P2P File Sharing Ruining Physical Piracy Business 192
TorrentFreak has a short post up talking with a former physical data pirate, who sold his wares in flea markets and made buckets of money in the 90s. By the end of the last decade, his money flow had dried up, and he places the blame squarely on the shoulders of P2P file sharing. "Tony is very clear about why his rags to riches story has gone back to rags again. 'File-sharing, P2P - call it what you like. When you asked a customer why he wasn't buying anything, 9 times out of 10 it was BitTorrent this, LimeWire that ...' P2P is a very powerful machine and although Tony could see that his operation was feeling its effects, he admits that he sat back and did nothing about it and consequently, his business has paid the ultimate price. Other industries affected by P2P should take note: Don't be a Tony. Overhaul your business model. Quickly." One would imagine overseas media sellers will have similar issues, as P2P networks become more common outside of the Western world.
Nonsense. (Score:4, Insightful)
One would imagine overseas media sellers will have similar issues, as P2P networks become more common outside of the Western world.
No, one wouldn't imagine that. You any idea how (relatively) expensive bandwidth is in much of the third world? Much cheaper for one pirate (yarrr!) to download & sell copies to everyone (this is the way real free markets tend to work).
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Re:Nonsense. (Score:5, Informative)
No different than America (Score:5, Insightful)
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Elements (Score:3, Insightful)
And remember, according to all the do-gooders, little johnny downloading a $1,200 copy of Photoshop via bit torrent so he can play with photos on his blog is just as evil and bad and harmful to corporations as the middle aged guy manufacturing and distributing tens of thousands of copies of the $1,200 application for a hundred bucks a piece.
And due to the statutory damages rule, little johnny downloading a $100 copy of Photoshop Elements is just as bad as little johnny downloading a $1,200 copy of Photoshop full version. (Bring out the GIMP?)
Clever Sao Paulo pirates! (Score:3, Funny)
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Slight exaggeration. You're talking about 298 Hennessy Rd. This is a three-floor computer mall with hundreds of shops. At any time maybe 20 of these are selling bootleg software. But most sell hardware and media. There actually several selling legit software. Back in the 90s, bootelgging must have been more profitable, software was sold by the fl
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I sort of miss the old days, the bootleg vendors were quite knowledgable about their goods and would discuss the pros and cons of Excel vs Lotus, for instance. These days the front men just collect money and have no idea what they're selling.</p></quote>
I remember when the legit vendors used to do that too. Maybe it's not just the people?
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I live in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We have dozens of "physical pirates", and I think they are doing pretty well
To be honest, my mental image of Sao Paulo (based on what I've heard and read) is somewhere where people are either
(a) Humungously rich, and could afford to buy three or four diamond-encrusted solid-gold genuine Windows Vista Ultimate install disks, simply using the spare change they found down the backs of their sofas, or are
(b) Mindbogglingly poor, living in slums, and would need to save up for a year to buy one of those 99-cent calculators.
Okay; I'm exaggerating, but not by that much. Sao Paulo has
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And there is something called a middle class. They might not be that large in numbers, but they go shopping at Carrefour (the one I was talking about had a defective last "r", thus converting the shop into a Carrefou or Crazy Car) Supermarkets, they have their home with a little garden around (and a high wall with glass shards on top to ward off burglars), they work as attorney, clergyman, consultant, banker...
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Re:Nonsense. (Score:4, Informative)
If anyone wants to practice their spanish, here [geocities.com] is a really good description of what the Tepito market is famous for in Mexico. Gosh, one of the main reasons why no one makes anything against it is that usually the heads of those markets (and the people moving the money) are the same of the people from the government!
So yeah, there is still *plenty* of demand for pirate DVDs and CDs (and even VHS!!) in the street.
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Mod parent up (Score:5, Interesting)
The situation outlined in TFA is interesting precisely because it runs contrary to what you might expect, namely that people would be too lazy to actually download multi-GB files themselves. But the story shows that this indeed is the case; at least the people who are cheap enough to buy pirated software at flea markets put a low enough value on their time to download the stuff themselves in order to avoid even the minimal cost of pirated discs.
I'm not sure what the lesson is here. There's a big question in my mind whether lessons from the 'grey (or black) market' can be taken as indicative of movements in the regular 'white market' -- online distribution probably is a lot more attractive to the kind of low-rent geeks who are buying hot software at flea markets than to very busy middle-classers with little time to spare or technical expertise.
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It might be different still. People do pay to the likes of allofmp3, so it seems that some pirates at least are doing very well. Time spent downloading is not time wasted - even on a slow connection, you can just do something else meanwhile. It does sav
Allofmp3 is almost in a league of its own. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Allofmp3 is almost in a league of its own. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not certain where you live, though based on your attitude I will surmise you live somewhere in the developed world.
There are places in the world where the price of software is quite disproportionate - for instance, here in Croatia Photoshop costs about two or three monthly salaries IIRC. And even in the richer parts of the world, there is quite a lot of software which costs a great deal of money, and is still relatively easy to find in the gray/black market.
If the price of the software runs up to several hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and the probability of you getting caught is slim, buying from a pirate is putting a rather high value on your time - it doesn't take more than a few hours, and the savings are vast.
But then, what do I know... from where I stand, capitalism seems to be based on the principle of getting something for nothing as much and as often as you can.
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Whether it is legal or not, it hardly matters to most of its customers. Not the ones I know (myself included), anyway. What matters is the quality of the tracks they offer for download, and the convenience of use. For the price they ask, they do offer
Re:Mod parent up (Score:4, Insightful)
I, for one, don't avoid pirated discs because of the cost issue, but because it's less hassle and faster to download a movie [1] than to have to go out, find a physical pirate store (Hell, I wouldn't know where to find one) and buy the movie I want.
1: Sure, the actual downloading takes a few hours, but the only effort for me is a few minutes on thep(cough)ay.org or somesuch.
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Could you clarify what you mean by this? P2P seems like it would take less time, and therefore be a better use of time, than going out to purchase a physical pirated copy. It's not as if the person has to pedle a bicycle to keep bittorrent or limewire running. They click a link and walk away until it's done.
Much more likely... (Score:2)
Laptop computers are the big thing to have thanks to social networking and every one of them has a device in it which copies shiny disks.
Re:Nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pirates were charging $5 dollars a disk, pretty much the same price as a supermarket bargain bin, who would bother with the questionable illegitimate quality.
Yeah, I know you don't get the latest releases, but with the sheer volume of content available on DVD why bother with the latest releases, especially as most of the latest releases basically suck.
Re:Nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Black markets thrive on high markups. When the whitemarket's profit margins collapse, the blackmarket gets squeezed out (well, not hardly -- they move on to other things where the markups are still high).
I suspect that DVD videos would be a tough sell in the First World (probably less so in other parts of the world, where the cost of a movie relative to other goods, like food, is much higher), however, higher-margin information products like expensive software (Photoshop, Logic, etc.) will still be widely pirated and counterfeited, in both electronic/P2P and physical forms.
No, they were not. (Score:2)
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Re:Nonsense. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh and bandwidth in the third world is expensive, but there's more to "outside western world" than that. Try going to South Korea for Internet connection, and you'll be pleasantly surprised. Remember that much of the cost is digging up the countryside, and where there's cheap labor ditch diggers aren't expensive either. Some of the poorer skipped phone lines altogether and went directly for cell phones and satellite, when they dig up it's either modern cable designed for Internet service or fiber going in there.
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"Patience"? (Score:2)
1. Broadband penetration is high now - even slow broadband can download most apps if you just leave it on overnight.
2. A lot of broadband isn't slow anymore, especially outside of the US. I am sitting on a 24/8 mbit line, and 10 and 100 mbit (full duplex) fiber isn't unusual. "A gig" is a few minutes worth of downloading most of the time using a decent DC hub or torrent.
3. Burning CD:s and DVD:s isn't hard.
4. Even if you find downloading and buring h
when (Score:5, Funny)
Re:when (Score:5, Funny)
Way to kick a guy when he's down (Score:5, Funny)
Pirates VS. P2P (Score:3, Funny)
I feel a great disturbance in the MAFIAA.
As if thousand of lawyer's head exploded and then suddenly disappeared in a puff of logic.
Re:when (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe nobody feels bad for Tony, but think about what will eventually happen to the genuine distributors and consequently developers. If Tony couldn't even sell pirate software any more then how will anyone sell software?
Sure, there is that old argument, "the people buying from Tony probably wouldn't have bought it retail anyway". But stop and think about what's happened here: He had a big house, fast cars, expensive holidays, rented a warehouse, employed several people - that's all money that the real developers never saw a penny of. And you have to wonder - we live in a world where the younger generation (of which I count myself part) just tends to pirate everything. It has become the common culture. Apparently these days the majority of people under 30 "wouldn't have bought it anyway" all of the time - yet look at the masses of stuff they have pirated over time.
First Tony will go out of business, followed by the software houses we know and love, if it hasn't happened already. The article ends "Overhaul your business model. Quickly.". This assumes that there will still be enough people around who will be willing to pay at all. I know many people who go out of their way to pay for nothing - be it software, music, or movies.
Basically, if you're writing commercial software, you better have an online service or technology licensing program attached to it to make decent profits.
Re:when (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't buy many games anymore. Frankly, I'm sick and tired of being hyped up for a year by some paid-for ads-cloaked-as-previews and then sitting down to play the game for all of 2 or 3 hours before it starts to suck because it was launched early, is full of bugs and the gameplay was never quite finished.
It isn't worth the 50 or so uros they charge these days.
On the other hand, I have bought great games after playing the pirated copy halfway through. I've bought the entire DVD series of Hellsing after having seen them all in ripped-from-TV downloads. A few years ago, I watched most new movies in my home theatre courtesy of bittorrent, mostly because I enjoy original versions over (often) crappy localisations, and the originals launched 3-6 months earlier in the US than the localised versions showed here. Nowadays, with simultaneous worldwide launches, I find myself going to the cinema again quite often.
Quality still sells. Listening to market demands still sells. Crap doesn't sell as well anymore.
Re:when (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand what you're saying - but you have to realize that this isn't about what you do, or what I do, it's about the behavior of the overall population. If you believe that the overall population tends to follow your habits, then that is one argument. If, on the other hand, there is a growing population of freeloaders, then that's another problem.
Although I'm essentially replying to you here, I make this point more globally because I see similar responses everywhere the topic of piracy is discussed, and I think that except in very few circumstances they mask the real issue.
P.S. "Crap doesn't sell as well anymore.", agreed!
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It gets better, even. I'm very sure Adobe realizes very well that
a) lots of students copy Photoshop
b) many of them will buy it later because they're used to it
Looking around, there's a lot of software that is strong in its segment and one of the reasons is that it is pirated so often. Photoshop, 3D Max, Windos... if there were absolutely no way to get windos without paying for it, OSX and Linux would at least double their market shares within the week.
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Also i use Windows 2000 and although many Windows XP-only games will work fine on 2000, some don't.
On top of this, here in the UK the law that allows you to return unwanted items within 7 days explicitly excludes software, CDs and
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Maybe nobody feels bad for Tony, but think about what will eventually happen to the genuine distributors and consequently developers. If Tony couldn't even sell pirate software any more then how will anyone sell software?
If nobody is able to sell software, that's a very, very good thing. If the incentive to make proprietary software goes away FLOSS will have won, liberty will be restored, the Dilbertization of IT http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/17/175 256 [slashdot.org] will stop and Microsoft will die. Party like it's 1999.
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By writing it, and selling it to the people who aren't looking for something that fell off the back of a truck.
I mean, consider this as a survey. If someone went to a bunch of pubs and surveyed people about their drinking habits, you'd end up with different results than if you went to a bunch of churches and passed around the same paper. All this article shows is that among people who are already looking to buy stolen goo
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But that never happened, because movies were a different form of entertainment than TV. It had a bigger screen better sound, a
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And if there aren't, there are a few possibilities...
Creators will stop creating as they are not being paid and there won't be much at all to pay nothing for.
Creators will insist on getting paid up front for creating things.
Creators will create anyway because they are driven to express themselves.
Instead of really wel
Re:when (Score:5, Insightful)
The same problem exists even if one parent company funds branches in two or more industries - nobody wants to finance a loss. The same problem even exists if you download software and pay for only what you consider the best of it, because this means that you will tend to fund only the biggest players, and startups won't have as much of a chance to break through. If we're really being honest, many people who claim they pirate to "try" software are full of it - ever hear of a demo? Demo's are a section of the game or an otherwise limited version that the distributors actually want you to try out legally, and base your purchase decision upon.
Now, believe me when I tell you that in my opinion the MPAA and RIAA are full of crap in most statements they make regarding piracy statistics. But based on the attitudes of many people I know in real life I actually believe we may end up in a situation where the populace is simply taxed at some flat rate for piracy, beyond what we have already seen for blank media in certain countries, simply because there will come a breaking point where the practice of piracy is so widespread that we'll face at least a partial collapse of certain industries. I already believe that if you ask most people about piracy today you'll simply be told that "everybody does it".
I do make an effort to pay for the software, music and movies I use. In the sense that many people I know simply download the same products you could say this makes me foolish, "wasting my money". On the other hand, when I put myself in the position of the developers, artists, and producers, I look at a real problem they're facing, no matter how inflated it may be in the industry stats presented to us by the media.
My main gripe, however, remains with the freeloaders - people who seem to see no value in any of the products they consume, or who delude themselves into believing that by simply "making a copy" they aren't "stealing" anything. Okay, so piracy is not quite the same as theft, but developers, musicians, and so forth produce works that contribute to society and culture. In that sense freeloading is most equivalent to not paying your taxes - those people who do pay are essentially funding various works from which you benefit. At some point the burden that is shifted onto the shoulders of those who do pay will become too great.
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The real freeloaders are people who
Demos (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a problem with demos. You aren't really supporting what I'm complaining about, but I'm going to complain anyway.
My major problem with demos is that, by their very nature, they *require* a clean uninstall procedure. I have y
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Re:when (and why) (Score:2)
It won't end well when Mr.Soprano finds out.
This is severely damaging the freemarket system! (Score:2)
I would have RTFA... (Score:4, Funny)
Don't Be A Tony? (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, you pirates. You need to find another way to make money by leeching off the honest work of others. Art forgery perhaps? Maybe consider a payday loan business... legally charge loan shark interest rates by calling them "service fees".
- Greg
Re:Don't Be A Tony? (Score:5, Funny)
Set up a record company??
bread and cheese for the whine? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah (Score:2)
sell drugs instead (Score:3, Insightful)
until we finally get it legalized, then you'll have to find some other criminalized act to profit off.
Re:sell drugs instead (Score:4, Insightful)
I think there is another morale to this story (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the old tale of the ant and the grasshopper. Tony still could be living well today if he actually squirreled away some of it. I wonder how many people in the late 90's early 00's tech boom were blowing money the same way that have very little to show for it now.
Re:I think there is another morale to this story (Score:5, Funny)
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Why can't people be satisfied with a nice new but still economical honda or something when they make it big? Why always blow it out on frivolous shit?
Because money has to be visibly spent in order to count (J.P. Carse). In other words: If you want to use your money to improve your social status, you have to spend it so that other people see that you have money. Contrary to popular believe, money isn't an end in itself for the rich, it's ammo in a game called "society".
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You must mean the old tale of the ant, the grasshoper and the squirrel.
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You must mean the old tale of the ant, the grasshoper and the squirrel.
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He made the all too common assumption that the only way his profits could go was up. Whereas what actually happened was his business model became obsolete.
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The Way of the BatBelt is NOT DEAD!
Bunch-O-Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
P2P only makes sense when there isn't an affordable convenient alternative. Tony just priced himself out of business evidently. It's all about volume and price point. If Tony had focused on improving his productivity so he could lower his sale price he'd probably still be in business. Even in the black market you have to continue to innovate.
Tony got in when he thought he could make money easy, he wasn't bothered by the ethics of his choices. I have no trouble believing he'd be too lazy to work harder and charge less to give the same product. Even so I am highly disinclined to believe this story at face value. There may be a high volume of Slashdotters out there doing P2P for video, but Joe-6-pack is just barely able to share mp3s and spends a lot on DRM products. Joe would easily plunk down two dollars for a bootleg DVD if Tony where selling them.
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Why can't Hollywood....never mind.
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Probably more significently Tony's market changed, low cost high speed Internet access came to the part of the world Tony was operating in.
It's all about volume and price point. If Tony had focused on improving his productivity so he could lower his sale price he'd probably still be in business. Even in the black market you have to continue to innovat
If anything you need to in
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People who
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You're downloading from the wrong sites, man, or you live somewhere where bandwidth is too meager or expensive. You should be downloading the full, ripped DVDs over a few nights. It's not like you're going to bank the bandwidth that you don't use.
For 50 cents to a dollar? I'd skip the hassle of making sure I find a legit copy, downloading it, leaving my computer on over a few nights, using up a portion of my bandwidth and (possibly) burning it. Sure, it's still not that big a deal, but a dollar is hardly a lot of money either.
Hungh? (Score:2)
Cute! (Score:2)
Either that balances out or it means the aforementioned studio mafia are justified in suing grandmas and teenagers.
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Tony was not a pirate, just a leech. (Score:2, Insightful)
Tony won't have been cracking anything, creating anything, "value added" anything, Tony is a leech.
It's easy, always was, beige box FTP server on a decent pipe and start couriering, what Tony was trading on was usenet and a stack of dupe burners, and don't forget to take other groups work and rebrand it with your own nfo file to
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I've been around this scene since the 5.25" floppy days ...
I'm really hoping that you're not still in the scene, most of us got over it before we were 20.
I applaud the fact that another leech has bitten the dust, and can no longer make an easy living selling the fruits of other people's works to noobs and lusers.
I'm going out on a limb here and presuming you're referring to the work of suppliers/crackers/couriers rather than the people who created the stuff. Warez scene != work. It was and is a ga
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Tony won't have been cracking anything, creating anything, "value added" anything, Tony is a leech.
Unlike those who crack something, thereby creating "value"; who aren't leeching off of the original producers whose work they cracked.
I applaud the fact that another leech has bitten the dust, and can no longer make an easy living sell
Haha... (Score:2, Insightful)
You are soooo l33t
I hope you see the hypocracy in your statement.
As a student (Score:3, Interesting)
Never really made any money, but came out the other end of two degrees with only a modest amount of debt (not that I'm defending it) and am now a good tax paying little legit drone.
I was never part of the scene, so all my stuff used to come in as trades and I still remember the joy of opening jiffy bags with foreign stamps to see what weird and wonderful contents they would contain. I'm sure part of it was an aspergers like desire to try to collect everything there possibly was available - whether or not I or anybody else actually wanted/needed it.
Had a fun time and it's left me with all manner of fond memories - playing a pre-release version of MGS throughout the night as we couldn't work out how to save the game, or what was actually going on (I've still not quite grasped Japanese), realizing ThrillKill wasn't released as it 'wasn't actually any good' to nervously opening my door to a car-load of scarey looking people in the small hours and them asking very sweetly if I could chip their PS.
I stopped (assuming I'd started) all this many years before the guy in the article threw in the towel (I never made it onto DVDs). The premise of the article that P2P killed physical piracy is probably right. I doubt it's that everybody has know learnt how to download whatever they want and make their own copy - it's more that pretty much everybody knows a friend or colleague that can. Towards the end I used to temp in offices over the holidays - and every single one of them would have the guy who'd come in with a pile of disks in the morning for people (and get a pint if anything returned to him at lunch).
Death of LikSang reminded me of their initial incarnation as supplier of DrV64s (I could never afford a Z64) and the fun I'd had resoldering the guts of what they delivered into a working machine and trying to track down a CD drive that didn't gulp enough power to max out the piss-poor PSU it came with. Dug out my old folders of disks and had a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Most of them were dead, cheap ones had flaked and I'd managed to eat through a load using a big solventy magic marker.
All in the bottom of a landfill now.
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to Wit:
William Gibson, is that you?
The truly big time for profit "pirates" (Score:2, Interesting)
This just in (Score:3, Insightful)
Law suit (Score:4, Funny)
Tony should move to Ukraine (Score:4, Interesting)
Newsflash: most of the people in the world don't even own a radio never mind a computer.
Takes another one of their anti-piracy reasons. (Score:2)
If you download for free, your not giving money to anyone, not the pirates who finance drug dealers, nor the software companies and whoever they might be financing.
Piracy supports terrorism. (Score:2)
You really need to pay more attention...piracy doesn't support drugs, drugs support terrorism.
And, as if I even needed to mention it: Think of the children.
Flea Market? (Score:2)
Oh noes, the poor darling! (Score:2)
But are we supposed to feel sorry for this guy or something? I mean it's one thing downloading Photoshop for your personal use (arguably strengthening the brand for when you're in a position to buy it at work etc), but actually making money and getting rich from ripping off other people's work... he acquired his wealth dishonestly, so surely he has no right to complain when he loses wh
I wonder who is really winning. . ? (Score:2)
Asia ignores copyright and never pays for Western Media, distributing it like crazy to all corners of the East.
Those two things are different.
The West sending all its money to Asia is a way to go broke. But. .
Getting everybody hooked on Western media is the way you totally decimate a local culture and re-forge it in your own image.
So if the West goes broke and blows away in a giant dust bowl, does it matter if it has re-spawned over in t
Re:$5 for a hard copy current movie= good model (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if the legal copies were about this price, that market would not exist. $20 for a copy of Open Season? What are they thinking. It's high prices that cause a piracy market to exist.
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I'd wager it is also releasing to dvd long after the theatre release. It isn't as long now, but I fail to see why most movies aren't simultaneously released to theatre and dvd. I may be projecting, but I hate the theatre. Movies look and sound great at home, they cost less, the food is better, the seating is much better, I don't have to sit near some unhygenic stinkhole, no one sits infront of me and blocks my view, random cell phones don't go off du
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There's also the whole staggered release thing.
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Sure, but then you're competing with the margin on blank DVDs. Where the REAL inroads to piracy are to be made are the fact that people are buying movies at all.
If you REALLY want to fight piracy, just make a product that no one wants at any price. It's a desirable product that causes a piracy market to exist. Extra bonus:
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For a backup of $HOME? Not so much. When do we get a price drop?!
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As long as they don't repeat what they did on Laser Disks. Movies were over $60 for anything decent. In a more affordable range were wonders like "How to watch Pro Football".
http://www.bigemma.com/index.php?main_page=product _info&cPath=21_32&products_id=10156 [bigemma.com]
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Then again, if the legal copies were that price, the product might not exist? A duplicator doesn't care if what you're putting on it is your local bands playing worth about 1$/GB or 100000 manhours put into creating a software app that's maybe worth 1000$/GB. Or at least, if you don't agree with the word "value", then it's certainly "what do we need to earn to produce this".
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