EU Piracy Estimates — Just How Inaccurate? 124
Last week we discussed news that a US government report questioned the reliability of piracy statistics from the media industry. Reader superapecommando sends in a follow-up written by Glyn Moody that examines a similar problem in Europe. Quoting:
"As far as I know, no similar analysis has been carried out for European reports. So I thought it might be interesting to look at one particular European report on the subject — not least because I've heard that its findings influenced some of the MPs voting on the Digital Economy Act. ... the net result of this 68-page report, with all of its tables and detailed methodology, is that four out of the top five markets used for calculating the overall piracy loss in Europe draw on figures supplied by the recording industry itself. Those apparently terrifying new figures detailing the supposed loss of money and jobs due to piracy in Europe turn out to be little more than a re-statement of the industry's previous claims in a slightly different form. As a result, as little credence can be placed in the report as in those criticised by the US GAO."
I still blame Metallica (Score:5, Interesting)
I still blame Metallica. When Load didn't sell jack because it was the worst album they ever put out they started screaming that the reason that Load of crap did not sell was due to piracy.
They are Janet Jackson's nipple of the piracy world.
Re:I still blame Metallica (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I still blame Metallica (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but...Jackson's nipple is still awesome, unlike Metallica.
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Hey, S&M was a great experiment (they actually played a "The Memory Remains" that was good), and Death Magnetic was actually as good as "...and Justice for All". Signs are that they've made a comeback. They even apologized for being douchebags with the Napster thing.
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I'll have to take your word for it. After St Anger, I don't give a shit about them anymore, Utterly worthless. I won't even bother to risk wasting 60 minutes of my life to listen to their new music.
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I actually recommend giving them a listen. Death Magnetic is sort-of like the Black Album, with the more melodic elements, but it has a lot of the thrash back from the classic days. It's not their best, but it's their best in over a decade. It does have some problems: the songs go on a bit too long, and some of the tracks are a bit weak, but overall worth trying at least one song.
S&M is actually one of my favorite albums of all time. Give "No Leaf Clover" a listen. Or the S&M version of "Battery", i
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It's not their best, but it's their best in over a decade.
I agree Death Magnetic is their best in over a decade.
Sadly, that isn't saying much.
It's still nowhere even remotely as good as their older work.
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The official CD release of Death Magnetic was a pile of overcompressed horseshit.
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Guitar Hero III multi-tracks (Score:3, Informative)
Take a look for a version of the album that was created from the multi-tracks used in Guitar Hero III... sounds way better than the retail CD. These tracks were apparently handed over to the GH team before the moron who compressed the shit out of the album did his dirty work.
Various version available on Demonoid, The Pirate Bay, etc.
Re:I still blame Metallica (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I pirate games as a demo. If I download one or two songs from a new album, and I like them, I'll go out and buy the CD.
I played half an hour of Just Cause 2 and decided to go out and buy the game within an hour of playing with the pirated version.
It's reasonable nowadays seeing as these companies are developing too many shitty games to release a goddamn demo, so more people will buy their shit because of the media hype, and not the actual gameplay.
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If I download one or two songs from a new album, and I like them, I'll go out and buy the CD.
Fairly unnecessary now, iTunes lets you listen to 30 second samples of all songs in the album so you can decide if the style is something for you. Sure, samples aren't perfect but neither is grabbing two random songs out of an album.
Re:I still blame Metallica (Score:5, Insightful)
I still blame the RIAA/MPAA/MafiAA... and add in Clear Channel to the mix.
The death of radio DJ's who actually spun an album now and again was the death of my music-buying habit; it let to me getting burned by a couple groups who had a decent radio single, and the other 12 songs on the album turned out to be pure crap.
I bought Aerosmith's "Get a Grip" album on the strength of a radio DJ playing it; I left "Just Push Play" on the shelf after listening to a friend's copy and realizing it wasn't worth it.
Ever since Bill Clinton signed on to radio consolidation, radio's basically been fucked. Small wonder "talk radio" got so big, their only competition has been precanned shit-music format stations. We used to have a 2 great alt-rock stations in town, then Clear Channel bought them out and turned one into yet another mexicrap station, the other into a "shit-rap that morons without two brain cells to rub together blast from their ghetto cruisers" station ... as if we didn't already have 12 of those damn things crapping up the airwaves locally as it stood.
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iTunes lacks a proper platform, and does not give a physical hugable media nor does it deliver full quality flaq.
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iTunes lacks a proper platform, and does not give a physical hugable media nor does it deliver full quality flaq.
FLAQ - Free Lossless Audio Quoi?
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Yeah but you don't need those for previewing purposes, do you?
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Re:I still blame Metallica (Score:5, Funny)
Wow!
I've heard stories about your existence, but I thought them myths.
I must say it is truely an honor to speak to the one person in the world that actually does what millions of downloaders merely claim to do.
Are you also the guy that downloads only Linux CD's using bittorrent?
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And I am the other guy, who doesn't download any songs illegally and thus never buys music.
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When Load didn't sell jack because it was the worst album they ever put out
No way, St. Anger makes Load look like a masterpiece.
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I still blame Metallica. When Load didn't sell jack because it was the worst album they ever put out they started screaming that the reason that Load of crap did not sell was due to piracy.
I blame shitty bus drivers.
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Who is Metallica?
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They are Janet Jackson's nipple of the piracy America.
There, fixed that for you. “Nipplegate” is a purely American phenomenon.
Very Inaccurate (Score:5, Interesting)
That's no excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
In the sciences you put a huge effort into quantifying error. A result might be quoted as:
60
+- 2 due to limited sampling in a Monte Carlo experiment (statistical error)
+- 0.5 due to uncertainties in a previous result that this one relies on
+- 0.2 due to using an approximation in our math
+- 0.8 due to uncertainties in how we corrected for a bias (systematic error)
The presidential pollsters do this: they'd quote some number as "58% for Obama, with a 2 percent statistical margin of error, and an additional 1 percent error coming from the fact that we're not quite sure if we're over- or under-sampling cellphone-only voters."
If your estimates aren't *precise*, that's okay. You can still give an honest estimate with a large error bar. Do it, and honestly quantify your uncertainty.
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* ± 14 bajillion %
Re:That's no excuse (Score:4, Insightful)
In the sciences you put a huge effort into quantifying error. A result might be quoted as:
60 +- 2 due to limited sampling in a Monte Carlo experiment (statistical error) +- 0.5 due to uncertainties in a previous result that this one relies on +- 0.2 due to using an approximation in our math +- 0.8 due to uncertainties in how we corrected for a bias (systematic error)
The presidential pollsters do this: they'd quote some number as "58% for Obama, with a 2 percent statistical margin of error, and an additional 1 percent error coming from the fact that we're not quite sure if we're over- or under-sampling cellphone-only voters."
If your estimates aren't *precise*, that's okay. You can still give an honest estimate with a large error bar. Do it, and honestly quantify your uncertainty.
Indeed, but since when was the average person educated enough about science and statistics to understand the importance of what you are saying, or to competently criticize the methods used and claims made by the copyright interests?
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Since before "No Child Left Behind"?
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Do it, and honestly quantify your uncertainty.
The reason they will never do that is because there's actually a potential net gain in profit due to piracy, via its function as free advertising.
Re: Potential Gain (Score:2)
Susan Boyle.
Sweet old Lady, got some bad breaks earlier.
She became a crystal clear YouTube phenom, and then this happened:
From Wiki:
Global interest in Boyle was triggered by the contrast between her powerful voice and her plain appearance on stage. The juxtaposition of the audience's first impression of her with the standing ovation she received during and after her performance led to an international media and Internet response. Within nine days of the audition, videos of Boyle -- from the show, various in
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Which can be a good metric for spotting psudoscience, which dosn't tend to do thia...
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Further, such numbers, whatever they are, don't even support their derived claims about jobs or taxes; copyright is fundamentally a taxation form, and as such it does not create jobs but merely redistributes resources. Jobs gained from IPR are lost elsewhere in the economy.
Arguing about the numbers is merely a smokescreen and by even playing that game one supports the even more flawed premise. More taxes don't necessarily lead to more jobs. Neither does more copyright levies and revenue.
Invalidate (Score:5, Interesting)
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That should be law.
If a law is built on incorrect information it should be automatically repealed. After it is repealed it can have another go at becoming law with the correct information.
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You know, that would also probably make Congress/Parliament/what-have-you too busy looking at old laws to pass pork/raise taxes/etc. That way you kill two birds with one stone.
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Every statistical information is incorrect to some degree.
How incorrect can it before it is too incorrect?
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You can't just say, oh oops, we are no longer at war with you. Well you can, but that doesn't mean they won't continue the war you just started.
Troops should only be removed if that is the best course of action to take based on the well being of those the troops are protecting.
If the US had pulled out of Iraq after the invasion then its possible that Iraq could have fallen into a Somali type situation without a central government.
You break it, you fix it.
I would say that the only reason we are still in Ira
Re:Invalidate (Score:4, Insightful)
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There is no requirement to fix it.
You can break it and leave.
Happens throughout recorded history.
Rome did not fix Carthage.
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Thank god that the US is not as bad as Rome then.
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For some values of bad.
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I'd go further and advocate replacing them with the politicians (and any associated hangers on) who supported the war in the first place.
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Wonder how many legal drugs meet these criteria...
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Might not be a good idea to "invalidate" all the legislators responsible for passing it too. Just to be on the safe side best invalidate any other legislation they may have passed. Since checking proposed legislation and the claims supporting it is part of their job!
Completely inaccurate (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no way to make any kind of meaningful estimate as to how much piracy there is, let alone how much or if any of that results in lost sales or gained sales. No data == no meaningful guesses.
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No data == no meaningful guesses.
Unfortunately that won't stop the MPAA/RIAA from making up numbers and meaningless guesses.
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fraud: deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.
perjury: the willful giving of false testimony under oath or affirmation, before a competent tribunal, upon a point material to a legal inquiry.
When are these people going to face the music? Why is there one law for the individual, and a different application of the law when a multi-million dollar company does it?
Re:Completely inaccurate (Score:4, Funny)
When are these people going to face the music?
They claim they can't because someone pirated it.
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Why is there one law for the individual, and a different application of the law when a multi-million dollar company does it?
God is in between. And by "God" I mean "money".
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No data == no meaningful guesses.
Almost correct. No data = no constraint on wild exaggeration. They'd claim infinite losses if they thought it might be believed.
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Good point. You can't prove their numbers are wrong!
Any time you come up with any other number, they'll claim your methodology is flawed. And then cry a lot about their children starving in the rain. Or driving last year's Benz instead of buying a new one like they deserve.
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Any time you come up with any other number, they'll claim your methodology is flawed.
How do they argue against their revenues going up every year?
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Especially in the current economic situation. Maybe the wrong numbers are being looked at.
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There's a relevant Simpsons quote.
Everybody already knows what it is, so there's not much point in saying it.
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Of course there's a way to make meaningful estimates of losses. Just ask the copyright holder how much he thinks he deserves.
This method has been used very successfully by courts all round the world. Why mess with a thing of beauty?
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How do you study something that you can't gain data about? Even if you could estimate the number of downloads, there would be no way to tell if that download resulted in a lost sale or a gained sale.
The only way to study it that I can think of would be a survey, but I know from doing surveys for my employer 15 years ago is that people don't trust those asking the questions, especially about something they might get in trouble for.
You might as well survey to find out how many prostitutes there are; almost no
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The industries involved just don't want to believe that "piracy" can result in gained sales or that it can make no difference to sales. Nor do they want to consider if it is their own actions, such as staggered releases and DRM, are relevent factors.
No data == no meaningful guesses.
Even Garbage In Garbage Out.
No corroborating evidence. (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently, the report writers noted that the sale of eye-patches and peg-legs didn't correlate with industry claims of piracy...
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How about bionic eyes which instantly adapt to different light levels
What the? (Score:5, Insightful)
calculating the overall piracy loss in Europe draw on figures supplied by the recording industry itself
Seriously? You know, there was a time when we believed the cigarette companies that smoking was fine based on the stats they gave us - and look how well that turned out.
This kind of self policing industry crap has got to stop.
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It's true, studies have shown that listening to Justin Bieber songs will give you cancer.
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This kind of self policing industry crap has got to stop.
Now if only we could apply that same logic to politicians...
I find one flaw in all these arguments (Score:5, Insightful)
The "substitution rate" is probably the worst figure in all these papers, mainly because it is far from constant. Perhaps, with enough study, you could find the substitution rate for one specific product in one region, but trying to get a national average by product category is ludicrous.
Since people like blaming Metallica, I'll use them as an example. Note that all these numbers were pulled out of my ass, same as all numbers.
You may get a substitution rate of 50% for Master of Puppets in Southwestern US. You may get a 2% substitution rate for St. Anger in Finland. You may get a 20% substitution rate for "S&M", and you'd be lucky to get a 1% rate for "Acoustic Metal". That's a massive change just for one band. How would you compare the rates between The Black Mages and Justin Bieber? Trying to lump target audiences like that will give you numbers about as meaningful as the ones I just made up.
Listen up, MAFIAA. We care about three things: quality, price, and usability. We will pay for the good stuff, and tell you where to shove your crap. We don't want to pay 30$ for a music album, $20 for movie tickets, or $70 for a game. Finally, we want to get stuff easily, that works with everything, and doesn't come with legal crap that shouldn't have a chance of standing up in court.
And if you can't give us those three things, you need a new economic model. How many bands are giving out the music for free and making money from concerts and merchandise? It's nearly impossible to pirate a t-shirt or an experience. How much money are "free-to-play" games making?
Stop trying to legislate a profit, and start spending as much on those three things as you do on legal fees. Maybe you'll actually make money by, *gasp*, making a desirable product.
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The $70 for a game is down to consumer stupidity.
If people see a game for $60 and a similar game for $70 they assume the $70 one is better. (and they're only going to buy one and it's only a $10 difference, I mean really they'd be stupid not to buy the $70 game, right?)
A free market does not serve consumers if consumers do not make an informed choice.
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Well, atleast hose people aren't so stupid as to wait a few months for the $70 game to cost $20 in the bargain bin. Surely at $20 the game has to have become far less enjoyable.
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The bargain bin? Are you crazy?
Only really terrible games end up in there!
What do you take me for, some kind of trash monkey who is happy to take games out of bins? Pff.
Ahem.
Back in the real world, there are some people who will only buy from the bargain bin because they play a lot of games and don't have a lot of money and are happy enough to wait or seek out a bargain.
I'd argue though that there's still a large proportion of people buying games who have no idea how to tell the good stuff from the crap. Ki
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Note that all these numbers were pulled out of my ass, same as all numbers.
You must have a pretty large ass to fit every number in there.
On a slightly serious note I wouldn't point to "free-to-play" games as a great strategy either. Several are hooked up with scams for points (like Zynga) They should look at games that are fun but not flashy (like World of Goo).
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I'm not saying free-to-play is right for everything, but it's currently a "next big thing" to many game devs. A lot of them are wary, but they see profit margins that are simply obscene by regular standards. I read an article (can't find it ATM) that compared costs for World of Warcraft and Farmville. The dinky little Facebook game made more money, with an order of magnitude more users, an order of magnitude less dev time, and minuscule hardware overhead.
The artists, musicians and game designers may not lik
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Note that all these numbers were pulled out of my ass, same as all numbers.
Just for saying something like that, I'm going to have to punish you
1273, 18, 9762381, 44.2
Ha! Take that.
8, -273, 4, 91827364E23
And now for one that'll really hurt:
Pi
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And now for one that'll really hurt: Pi
Oh come now, be rational.
As inaccurate as desired (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems nobody requires those making piracy loss claims to prove anything they say. Consequantially, estimates keep going up, and have reached a ridiculously high level. Typical dishonest tricks used include billing the price of a full retail version for each suspected download (1. the full retail price is unrealistic 2. people would not have gotten the thing if they would have to pay 3. a lot of downloads never get installed/used/listened to 4. filenames lie and not everything is what is claims to be).
There is a really urgent need to either have serious negative consequences for those making claims that are inflated or to stof listening to those with high self-interest and get hard numbers. Just remember that somebody downloading a song, litening to it once and then deleting it is the equivalent to have listened to it on the radio and then deciding to not buy it. Content providers have a far to high opinion of the quality of the things they offer. Many people would just go without if pirating was harder.
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It is relevant because politicians listen to these people and then pass insane laws.
My take is that if the business model does not work anymore, the onlythink to do is to change it. If we find out that actually nobody produces music, movies or software anymore, something needs to be done, bit that is very unlikely to happen. Don;t forget that in the arts the talented ones are not after getting rich, and being able to life off their art is a bonus. With global cheap distribution, funding the creatives should
dilemma (Score:5, Interesting)
The media industry has a nice dilemma here:
If the piracy figures are too small, then nobody will care about them.
On the other hand, if the piracy figures are too large, then the whole European population is criminalized, and nobody will care either...
I'm sure it's everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Science by the Pound (Score:2)
as little credence can be placed in the report as in those criticised by the US GAO
That's not the point. The point of these studies is not to find out anything, and it's not really even to convince anyone of anything, it's to show that the problem has been exhaustively studied, and that "our" research is more exhaustive than the other side. When I was in government, we used to call this "science by the pound," and it could literally devolve into "my study is thicker than yours" type of arguments.
As a simple
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Hell, I ignore any study of the Internet that involves humans. Half of the researchers don't understand it, half already wrote their conclusion, and half are so out-of-date that they're still bracing for Y2K.
hmmm... (Score:2, Funny)
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Avast Anti-virus = free
Spybot Search & Destroy = Free
I'm sure you were making a joke, but on the off chance, those two things should save you from having to re-format as often.
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Are you still using Red Hat 4?
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No, Slackware. That's why I keep the 3.5" FDD in my system :-)
Actually, that IS how I got my first ever version of Linux - Slackware on 14 floppies and the message "I'll answer questions but only if they're intelligent ones, have fun". That's how I got into Unix sideways, after that I also used SunOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, HP-UX and AIX (as far as I recall, may have been others). I think I've used a fair number of Linux variants, but I got lazy and stuck with (Open)SuSE - I lack the patience/time to hack tex
Five Things To Consider (Score:1)
1. When stating how much software "costs" they always use the list - or highest price, which is usually a multiple of the actual end-user site license cost.
2. They don't allow for typical disk-to-disk archival backups. Most modern sites use archival backup strategies, and copy data from disks to allow for recovery when a primary disk fails. This gives you two or three "software" copies, when in fact only one is used, the other two being archival - one on the same computer, the other on another (backup) comp
Irish "piracy" (Score:4, Interesting)
These figures are so implausible that it is a wonder that any government takes them seriously at all. It's clear that piracy does result in lost sales, but the music / movie industry is doing itself no favours by lying. Pirates almost by definition place less value on an item than a music industry. The industry might think a CD is worth 15 but the pirate clearly begs to differ. It therefore makes no sense to say a pirated copy = one lost sale since the pirate would be unlikely to have paid full price in any event.
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I expect there are many kinds of users. Hardcore pirates (lamers) who would never pay for anything ever. Those people are not lost sales because they're lamers. At the other end perhaps there are try-before-they-buy kind of people who buy music they actually like. Everyone else falls somewhere along that scale. I expect many people on that scale would switch if there
How inaccurate? 100% (Score:1)
I'd say they are 100% inaccurate.
Seeing as it's IMPOSSIBLE to get a correct number, or even an close estimate of the number of pirated copies.
They can though, give you a total cost of how much they are wasting on DRM.
Hey Government!! (Score:2)
My employer is under paying me by 5 billion dollars, now think of how much in taxes you are not getting from me.
Downward spiral (Score:1)
I think it's obvious.
1. The record companies make the content cost more (to compensate for "lost" sales) and more difficult to use (DRM)
2. People listen to less music
3. People buy less music
4. "Sales are down - must be due to piracy"
5. Goto 1.
If you think I am exaggerating, look back to what happened when CDs launched
I don't think it's accurate... (Score:2)
... to call the number that come from the RIAA or the MPAA statistics. "Assertions" is what comes to mind when I hear or read the stories from these folks.
Is there a magical counter somewhere that counts the number of allegedly pirated versus the legally purchased songs or movies? No. So what we get are nothing more than assertions from these people that do nothing more than to serve their crazy claims of having lost umptyump millions or billions of dollars in supposedly lost revenue.
Nobody, other than
Kindasortamaybe (Score:1)
The truth, and nothing but the truth? (Score:2)
I'm wondering how this affects the court cases that have been, because judgement of the relevant offences was pretty much driven by those numbers. I cannot imagine it wasn't patently obvious that the data was false, but I notice in these various re-calculations a total absence of such activity from the RIAA/MPAA side - logically, because they got those numbers accepted as fact.
You could call this lying in court, no? Wouldn't it be funny if all the RIAA convictions were decleraed a mistrail and they had to
Re:I blame entitlement systems (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright is an entitlement system...
They sold it, tough shit. (Score:2, Insightful)
They sold it, tough shit. If you want to control your ideas, don't sell them. Or contract out an NDA. But after all this time of stealing every single item out there, DO NOT come crying to us about theft of copyrighted works. YOU STOLE FROM THE PUBLIC.
So fuck off with your "I feel I am entitled" shit.
You don't feel I should do what I want with what I know of your stuff? Then don't sell it.
Re:I blame entitlement systems (Score:5, Insightful)
"Since I have made something (or have been explicitly granted the specific rights to something), I feel I am entitled to use lobbyists and excessive laws to force you to pay more than you are willing to pay. I will also product lower quality, unoriginal remakes and make minimal changes just to artificially extend the time I can charge these crazy amounts."
That is what the MPAA/RIAA is actually saying.
Just because other people don't get it isn't any excuse to walk over their wishes
How about the fact that they have many times in the past used their combined power to raise prices, rip off customers and force out the little independent competition.
People wish to have culture at a fair price. In a free market we wouldn't have to pay as much but they have repeatedly changed laws and destroyed any hope of it changing back.
No, "they started it!" isn't an excuse, either.
It is an excuse, its just one you dont agree with.
They extend copyright and make attempts to slowly erode rights like fair use and then claim idiotic rubbish like "you license the music not own it" to stop you listening to something you've bought in the way you want.
I consider culture a basic human right. Granted it might not be as important as some others but my morals allow me to fight an unjust system in any way I decide no matter how many politicians they bribe into passing laws.
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FTFY
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Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
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I just realized...Your statement is equally correct from both opposing viewpoints. Genius!