Study Finds Anti-Piracy Messages Backfire, Especially For Men 106
jbmartin6 shares a report from Phys.Org: Threatening messages aimed to prevent digital piracy have the opposite effect if you're a man, a new study from the University of Portsmouth has found. According to the research, women tend to respond positively to this kind of messaging, but men typically increase their piracy behaviors by 18%. [...] This paper studies how effective anti-piracy messages are as a deterrent, examining the change in TV and film piracy intentions among 962 adults compared with their past behavior. The three messages examined in the study were verbatim copies of three real-world anti-piracy campaigns. Two of the campaigns used threatening messages to try to combat piracy and the third was educational in tone.
One of the threatening messages was from crime reduction charity, Crimestoppers, which focused on the individual's risk of computer viruses, identity fraud, money and data theft and hacking. The other message was based on a campaign by the French government, which used a "three strike" process, whereby infringers were given two written warnings before their internet access was terminated. The educational message was taken from the campaign "Get It Right from a Genuine Site," which focuses on the cost to the economy and to the individual creative people, and signposts consumers away from piracy sites and towards legal platforms such as Spotify or Netflix.
The study found that one threatening message influences women to reduce their piracy intentions by over 50%, but men increase their piracy behaviors. The educational messages had no effect on either men or women. "The research shows that anti-piracy messages can inadvertently increase piracy, which is a phenomenon known as psychological reactance," explained [lead author, Kate Whitman, from the University of Portsmouth's Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime]. "From an evolutionary psychology point of view, men have a stronger reaction to their freedom being threatened and therefore they do the opposite." Moreover, the study found that participants with the most favorable attitudes towards piracy demonstrated the most polarized changes in piracy intentions -- the threatening messages increased their piracy even more. The study has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics.
"I'm not so sure about the author's attribution of this difference to evolutionary psychology, so looking forward to some educational comments on that," adds Slashdot reader jbmartin6.
One of the threatening messages was from crime reduction charity, Crimestoppers, which focused on the individual's risk of computer viruses, identity fraud, money and data theft and hacking. The other message was based on a campaign by the French government, which used a "three strike" process, whereby infringers were given two written warnings before their internet access was terminated. The educational message was taken from the campaign "Get It Right from a Genuine Site," which focuses on the cost to the economy and to the individual creative people, and signposts consumers away from piracy sites and towards legal platforms such as Spotify or Netflix.
The study found that one threatening message influences women to reduce their piracy intentions by over 50%, but men increase their piracy behaviors. The educational messages had no effect on either men or women. "The research shows that anti-piracy messages can inadvertently increase piracy, which is a phenomenon known as psychological reactance," explained [lead author, Kate Whitman, from the University of Portsmouth's Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime]. "From an evolutionary psychology point of view, men have a stronger reaction to their freedom being threatened and therefore they do the opposite." Moreover, the study found that participants with the most favorable attitudes towards piracy demonstrated the most polarized changes in piracy intentions -- the threatening messages increased their piracy even more. The study has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics.
"I'm not so sure about the author's attribution of this difference to evolutionary psychology, so looking forward to some educational comments on that," adds Slashdot reader jbmartin6.
... towards legal platforms such as Spotify ... (Score:2)
for so many reasons.
in other news, piracy is up 36% around here...
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Spotify? NetfliX?
about "monopolies"
while it is true that Netflix for instance is not a monopoly, we are in the era of consolidation of power to a small number of (essentially) unregulated entities, your Big Fruit+what was called "FAANGS", etc... The idea that the governments (of France in this case, but everywhere) are just literally incapable of even understanding how violently you are being data raped... the politicians canno
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tl;dr oligopolies are bad for society
FTFY. Looks like you're struggling to find the word that already exists for this. They should be covered by anti-trust laws the same as any monopoly.
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Oh, such virtue. As a user/listener, I actually don't even care about this.
I used to see people complain about how little the artist would make from the sale of a CD, and now the complaints are about properly compensating the artist per stream. Why should I care? As a consumer, why is this my problem to solve? Also, do most artists really even care? It's no secret that the real revenue is with ticket sales to live performances, and that streaming (just l
Re: ... towards legal platforms such as Spotify .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry people designing these, I would absolutely download a car, lol! :-)
(/male)
Re: ... towards legal platforms such as Spotify .. (Score:5, Funny)
And also shit in a policeman's hat [youtube.com]?
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And also shit in a policeman's hat [youtube.com]?
This may be a UK urban myth, but the old story goes it's legal for a pregnant woman to urinate into a policeman's helmet.
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Those Brits are into pretty kinky shit, I have to give it to them.
Pirated until I had something to lose (Score:5, Interesting)
I did whatever I wanted until after college. Once I had a real job, the risk/reward ratio changed dramatically. I also realized I didn't even unrar or listen to most of what I was grabbing. It was just an exercise in "I can therefore I will" and pack rat syndrome.
One day I simply blew away the entire tree of my collection. Never missed any of it for a second.
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No. I am a real atheist. I've never believed in the divine, attended any form of church, etc etc. But I don't hate religious people either. They do their thing over there; I do mine over here.
Why?
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Once I had a real job, the risk/reward ratio changed dramatically.
i got a friend just finished a 10 stretch for downloading linkin park numb.mp3, i told him at the time youre throwing your life away but he wouldnt listen
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Let's be honest here, it's not the risk/reward ratio that changed, there just ain't any content that is worth the bandwidth.
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I'd disagree with that, because there's lots to pirate.
Heck, I can tell you in the past, I pirated a lot of videogames. These days, I just buy them - Steam, GoG, or even used. It's just easier that way than hunting through all sorts of shady websites trying to find the game and which is a good version and patches and all that crap. Just easier to put in the few dollars and get the leg
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While I am sympathetic to your thesis, if you're serious about raising the voting age, I must say I am in violent opposition to that unless you raise the draft age by the same amount.
Re:Pirated until I had something to lose (Score:4, Interesting)
I did whatever I wanted until after college. Once I had a real job, the risk/reward ratio changed dramatically.
Once I had a real job, the value proposition changed for me. I went from having unlimited free time and no spare money to having more money than I needed and less spare time than I wanted. It was simply more efficient to buy what I wanted.
Plus the novelty of the technology involved in pirating wore off. It was cool and fun to learn the ins and outs of the various software and the sites, but once I knew how, actually doing it was just dull.
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There's that, too. In some sense, it was a hobby. I was in pretty deep and was very "efficient" at it by then.
But yeah ultimately a waste of time, not all that fun after a while, and I found better things to do which didn't risk jail or fines.
When you can't buy, only Rent ... (Score:5, Insightful)
People have been burnt so many times by the Streaming and online only "ownership" that they Pirate simply to retain access to what they have already paid for ... ..then discover the pirated version is without adverts ...
We are back to the situation of the pirated version is better...
Re:When you can't buy, only Rent ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Too much effort, and a small environmental disaster as energy is wasted repeating the same ripping and re-encoding over and over and over again by different people.
Just put the disc in a box and grab a copy from your favourite torrent site. Someone else has already ripped and checked it, added all the metadata, scanned the booklet etc. Downloading is much more energy efficient.
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You can always buy them in MP3 format if it's audio, but for video there doesn't seem to be any low carbon option.
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Just put the disc in a box and grab a copy from your favourite torrent site. Someone else has already ripped and checked it, added all the metadata, scanned the booklet etc. Downloading is much more energy efficient.
While expedient, I would advise against this. It is one thing to legally argue that you personally ripped your own copies for format shifting purposes. It is another thing to admit you downloaded pirated copies off the Internet regardless if you have the physical copy.
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Depends on your legal jurisdiction I guess. Use a VPN too.
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It's certainly legal in the UK, if you have a bought copy. It's too small scale to be commercial copyright infringement, and any attempt to sue you would fail on the basis that there was no loss since you did actually pay for it.
The court isn't going to care that you downloaded it instead of ripping it yourself.
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Re:When you can't buy, only Rent ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that the legal version burdens you with these anti-piracy messages that aren't skippable doesn't help, when the pirated version is without any unwanted junk.
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They're trying to compete with "free" with an inferior product and wonder why the customers don't buy...
Re:When you can't buy, only Rent ... (Score:5, Insightful)
This. The way that streaming services have redefined ownership of things sold to their customers to mean "you can watch it for whatever amount of time we care to give a fuck about you" is getting out of hand. If they cannot figure out they are going to have consumer backfire for this, they really need to get out more.
And also the fact that streaming services have become too fragmented now. It's a hassle to figure out what service you need for what content, it's too much to pay for all of them, and a pain in the ass to juggle them every month and plan out your watching schedule.
Legal services won because they made their user experience better than piracy. Now piracy is winning again because legal services have made their user experience worse than piracy. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
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True story: Where in the world for carmen sandiego on 5.25in disk stopped working.
My mom called broderbund support and they had her rotate the floppy platter until a fingerprint was visible. They had her fold the disk into a standard envelope and mail it to them. They provided a replacement.
Shit like that just doesn’t happen anymore.
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Give consumers what they really want and they'll cheat less: A La Carte. They shove bundling down our throats, as oligopolies have long loved to do. Bundle this!
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1) set a track record of buying cd's at every garage sale near you. Doesn't matter what music, get everything - variety is important.
2) rip these CDs to varying degrees of fidelity - inconsistency is important.
3) give away these huge boxes of CDs to local libraries, churches, and sell them for basically nothing at garage sales. You can even throw some away, but do something like call your trash company and tell them 'hey, I'm dumping a buttload of cd's next to my garbage, your guys can feel free to keep w
You wouldn't steal a car... (Score:5, Funny)
[Young man, sitting in the audience of the theater] Actually, now that you mention it, that sounds awesome!
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[Public Service Announcement] You wouldn't steal a car...
[Young man, sitting in the audience of the theater] Actually, now that you mention it, that sounds awesome!
Oh, hey. I have this awesome idea for a video game [fandom.com]!
Re:You wouldn't steal a car... (Score:4, Interesting)
[Public Service Announcement] You wouldn't steal a car [youtube.com]... [Young man, sitting in the audience of the theater] Actually, now that you mention it, that sounds awesome!
I used to find those adverts so patronising. I mean, they essentially accused the people who actually turned up to pay for their overpriced movie as being willing to steal from them. It's like when I went to a concert and after the first song the lead singer just started ranting about people copying his CD. I walked out. What an idiot - I paid for a concert not a lecture on quasi-morality.
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Same as the argument over AI. Artists angrily defend the same copyright expansion that retards cultural progress because it helps them pay their bills with rent seeking instead of creating more art. That fucking tree was far too late.
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I used to find those adverts so patronising. I mean, they essentially accused the people who actually turned up to pay for their overpriced movie as being willing to steal from them. It's like when I went to a concert and after the first song the lead singer just started ranting about people copying his CD. I walked out. What an idiot - I paid for a concert not a lecture on quasi-morality.
Funnily enough, the last time I heard a spiel from a front man about piracy, he made commentary to the effect of, "This one's off our new album, if you haven't heard it yet, there's a torrent of places to find it." Went back to their merch table and bought a shirt right then and there.
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What was the band?
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I'll check out their stuff.
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They must be signed with a major label then. They get almost nothing from album sales, a little from concert sales and a lot from merch sales.
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[Public Service Announcement] You wouldn't steal a car [youtube.com]... [Young man, sitting in the audience of the theater] Actually, now that you mention it, that sounds awesome!
I used to find those adverts so patronising. I mean, they essentially accused the people who actually turned up to pay for their overpriced movie as being willing to steal from them. It's like when I went to a concert and after the first song the lead singer just started ranting about people copying his CD. I walked out. What an idiot - I paid for a concert not a lecture on quasi-morality.
Last time I went to a UK cinema, they didn't have those ads.. OK I might have missed it as I walked in about 2 mins before the film started and the stupid tards behind me were talking the whole way through it... I guess there's a reason I dont go to the cinema very often.
Of course (Score:1)
Men are entitled to whatever they want. They only get upset when it's their stuff being taken and they don't get compensated. When it's someone else, fuck 'em. They don't deserve to get paid for their work.
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You're funny, the entertainment companies are rolling in money and have lawmakers in their pocket to support monopolies. I'm supposed to feel sorry they didn't make a few extra shekels?
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If someone produces something you don't get to take it just because. That's the point the OP was making.
If you're that upset that someone wants compensated for the work they do, then don't use it. You can't be a hypocrite and say you would never have bought it yet still go ahead and use it.
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Lol no. I have as much right to pirate megacorp content as I do to devour foolish adventurers.
I’ve dropped over a grand on iTunes and Steam each. If I’m pirating from you then you’ve done something pretty wrong.
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You're hilarious, "take" you say? Nothing is taken, a replication is made. The entertainment caetel still has the originals, their customers and great wealth. No theft has occurred, just copyright violation.
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also you are confused on who is getting the money, the entertainment cartel are not actors and musicians, guess again.
Enticement (Score:3)
Notice the legal departments of these companies.
From here on out they're deliberately enticing young men to commit crimes if they continue and cannot claim vicitm status in the Courts.
Maybe just have a good offering? (Score:2)
Naa, that would mean actually having a working market! Cannot have that, the rabble needs to PAY, regardless of how crappy the legal offers are.
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The predecessor to Paramount+ for Star Trek, CBS All Access, was even worse. My spouse actively hated it, and we stopped watching the new Star Trek series live and just wait for the DVDs to drop.
"especially men" (Score:5, Insightful)
Men learn to ignore nagging, to be frank.
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Most cultures also punish rebellious women consistently but reward men for standing up for themselves at least some of the time.
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That's just not even remotely true.
It's true in a broad variety of ways [rightsofequality.com].
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Standing up for yourself is its own reward.
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This is true, but not the complete truth;
Men will do the opposite of what the nagger wants to educate the nagger that their nagging is counter productive, in the hopes that the nagger will stop.
It often works.
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It works, but you get no bed action for a week.
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It works, but you get no bed action for a week.
If it works, you weren't getting any bed action that week anyway.
after all . . . (Score:2)
After all, why should this be any different?
As long as wives has been telling men not to do things, we've been doing them!
Double moral standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that I feel entitled to whatever it is I am pirating, it's that sometimes it's the only way to go: I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable amount of money for the things I want, but a vast majority of it is simply not available in any format other than pirated files! Being a man who now is over 50 years old, I find most of today's music boring, and I wouldn't buy it for any price. But I listen to a lot of music from the time span between the 1960's and the 1990's. From time to time I try finding it to buy, but I mostly fail. It is so bad that I have almost given up on most of it. And if the copyright owners are not making their product (music, film or other) available on the market, I don't feel bad if I pirate it.
And to make matters worse, in Sweden (where I live) there is a fee imposed on _all_ forms of digital media storage, to compensate for what little legal copying takes place: if I buy a legitimate copy of a CD I am allowed to make a small number of copies for friends. So there is a fee on blank CDs. But the same fee also applies to:
- USB memory sticks
- hard disk drives
- SSD drives
- SD cards
- CF cards
- recordable DVDs
- mobile phones
You might notice that some of these items (mostly SD and CF cards) are rather unlikely to be used to copy music. In my specific case, all my digital camers have used CF cards to store the pictures on. So when I buy any CF card to use it for my own photography, I have to pay a fee to composers, musicians, artists and others for copying that doesn't happen. If I have to pay money to composers, musicians, artists and others in order to take photographs, I don't feel bad at all for pirating their work.
And the same applies when I make back-up copies of my own work: I have to pay money to composers, musicians, artists and others in order to buy disk drives to store _my own_ work on...
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They did the same thing in Canada, imposed a fee for consumer media because it can be used to distribute pirated goods, so that fee got paid to the music industry or whatever.
Anyway a major legal challenge was lost because piracy skyrocked, with the simple argument that well we've paid for the right to burn this content to a CD. They ended up reversing the decision here as they realized by charging a fee because you might pirate content with it and share it, they were legitimizing your actions and couldn't
A man believes in fairness. (Score:2)
The arrogance of it is just begging for a foot in the ass.
If the profits went to the artists (Score:5, Insightful)
Go free (Score:1)
I stick to PlutoTV, Tubi, Roku Channel, & YouTube when I want to watch something. Free content, occasional ads (no big deal). There are no new movies or TV shows that look interesting to me. The idea of parking on a couch and watching an evening of TV isn't really a thing for me anymore. Too many other things to do.
Anti-piracy messaging = advertising piracy (Score:5, Funny)
Early on in the war on piracy, I went to a movie in the theater. A young boy and his mom were sat in front of me. I don't even remember what the movie was, but I remember this little moment EXTREMELY distinctly.
The screen goes black and they launch into that anti-piracy bruhaha about downloading things off the internet, then give a list of things that are bad to download.
When it's over, and the theater gets quiet, the kid goes to his mom, "I didn't know you could download movies on the internet! That's awesome!"
I still laugh about that when I think of it.
These giant industries that are so invested in believing piracy is profit loss just seem to fail to understand human nature on even a basic level. Make the user experience for legal purchase easy and available at a fair price. Piracy will still exist, because not everyone will want to pay for everything, but you'll see a lot less of it if not for all the hoop jumping bullshit they try to make those attempting to stay legal do. Thus far I've avoided piracy myself due to my own hang-ups as a creator. But the way the media industries treat the end-consumer is getting to feel like a beating for loyalty. When those bastards manage to drive folks like me into the piracy universe, they've really fucked up. And it feels like that moment may be fast approaching.
Don't remind people (Score:2)
No idea on the men-vs-women thing.
But it seems absolutely crazy for the DRMed media sales industry to remind people that their media could Just Work and be normal, instead of requiring specific proprietary players (a different one for each media source). They shouldn't even mention piracy, because that just plants the seed that people could instead have standard format files, where things are much more convenient than the awkward situation with DRMed media.
If we want people to just accept that things are sh
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Normal people don't really care about "standard format files", just that it plays when they click it.
That said, reminding people that piracy is possible is indeed something I've considered counterproductive, I've often raged "why are you annoying me when I ACTUALLY BOUGHT YOUR PRODUCT?"
Why are you showing a half hour of ads, that you made skipping as hard as possible, on a DVD for your other productions and such, that I most likely already have if at all interested in?
Or, you know, I could visit a website,
You wouldn't download a car (Score:5, Funny)
..."Car 3D printable complete Left-hand Drive no DRM.zip" is stuck at 93% complete with 0 seeds. Please guys, I'm so close. I just that last little bit; Can someone re-seed this?
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..."Car 3D printable complete Left-hand Drive no DRM.zip" is stuck at 93% complete with 0 seeds. Please guys, I'm so close. I just that last little bit; Can someone re-seed this?
That's nothing. the petrol I'm trying to download is stuck at 0%.
Obligatory Weird Al (Score:3)
What is working for Movie Studios to combat piracy (Score:2)
No shit (Score:3)
It drives me nuts that when I buy a 4k UHD Blu-Ray Steelbook Collector's Edition for $50+, pop it in to my home theater system.... then have to watch 10-20 seconds of unskippable "anti-piracy"messages. I paid for this copy and it should say THANK YOU, not threaten you with jail time.
Problem is calling them "pirates" (Score:2)
Don't they know how cool pirates are? They just make it sound awesome (arrr-some!).
Recording Industry Is Evil, Can't Own Streams (Score:1)
When I was selling shareware (Score:3)
I had to come up with a EULA. I figured that people who wanted to rip off my software would do so, whether I posted a threatening EULA or not. And I figured that people who wanted to do the right thing, just wanted to know what the expectations were. So I made it simple. Just a few bullet points explaining that the license was for one computer, and that a discount was available for multiple machines. That approach seemed to work really well. People weren't annoyed by a long, incomprehensible EULA, and I sold quite a few bulk packs.
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I had to come up with a EULA. I figured that people who wanted to rip off my software would do so, whether I posted a threatening EULA or not. And I figured that people who wanted to do the right thing, just wanted to know what the expectations were. So I made it simple. Just a few bullet points explaining that the license was for one computer, and that a discount was available for multiple machines. That approach seemed to work really well. People weren't annoyed by a long, incomprehensible EULA, and I sold quite a few bulk packs.
The first thing I'd put at the top of a EULA is "Thanks for buying my product".
Then bullet points and finally the legalese. Sadly there does seem to be a lot of the latter required these days, not to enforce unreasonable terms (EULA's aren't really enforceable in most of the world) but rather to protect you from liability from someone using your product illegally or for illegal purposes.
Maybe have a preamble about the product or the developer, but lets not write war and peace here.
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In my experience, legalese serves no real purpose, other than to generate income for lawyers. You might think that by adding legalese, you would be protecting yourself from liability. But if somebody is going to sue you, they won't let a bit of legalese stop them, they'll find some loophole. You can *never* get your text so buttoned-up that it's bulletproof.
So, legalese doesn't help the ones that want to cooperate, it doesn't stop the ones that want to flout the rules, and it doesn't stop those who want to
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In my experience, legalese serves no real purpose, other than to generate income for lawyers. You might think that by adding legalese, you would be protecting yourself from liability. But if somebody is going to sue you, they won't let a bit of legalese stop them, they'll find some loophole. You can *never* get your text so buttoned-up that it's bulletproof.
So, legalese doesn't help the ones that want to cooperate, it doesn't stop the ones that want to flout the rules, and it doesn't stop those who want to sue.
It may not stop the ones that want to sue from suing, but it does stop them from winning.
I've found that having a correctly worded contract is very useful, if for nothing else but for showing in court.
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it does stop them from winning
Only in the fantasy world of the lawyer writing the legalese. For every carefully-worded paragraph, another lawyer will find a loophole. That's what they're paid to do.
Don't copy that floppy! (Score:2)
Why isn't our propaganda working?!? (Score:2)
Ah ah ahhhh.... (Score:2)
>"have the opposite effect if you're a man"
Sorry, that can't be. Remember, men and women are the same and even interchangeable, right? Just ask Google's AI...
Consequences of greed (Score:2)
Every time a show I am watching is interrupted by an advertisement, the odds of my pirating said show increase significantly.