Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy? 1115
Andorin writes "Anyone familiar with the piracy debate knows about the claims from organizations like the RIAA that piracy causes billions of dollars in damages and costs thousands of jobs. Other studies have concluded differently, ranging from finding practically no damages to a newer study that cites 'up to 20%' as a more accurate number (PDF). I figure there's got to be an easier way to do this, so here's my question: Does anyone know of any creative works that were provably a financial failure due to piracy? The emphasis on 'provably' is important, as some form of evidence is necessary. Accurately and precisely quantifying damages from p2p is impossibly hard, of course, but answering questions like this may lead us to a clearer picture of just how harmful file sharing really is. I would think that if piracy does cause some amount of substantial harm, we would see that fact reflected in our creative works, but I've never heard of a work that tanked because people shared it online."
Actually Yes (Score:5, Informative)
A film producer had his film stolen, and the thief got a lot of money for the screenings.
The producer that ended penniless: Georges Melies
The Thief: Thomas Edison
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon [wikipedia.org]
Amiga games (Score:2, Informative)
He sega dreamcast (Score:3, Informative)
Starsiege: Tribes took quite a hit from piracy (Score:5, Informative)
No two ways about it, the game sold poorly, but was quite successful with players. I certainly don't mean to imply be any stretch that every player represented a lost sale, but I definitely believe that the complete ease with which the game could be copied (ie, right click on the install folder, and select "ICQ this to my buddy") led to very disappointing sales.
Most games that sell poorly are poorly made games: the market is the final judge of quality. However, I also firmly believe that had Tribes had some basic form of copy protection, the sales would have been much much stronger. I hate that I am now sounding like I advocate loads of DRM, but Tribes represented an almost pathological case with its utter lack of any protection, and I think this wound up hurting sales very markedly.
YES - Frantic Freddie For the Commodore 64 (Score:3, Informative)
YES - Frantic Freddie For the Commodore 64.
Everyone had a copy - pirated. I meet the makers and they made virtually nothing.
Re:Halo Series for Mac (Score:1, Informative)
Bungie was bought by Microsoft prior to the release of Halo, and Halo for Mac, along with Halo for PC, were both released by Bungie under Microsoft.
That's very misleading. For all intents and purposes Halo was finished prior to the MS buyout and only held back as a means to give the xbox an 'exclusive.'
Bungie was mac-centric before the acquisition - ports of their prior games with Win95 were always delivered much later than the Mac releases. Furthermore, Halo had been announced for the Mac in Steve Job's keynote speech - after it was privately demoed - roughly a year before the MS acquisition.
Bilestoad for the apple II (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:3, Informative)
I support them by paying for concerts *and* recordings. (Most of them don't tour my part of the world regularly, BTW.)
I fail to see how you can pirate someone's music and "support" him at the same time. (Unless what you pirate is bootlegs or material the artist for some reason doesn't reissue, like My Bloody Valentine's "You Made Me Realise EP".)
Re:Short answer (Score:5, Informative)
The short answer is also wrong and based strictly on your support of piracy and not the facts. I'm a writer/director and it's well known in the independent community that if you release a film you either have to sell distribution foreign and domestic at the same time or release it foreign first. Once it comes out in the US it will be pirated within days and no one will risk releasing it for sale in most territories. The Southeast Asian market is largely worthless due to rampant piracy. I was told by a distributor nearly ten years ago that my first film was selling side by side with 100 million dollar films in Malaysia for a $1 a copy. Foreign used to be a good market for independents but it has most dried up over the years due strictly to piracy. In the US it's gotten hard to even get a distributor because everyone is focusing on higher profit studio films. You can argue over the impact on big budget studio films but to say there's no impact is is denying what the ones on the ground are dealing with every day. I'm planning to be out of the film industry within two years because it's already nearly impossible to sell films as it is. What's happened is in order to hang onto their tightening profit margins the studios are squeezing out the independents. Anyone that thinks film profits are going up hasn't done their homework. Actual ticket sales have been falling for years. Increased ticket prices have somewhat offset the drop but they've maxed out what people will pay for tickets so over the next few years the box office take will start to drop. DVDs are faltering and over the next 18 months most of the brick and mortar stores will close up. There's less profit in the download rental services so that's more loss of revenue. Most of the films count on theater money to at least break even. The industry bet the farm on 3D out of desperation. It'll never last so one day those cash streams will dry up and films will become unprofitable. Already fewer films are made and released. It's not that people are watching fewer films they are simply starting to find ways around paying for watching films. The marginal films will die first but don't expect to see many blockbusters in ten years. George Lucas was dead on when he said by 2025 the average studio budget will drop back to 3 million dollars per film. That's more like what it was when he started out and that's without adjusting dollars. So what? How many 3 million dollar films have you watched in the last year? I'll bet they are mostly on the SciFi Channel. That's the future that is being created in large part due to piracy.
Re:Halo Series for Mac (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=9021 [insidemacgames.com]
Re:Halo Series for Mac (Score:3, Informative)
Bias alert: The author used to work for Bungie Software (the creators of the Halo series).
Re:Music 60 years from now... (Score:5, Informative)
I hate to defend her, but through forced exposure, I've come to the conclusion that there is a talented artist hidden under the shock pop veneer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CUYvWTd6oA [youtube.com]
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:3, Informative)
Do you think an author should only be able to sell a book once?
Yes. Because that's how it is for everybody else.
Wow way to really abstract the problem until it doesn't resemble reality. It is a trade off.
The cost to write the book once is difference than the cost of printing the book. if only one book were ever sold, then it would cost $20K. And then we would all have to rent time to read it. Currently, instead of only selling one book at the hourly rate it took for the author to write it, the authors make the money in bulk. (8$ [retail]- 1$ [to print]) * # [of books sold]...
A better metaphor would be how an some engineer makes money. Say someone asks me to design a circuit for a product. My time is billed at 5K$, but the cost to produce the circuit is 25 cents. We don't sell those cool singing halmark cards for 1000$, we sell them for 5$, and let the profit for selling 1000s of them pay my salary. Same for software designers etc...
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:3, Informative)
The Wired article is wrong. My wife made a CD and pressed 1000 professional copies of the CD. She sold over 500 of them at gigs (and gave another 400 away to people in the business). SHE MADE A PROFIT ON HER CD. We made more money selling the CD than we spent on making it.
Only one copy would show up on SoundScan because it was sold by CDBaby. The rest would never show up because she sold them herself at concerts, Borders, churches, etc. and they were never barcode scanned.
By Wired's logic, Dave Matthews Band was a complete failure until they signed with a large record label.
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Lady Gaga sucks??? (Score:4, Informative)
Britney has a shit voice. Leave her alone because she's been exploited all her life and has never had a chance to figure out what a normal life looks like, let alone feels like.
Re:Excellent call! (Score:3, Informative)
Cancerous growths have more talent than Ms. Spears.
Re:Missing the point... (Score:3, Informative)
I think "opportunistic hypocrisy" is a good phrase to sum it up.
Re:Missing the point... (Score:2, Informative)
Therefore, "creative accounting" = "piracy performed in the accounting dept"
Bloody right - seen this? http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml [techdirt.com] - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix "lost" $167 million.
Re:I think there's something to that (Score:2, Informative)
I'm like you. My neighbour however, who has just as many means as I do (more or less), chooses to pirate stuff all the bloody time.
Re:I think there's something to that (Score:3, Informative)
I'm guessing you are a bit of a young'un. Back when comms was a black art, the internet hadn't been heard of and 300 bps was standard, and 1200/75 was a strange UK-only invention, a BBS was not for warez. It was for messages and downloading public domain and shareware software.
I wouldn't have wanted to try making a living from shareware, but I made beer-money selling software, including some BBS software.
Re:I can think of 2 reasons (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I think there's something to that (Score:2, Informative)
Your friend would have made money writing PBX software at that time. Phone-Box eXchange...
Color me confused, because for decades I have always believed PBX stood for Private Branch Exchange. And my BBS never had a single warez file. My users were primarily interested in message boards and what few games I ran (VGA Planets, LORD).
Re:Missing the point... (Score:3, Informative)
Alternatively "protecting your investment"
Is also a phrase you could say about slave owners fighting against the abolition of slavery. It doesn't make it moral, or right. And if you really care, there are almost always ways in which you can make ethics and business meet.