Sales 196
Socguy writes "The London School of Economics has published a new study (PDF) which shows that the claims about digital downloading killing music and movies are overblown. In fact, there is new evidence to indicate that it actually generates more income in certain cases. 'While it acknowledges that sales have stagnated in recent years, the report points out that the overall revenue of the music industry in 2011 was almost $60 billion US, and in 2012, worldwide sales of recorded music increased for the first time since 1999, with 34 per cent of revenues for that year coming from digital channels such as streaming and downloads. "The music industry may be stagnating, but the drastic decline in revenues warned of by the lobby associations of record labels is not in evidence," the report says. ... The growing use of streaming, cloud computing, so-called digital lockers that facilitate the sharing of content and sites that offer a mix of free and paid methods of getting content will, the study predicts, spur the entertainment industries to shift their focus from pursuing illegal downloading to creating more legal avenues for getting content online.'"
Re:and maybe rape makes woman more likely to put o (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:and maybe rape makes woman more likely to put o (Score:5, Interesting)
It is illegal because the law says so. The law could be changed if it was generally considered to have a negative instead of positive net effect. The music industry's main argument about keeping it illegal (and even strengthen the laws against it) is loss of revenue. Therefore if it is shown that the main reason against changing it doesn't hold, it is an argument for changing the law.
There are different issues: First, if something is legal or illegal, that is, permitted by current law. Second, whether something should be legal or illegal.
Rape is illegal, and I think few would argue that this should change. Moreover, most would argue that you shouldn't rape even if there was no law forbidding it (and even if there were a law requiring you to do it).
Unauthorized copying is illegal, but there is not as much consensus that it should be illegal as there is with rape. The music's industry claims it should be illegal (and the laws even be made more strict) because of the losses they face through privacy. Any study that piracy increases revenue instead of decreasing it, weakens that argument.
That doesn't automatically make it legal to copy stuff without authorization. But it does make an argument for making it legal. Which can only be done by changing the law, of course. But the point is, the law is not god-given, the law is man-made. It can be changed if it is found that in the current form it is bad. And therefore it is of utmost importance that you don't just accept the law as is ("it's the law, therefore it is right"), but rather question it. Because if you find the law is bad it should be changed, and anyone who thinks it is wrong has the moral obligation to work towards its change.
And in certain cases, it may even be the right thing to break the law (I'm not going to cite the obvious example in order not to Godwin this thread, and to avoid someone incorrectly claiming I'd equate that one with unauthorized copying, which of course I would never do).
It's about telling you what to buy, not how much. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the sales of what they want to sell you. The Media/Content industry doesn't get the same power to tell you what to buy when you're free to choose it for yourself. They'd rather sell ten million copies of the latest ... crap, who are they trying to push these days? Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus or something? Anyway, they'd rather sell ten million of just one or two of those than twenty million albums spread across 200 different albums of varying genres.
This is about the power to tell you what to buy, not to tell you to buy from them.
Re:and maybe rape makes woman more likely to put o (Score:4, Interesting)
People have to work to create these WORKS of music, art, programming, whatever the item may be. They deserve fair compensation for that work, as they have families, bills, things they have to pay to survive.
Well, that's not how copyright works now.
The idea that people deserve copyrights based solely on the fact that they put in effort into creating something is the sweat of the brow theory; it's unconstitutional in the US.
Further, copyrights don't guarantee fair compensation. In fact, even if everyone respected copyrights completely, most authors would still not be fairly compensated for their effort, because most works don't sell very well. The vast majority of them have no copyright related economic value. Of the few that do, the vast majority have relatively little. Of the few that have more than a little, the vast majority are just middling, and so on.
There's a reason why there's a stereotype about starving artists.
All copyright does is concentrate some of the revenue derived from the work toward the copyright holder. How much the work is worth depends on the public. The recent Lone Ranger movie was a flop. Disney made a crappy movie and doesn't deserve fair compensation for the hundreds of millions of dollars of effort they put into making it. They deserve to lose big time, and so they have.
Copyright is all about increasing the number of works which are created and published, and then limiting the public use of those works as little as possible, as briefly as possible. If a degree of protection which you feel is less than fair nevertheless produces the greatest public benefit, then that's what we ought to have. Helping authors is merely a side effect because they are, so far, unavoidably involved. But they're not a priority.
Re:and maybe rape makes woman more likely to put o (Score:4, Interesting)
Have they lost any sales on me? Perhaps, because maybe a game that I thought originally looked cool from gameplay videos but after played for an hour I found stupid I may have bought it without playing it. (Deadpool comes to mind as the last one that fell into this category). However there have also been quite a few games where I originally would have given a pass, but pirated, enjoyed it, and ended up buying it (Dishonored, Dark Souls).
Before I used this system I was getting burned on buying too many games that were shit, but also passing up on a lot of games that ended up being good (sure perhaps I later bought on steam sale, but they would have made more money at release). I don't give a shit that it is "illegal", I have no moral issues using my above system. I am almost willing to bet that if I asked the publishers if they had a problem with me using my system that they would say no (except for publishers that constantly churn out shit games)
Where's the evidence ? (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't see any evidence presented that "piracy can increase sales". All I saw were claims that box-office, gaming, and music revenues are increasing. But these increases are due to acknowledged growth areas (e.g. streaming, in-game buying, etc) and improved distribution methods (e.g., iTunes) and these claims say nothing about what revenues would have been in the absence of piracy. In other words, there is nothing to support the causality implied in the Slashdot story title
Frankly, I don't see how it is at all arguable that piracy can increase revenues. If I can download a band's entire catalog, which I have done, once I have done so the likelihood that I am going to go and pay for the band's music is drastically - in my case, completely - reduced. Same goes for downloading movies. It is, as one poster commented, just bits now. The visceral pleasure of owning a record with its cover art, sliding open the sleeves and smelling that wonderful vinyl smell is gone. A legally purchased copy of music or a movie is no better than a pirated download of same.