'Pirates' Tend To Be the Biggest Buyers of Legal Content, Study Shows (vice.com) 108
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: According to a paywalled survey of 1,000 UK residents by anti-piracy outfit MUSO first spotted by Torrent Freak, 60 percent of those surveyed admitted that they had illegally streamed or downloaded music, film, or TV shows sometime in the past. But the study also showed that 83 percent of those questioned try to find the content they are looking for through above board services before trying anything else. And while the study found that 86 percent of survey takers subscribe to a streaming subscription service like Netflix, that total jumped to 91 percent among those that admit to piracy. The survey found that the top reason that users pirate is the content they were looking for wasn't legally available (34 percent) was too cumbersome or difficult to access (34 percent), or wasn't affordable (35 percent). "The entertainment industry tends to envisage piracy audiences as a criminal element, and writes them off as money lost -- but they are wrong to do so," MUSO executive Paul Briley said of the study's findings. "The reality is that the majority of people who have gone through the effort of finding and accessing such unlicensed content are, first and foremost, fans -- fans who are more often than not trying to get content legally if they can," Briley added.
This doesn't mean what the summary says it means (Score:5, Interesting)
So the upshot of this study is that people who consume a lot of content consume a lot of content, and they consume some of that content legally.
That's it. There's no indication that people who download lots of contents are some huge fanbase.
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It is the wrong question.
Not: Do you download? How big is your media library? What % did you (get legally/rip from media you own)?
Also: Argh...When private media servers are outlawed, outlaws will change their firewall configuration.
Re:This doesn't mean what the summary says it mean (Score:4, Interesting)
Importantly, what this is saying is that a portion of the population that pirates do so for reasons that the distributors control or can address.
Increasingly draconian DRM and punitive punishment does little to either decrease piracy or create more customers.
Increasing the ease of access to content and either lowering price and/or offering some kind of tiered pricing will do both.
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I'm probably a dullard because I still buy retail CDs and DVDs. The first thing I do when I get home with a new DVD is to rip it to my media server. I'm sick to death of sitting through 5-10 minutes of unskippable advertising and legal notices before I even get to the root menu. Thank goodness format shifting is still legal in our country or I wouldn't be buying anything at all.
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It's legal in the USA until you circumvent protection to do it. Enjoy format shifting your vinyl, I guess.
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Enjoy format shifting your vinyl, I guess.
Or CDs. Right?
The situation with CDs is substantially more complicated [wikipedia.org], since there actually are copy protection schemes and the DMCA makes it illegal to subvert those. It remains legal to copy audio CDs for which the copy protection bit is not set.
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That is not a true statement. You do not just pay $10.00 a month -- and you know it.
What about your internet (of at least $80.00/month in U.S.)? Are you trying to be silly?
If you want to be taxed for the rest of you life to listen to music you probably purchased
in the 70's, that's your choice. Please don't look down on smarter people who purchase
a product once instead of the same product thousands of times. You okay with that?
Try not to bother me with this dribble any further, please...
CAP === 'perspire
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I doubt the he is only using the internet for music.
It's like saying you need to include the cost of your house as part of the purchase price for that music you bought in the 70's since you have to store it somewhere.
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Actually, no need to prorate your internet costs into your music or Netflix costs because most would have Internet anyway for porn, I mean general surfing.
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That's the point I was trying to make :)
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A lot of people could cancel cable Internet and make do with 10 GB/mo of mobile tethering were it not for video streams and game downloads.
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You know, the more we talk about the importance of privacy for mundane shit like pausing music, the more we dilute the importance of privacy to the masses
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I download some movies etc, but I also have over 100 movies on laserdisc and over 500 records and a smaller CD collection.
Laserdisc, records and CDs do not have DRM or unskippable ads.
Re: This doesn't mean what the summary says it mea (Score:5, Interesting)
Guarantee you that The Expanse was saved by pirates downloading the show. If it wasn't for the response of the pirate community on forums and chats to go buy the show on Amazon, it would have been cancelled.
It just amazes me how little these idiots underestimate this medium and the pirate community. How completely under utilized it is for many shows to gauge if a show is popular or not. You can actually tell if a tv show is absolutely shit by looking how many seeders it has on torrent sites.
People pirate because they want to see if it's worth watching.
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Guarantee you that The Expanse was saved by pirates downloading the show. If it wasn't for the response of the pirate community on forums and chats to go buy the show on Amazon, it would have been cancelled.
It just amazes me how little these idiots underestimate this medium and the pirate community. How completely under utilized it is for many shows to gauge if a show is popular or not. You can actually tell if a tv show is absolutely shit by looking how many seeders it has on torrent sites.
People pirate because they want to see if it's worth watching.
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Increasingly draconian DRM and punitive punishment does little to either decrease piracy or create more customers.
Precisely! Literally the only person DRM has the power to hurt is the paying customer. The preson who gets it from the Pirate Bay (or whatever the current equivalent is) gets a nice clean product by comparison. No adverts. No crappy "streaming" which keeps flipping back to 320p for no good reason, no format shifting limitations etc etc.
Piracy isn't just free, it gives a beter product.
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Movies and shows not being available on the major streaming platforms alongside live air time isn't acceptable, neither is movies and shows disappearing from streaming services, random episodes missing, se
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Are you talking about TrueHD vs DD+?
The vast majority of people using streaming services are lucky to have a soundbar versus their TV's built-in speakers.
That said Atmos is possible over DD+ and Netflix is rolling out content that includes it.
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I bought about five DVDs in a row where the copy protection prevented them from playing on the only DVD player I owned - my laptop. Having shelled out about 20 euro for the DVD, I'd then have to download an illegal torrent to watch the legally-purchased movie.
Do that often enough, and yarrrr going to optimise the process.
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Importantly, what this is saying is that a portion of the population that pirates do so for reasons that the distributors control or can address.
Increasingly draconian DRM and punitive punishment does little to either decrease piracy or create more customers.
Increasing the ease of access to content and either lowering price and/or offering some kind of tiered pricing will do both.
Exactly. Sometimes I'll simply order CD's and videos from Amazon or from my local used-CD-and-video store. Sometimes I torrent stuff because I want it now, and I'm just not into subscribing to anything. I may keep only the torrent - possibly because I don't like the content as much as I thought I would, or I can't find it elsewhere, or it's ridiculously expensive because of various 'artificial scarcity' mechanisms. But in a fairly high percentage of cases, I'll buy a CD after I download an album. I like hav
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Most of the stuff I've pirated I've bought later.
I have a shitload of blurays.
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There’s another possible interpretation as well. People tend to want to justify their own actions; it’s entirely possible that people who are “unethical” enough to download content (I put the word in quotes as I do it myself) may also have little compunction about lying in a survey in order to save face. By furthering the image that pirates aren’t bad people, just people without legal options, they make themselves the victim rather than the offender.
Just a thought.
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This is possible. I also never give too much weight to a single study.
That said, as a musician, I would often "trial" songs/bands not typically aired on the radio (this was before Pandora and Spotify, etc..) by downloading them from Usenet first; if I liked the band, I went and bought all their CDs so as to support them: Type O Negative, Lacuna Coil and Killswitch Engage are a few examples. There is also material however that I felt "meh" about, most I deleted but probably not everything, tbh.
I just find
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The study showed they consume more legal content than those who don't pirate. It doesn't matter if you consume boatloads of content and 90% of it is illegal if the 10% which is legal amounts for more than the people with no illegal content.
The more things change (Score:4, Interesting)
the more they stay the same.
A few years ago I came across a magazine article from 1981. Back then, the record companies were complaining about "piracy". The villain, they said, was cassette tape recorders. People were using cassette decks to record their friends albums, instead of buying them.
So the RIAA commissioned a study which they hoped to take to the government and convince them to do something to stop this terrible problem. Unfortunately (for the RIAA), the study showed that people who owned cassette decks bought 80% more albums than people who didn't. And the study was shelved and never pursued.
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the study showed that people who owned cassette decks bought 80% more albums than people who didn't.
During a time where the majority of "albums" purchased were cassette tapes. Why would you buy something you couldn't play?
Re:The more things change (Score:4, Informative)
in 1981 vinyl was more popular than cassette.
Over 1 billion 12" LP's sold, 400 million cassettes. There were still sales of 7" records back then too, but they had already been overtaken by 12"
https://www.cambridge.org/core... [cambridge.org]
Modern equivalent (Score:3)
To build upon the answers of that AC [slashdot.org] and that AC [slashdot.org],
let's translate to a slightly more modern time : :
In the early 80s, functionally
- vinyl played the same role as audio CDs played a decade or so ago (the media that you buy your music on),
- tape cassettes played the role that USB stick or CD-R/RW played at the same time on which you could write heavily compressed MP3s with your whole collection of favorite palylist, that you stick in your MP3-compatible car radio.
Or iPod/other MP3 player, plugged in th
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So the RIAA commissioned a study which they hoped to take to the government and convince them to do something to stop this terrible problem. Unfortunately (for the RIAA), the study showed that people who owned cassette decks bought 80% more albums than people who didn't. And the study was shelved and never pursued.
So people who liked music bought more music and were more likely to buy a cassette player to record/play/mix said music. I could have told them that without a study. I know people that buy/download/listen to more music in a year than I have in my entire life. Likewise, I probably watch more movies in a year than my mom has in her entire life.
Sounds Counterintuitive (Score:5, Interesting)
But isn't. The material I pirate are material that would be really, really hard to come by (rarer music and movies). I have Netflix and Amazon Prime, in addition to having additional accounts here and there. At some point my CD collection was over 600 and my DVD collection over 800.
Another issue is also that I feel like I paid my dues. Between cassettes, CDs, DVDs, bullshit cable TV subscription for 30 years, I feel like I'm done contributing for the most part. I don't watch recent movies, and if I do, I pay for them. I definitely don't listen to today's crap music. So when I'm looking for a song from the 40's, I hit YouTube and rip the music out. Even 80's would be the same.
At the end of the day, it's the studios that fucked themselves up the ass by gouging their user base. Had they not been so greedy and made music affordable and available, they wouldn't have half the problems they're having right now.
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Furthermore, the product you download is better than the disc when it comes to video. No forced adverts, no unskippable trailers, no FBI and other agency splash-screens, no annoying menus to load and then nag to go online and download more crap for you to get passed.
Fortunately there are tools available to simplify extracting the feature, and ways to serve that; but that option isn't available to those on a limited budget or are not technically inclined.
Funny thing (Score:3)
I used to (5-10 years ago) buy a lot of DVDa and Blu-Rays.
But I almost always bought them used. So no income for any movie/content companies. Oh well.
Re:Funny thing (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to (5-10 years ago) buy a lot of DVDa and Blu-Rays.
But I almost always bought them used. So no income for any movie/content companies. Oh well.
Funny thing, I don't pirate much content but what I do pirate I don't pirate because I'm a penny pinching bargain hunter. My pirating is mostly because of dumbass artificial trade barriers that result in stuff being 'unfortunately not available in my region' or because whatever I want to watch is on some TV channel that I can only get access to by subscribing to an overpriced channel package of whom all but one or two out of a hundred channels are full of garbage that does not interest me. If I could obtain the shows, movies, documentaries, standup, music, etc... via on-demand streaming services at an affordable price and I'd probably never pirate anything at all. Fortunately at least some of the streaming services seem to be figuring this out.
Re:Funny thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to be a huge "pirate" but that I would download movies all the time, in the last 6 months I have probably downloaded like 4 movies all of them stuff so old that legit they should be free by now or at least able to be streamed from one of the gob of services I pay for...
Anyway what changed my habits was Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, Roku channel and Direct TV Now. Between those options if I can't find something to watch that would say more about me than the content... As a "pirate" I don't mind buying my content if it has some sort of benefit to me like ease of access or choices, hell I will even endure ads if I must... (sometimes I enjoy those too... sometimes lol)
Love streaming my movies and TV.
Meanwhile... (Score:2, Troll)
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The Billboard Top 100 has always been shit. Try elsewhere if you want stuff that came out in 2006 that didn't suck [pitchfork.com]
That idea that music has been going downhill is just.. well... sad really. Music has always been fantastic, and it always will be, you've just - like always - got know where to look.
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Is it your political/ideological agenda "the RIAA sues their customers", or did you just grow up?
Because, you know, I had a lot of CDs when I was younger. Then past 18 I started college and work. I had (and have) no time to buy or listen to CDs anymore.
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Could be worse. In the UK the primary sport is football, and the most watched is the Premier League in England.
To watch the live games on TV you now have to subscribe to three different services, and even then you'll only see a small subset of the games the team you support plays. They wont broadcast many of them live.
Streaming is shit quality but oddly enough it's significantly better than no game at all.
The daft thing is that I'd pay the cost of all three services for one that showed all my team's games,
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Most of the stuff on Netflix you can pre-download to the phone before your commute...
I pirate for convenience (Score:2)
I still pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, & PS Vue. But I download all the shows I enjoy and put them on a personal media server just so I can have everything in one place for my viewing pleasure. I could very easily stop paying for all of those services and still keep watching whatever I want. But I can afford to do so and the cost is still far far less than paying for straight up cable.
I buy what I pirate. (Score:1)
I try to buy all the content I like: stuff like GoT, The Expanse, good indie music, etc.
However, especially for video content, I watch pirated versions, even though I own it legally. Why? Because of the content protection clusterfuck and studios trying to dictate what devices I can play it on and monetize where and when I play it.
Fuck off with that. I'll buy the series to support the actors and production crew. I'll watch rips of same to avoid the MPAA shitfest.
NOT an distribution problem but an accessibility 1 (Score:3)
One of the reasons people pirate is because their is NO legal purchasing option available.
The classic example is games for the 8-bit computers. Can you buy these title anymore? 99% nope. If you are lucky you might be able to find a used copy on eBay.
No one is losing money when people pirate a game that came out out 40 years ago for a "dead" platform -- especially when the original developer(s) and publishers are long out of business.
Same thing with TV shows. Where can I buy seasons 1 through N for my favorite 80's show? Let alone at a _reasonable_ price? Chances are it isn't even available. So I can understand people pirating them.
Sadly, most companies view piracy as some sort of "distribution problem" -- it isn't. Piracy shows there is a demand. The "free" price is just an added bonus.
Also these dumb fucks would rather it make it illegal to pirate a ripped DVD / BluRay of a movie you already own so you can skip all the bullshit "unskippable" trailers.
The Law is so out of touch with reality that it isn't even funny.
Legal: Jurisdiction-dependent (Score:2)
How to legally skip "unskippable" trailers:
Put the DVD in a linux PC.
That depends on your local jurisdiction.
Here around in most European countries it should be legal (With some exceptions)
In the US : actually, no.
On two grounds :
1 - DRM and DMCA.
Any media since the DVD is encrypted (okay, its often encrypted with some laughable scheme that barely qualifies as such in the eyes of most cryptographers. Cue in usual discussion that "Bob" and "Eve" are the same person). Let's call it "scrambled" which is closer to reality.
DCMA restricts you severly in how you can un-scramble it
I used to pirate and buy a lot... (Score:2)
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That factor tends to be underestimated. I'm a bit older and I used to have a certain ratio of music I bought on vinyl and illegal copies on cassette. I would have bought less records if the cassettes hadn't helped feeding and growing my interest. That makes the argument of 'look how much money pirated content causes us to lose' quite dishonest.
Just pirated Naruto (Score:2)
Thirteen 16 minute episodes (the average amount of new content per episode) for $20 is far too expensive. Especially for 200+ episodes. So, I figured $100 for 320 minutes of entertainment is more than fair. Especially for content that is 10 years o
I have bought every game I once pirated. (Score:2)
I was very poor as a kid, and now I'm a successful IT professional. As soon as vintage games became available on GOG and Steam I started adding them all to my collection. I don't really have time to play a lot of computer games but I like being able to imbibe the occasional dose of nostalgia, and the fuzzy feeling of doing what's right.
34+34+35 = 103 % (Score:2)
Who the fuck is doing the math on these things? How am I to believe these stats if you are rounding up a percent on everything.
Arrrrgh! (Score:2)
I've got to keep my crew entertained with something while we're hiding out in Tortuga.