EU Study Shows Online Piracy is Complex and Not Easy To Grasp (torrentfreak.com) 44
The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) has released a new study which suggests that piracy is dropping in Europe. While the research is limited to site-based piracy, it has some interesting findings. Countries with a lower average income per person visit pirate sites more often, for example. In addition, the study shows that awareness of legal options doesn't always decrease piracy.
No, it's not dropping (Score:3)
What's dropping is the price of VPNs.
More than one reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes piracy happens because you're poor and can't afford content. Let's go back a few years to when Netflix was on top. There are people out there who legitimately cannot afford $15/mo. At my previous job, one of my coworkers lived paycheck to paycheck. He had a laptop, but it just wasn't in his budget to fit in an extra $15 every month. In that case, people are being pushed to piracy because they can't afford the legal alternatives.
Sometimes, piracy offers content that the content publishers refuse to offer. I can think of several examples of this. George Lucas refused for a long time to offer unbutchered versions of Star Wars. Pirate sites didn't, though. Comedy Central to this day refuses to offer uncensored versions of certain South Park episodes. Pirate sites don't. There are countless video game publishers who decided they don't want to support their old games anymore and now those games don't get support from anyone other than the pirates.
And sometimes, someone really is just being cheap and chooses to pirate content because they don't want to spend the money even if they can afford it. It's misleading and undermines our credibility to say Big Content's completely wrong -- their idea of piracy does happen, it's just not the only reason it happens.
One of the big lessons of the past decade or so is that there are a lot of people out there who don't really care about the legal way of doing things. This is why pirate sites are so hard to keep offline. The lesson Big Content should be learning is that rather than solely going after pirate sites, they should go after pirate sites while also trying to fix those problems that cause people to pirate content to begin with.
Re:More than one reason (Score:5, Interesting)
I won'd make any kind of claim that piracy is actually a net benefit. I don't have good figures to justify that any more than the media companies have good figures to justify that piracy has resulted in losses approaching the worldwide GDP, but I suspect that there are a lot of other people like me out there that just want to be able to consume something immediately and who don't have a problem paying for it later on if we think it's worth our time.
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I know, I know, but I wouldn't be such an utter knave if all the ladies didn't like bad boys so much.
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Hey what about the environment, which produces the most carbon dioxide and methane;
The pirates the copiers of content who steal nothing or
The forever copyright pigopolists heavily into bloated consumption to excess of everything, being the leading individual polluters, known for their kiddy fiddling, corrupting democracy and even supporting war for profit - Think of all that Carbon produced the sheer volumnes of individual over the top excess consumption - STARVE the fuckers and save the planet.
Ain't none
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A French study from years ago showed:
"Those who spend the most money on content also are the biggest users of piracy sites, etc."
So... someone really likes X, they will watch X before buying it.
And watch a lot of similar stuff without buying it to get to know new stuff. Which they might end up buying too if they like it.
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This seems pretty simple. It's my content. I made it. I should be able to control it and not allow people who don't pay me to watch it have it.
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Yes, but reality is never simple, and you have to deal with it, and it's the way you deal with it that ultimately warrants your success or failure.
You can try the MPAA approach and go down on everyone with your lawyers and cops, or you could go the steam way and make your product more attractive in places where piracy is the only media and suddenly its not the only media anymore.
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You are making MANY assumptions.
It's my content. -- how often is that wholly true, sampling, album covers , multiple authors. Most often content is collaborative, and all content is created as an artifact of the culture of it's create with many inputs from the culture and as a reflection of it as well, so besides being 'yours' it also belongs to the society ( or it would be of no interest and have no value to anyone).
Just because you made it. You really only physically control it until yo
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Of course. You can do that very reliably by not releasing it, keeping your content a secret. The context of this article, though, is piracy. Piracy is a thing that happens within the copyright system, and that system is designed in such a way that it might not be quite what you really want (e.g. it has fair use exemptions, lapsing into public domain, etc) and it's intended to balance various interests.
And even your interests are only indirectly supported since copyright (at least in the US, though this art
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I should be able to control it and not allow people who don't pay me to watch it have it.
>
Well, until you outlaw gifting (CDs, DVDs, etc), resale, and borrowing (via libraries), that's not gonna happen.ðYðYðY
Dogs in the manger; tracking down owners (Score:2)
It's my content. I made it. I should be able to control it and not allow people who don't pay me to watch it have it.
One problem with your proposal comes from owners unwilling to take viewers' money at any price, such as the owners of Song of the South and the English language version of Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea. So where's your order form that accepts payment from all countries?
Another problem is that it becomes prohibitively difficult after several decades to track who has this control. For example, who ought to have this control for the plays of William Shakespeare? Who even are Shakespeare's direct heirs?
Intangible property is hard to grasp (Score:1)
GIMME GIMME GIMME (Score:1)
Re:GIMME GIMME GIMME (Score:5, Informative)
That's one of the cases, yes.
But there also the "if you're not selling this to me, i'm getting it anyway", which is for example the case with the mandalorian and all the countries that are not in the 5 regions where disney+ is, or basically 95% of the games released before 2010.
"awareness of legal options"? (Score:4, Interesting)
When it come sto video (whether it's TV or movies; they're all the same to me) "legal options" are a JOKE. There aren't any legal options, or at least not serious ones. You still, in 2019 (I am not making this up), CAN'T simply buy non-DRMed files. So doing anything legal is like going back 20 or 30 years in technology, where you're stuck with unmaintainable proprietary players, remote storage that completely stops working if your internet service happens to be down at that moment, etc.
Piracy will remain until DRM has been outlawed, so that paying customers can actually watch video on modern equipment using modern software. Sell me at least 1970s tech (the decade VCRs started to become workable) or else forget it because I'll just pirate instead. It is WAAAAAY too late to go back or downgrade to proprietary streaming. It's 2019, dammit.
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Piracy will remain until DRM has been outlawed
Yeah I totally didn't pirate MP3s 25 years ago when CDs had no DRM. And piracy ended again when iTunes dropped FairPlay and you could buy plain AACs. Oh, wait... maybe there always will be people who'll just shout "information wants to be free" and grab whatever they can. I think if you dig up my old posts I was kinda like that.
My impression is that the situation is much less hostile than a decade ago, the streaming business is making money despite torrents and I've heard very little about mass lawsuits or
Hard to grasp if you are stupid (Score:2)
Countries with a lower average income per person visit pirate sites more often, for example.
What is complicated about that?
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Countries with a lower income per person typically have a small content production industry, so they lose foreign currency by enforcing copyright. They also typically have less effective legal systems.
Why the fuck are they even worried about this. (Score:3, Informative)
Piracy is complicated? No shit, Sherlock! (Score:4, Insightful)
As Valve's Gabe Newell mentioned: [escapistmagazine.com] back in 2011:
Ironically, pirates spend MORE money buying things. Gee, MAYBE if there was a legal OPTION to buy things more of us would! Go figure.
When a legal option isn't available some people will just resort to piracy.
Some will always pirate regardless of reasonable prices. Stop worrying about those and focus on the ONE JOB you have:
Make it as EASY as possible for (potential) customers to actually BUY the dam thing.
Stop with this bullshit of DRM / copy-protected movies, games, artificial time-gating, rent-seeking, "game launchers" and other shenanigans Just sell a TV show for $1/episode or $10/season.
This stuff is fucking complicated -- stop making it difficult for consumers to actually buy shit and then whine about piracy.
Why was money even wasted doing this study? (Score:3)
If they had instead of measuring mere awareness, instead measured piracy against convenience (which includes price point, ubiquity, ease of access, etc) of legal options, they might have found a much more noteworthy correllation.
First rigorously define "convenience" (Score:2)
convenience (which includes price point, ubiquity, ease of access, etc) of legal options
If "convenience" were measured, it'd have to be a more complex metric, and the incumbent entertainment industry would complain that the metric was unfairly skewed in opponents' favor. First measuring things against a simpler metric helps to avoid these objections.
Just like safe spaces (Score:2)
People feel they're entitled to someone else's work without compensation. They'll just take what they want because they can, then go about giving all manner of justifications for why they shouldn't pay the people for the work they've done.
Excuse after excuse after excuse is what we hear, and the comments on this story will bear that out.
Re:Just like safe spaces (Score:5, Insightful)
People feel they're entitled to someone else's work without compensation.
Just like corporations have been stealing from the public domain for 200 years. We live in a lawless oligarchy, you don't live in a world where the rule of law exists. But ignorant people like you don't pay attention to facts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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This is just another excuse to pirate things.
No it isn't because copyright is PUBLIC PROPERTY, aka we own your "cultural works" because the deal was you'd get monopoly IP rights in return for returning cultural works to the public domain and libraries, you've long since broken your end of the deal you corporate asskisser.
The deal was for people to gain monopoly rights temporarily granting them property rights to prevent duplication of their works so they could be compensated, it wasn't meant to give you permanent rights and the public gets nothing.
Her
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Well, the law changed
Can you prove that the manner by which the law changed was just, taking into account the effect on all affected persons as opposed to what would increase a legislator's reelection campaign budget?
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Income taxes help society. Paying for licenses makes it worse.
But yes I am a hypocrite, I pay for Spotify and Netflix just because they are so convenient.
Abandonware, OLD version not for sale, repair (Score:2)
Abandonware, OLD version not for sale, repair, etc are why some people do piracy.
you want $250 for an HDD to fix my arcade game. No way I will just download the image from the MAME rom / chds and use my own HDD.
You don't want to sell me an old copy of X software that I need for my old PC ruining on an old OS that is tied to some hardware I will just do some piracy as you don't sell it.
I really want to play this old game but it's not really for sale any where. Other them maybe old used ones on ebay.
ETC....
I
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Yes, but what does Disney's source of inspiration have to do with the topic?
been there, got that (Score:2)
I've pretty well pirated most of the stuff I want to listen to and watch - my bucket list of classics
So I have reduced my downloads,
AAAAARRR
rich people with no perspective (Score:3)
Most people in the world cannot afford to buy movies or even to go to the cinema. For them it is either pirate or never watch a movie. If you think they should choose the second option then let me just say this: fuck you. You are lucky that the poor people of the world do not just get together and take all of your stuff. Yes all of it. Then we will see how you feel about your property rights. Anyway a sequence of bits are no one's property and no you are not the exception. Deal with it or get out of the digital domain.
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For them it is either pirate or never watch a movie. If you think they should choose the second option then let me just say this: fuck you.
Well fuck me then, I've been doing the never-watch-a-movie thing for over a decade. They're all garbage anyways.
not a victimless slime (Score:2)
The main point of here is that the FBI warning plastered at the front of every DVD doesn't really work anyway, so why not update this for 2019 with an MPAA code of personal conduct instead?
It's beyond beastly to pressure the talent
for sexual gratification in exchange for
professional advancement.
The casting crouch is not a victimless slime.
Of course, this would not