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."
sort of.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I did some work for a man who paid to have drivers written for SCSI harddrives, a while a go, that was his edge over the competition. The competition simply pirated his drivers and sent him out of business. This may not be 'creative works' but the process is the same.
Halo Series for Mac (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember reading at one time that the number of pirated copies vs. legit sold copies was as high as 3 to 1 based on the people trying to connect and play the game online. The end result: none of the other halo titles were released on Mac and one of the reasons cited was because the original was so heavily pirated. Now there may have been other reasons why it was never ported, but that was the cited reason.
If you believe hollywood all of them (Score:1, Interesting)
Just read
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/07/09/1621218/Hollywood-Accounting-mdash-How-Harry-Potter-Loses-Money
D.
Re:Actually Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
No, therefor this is more like actual piracy and none of this namby-pamby "copyright violation" stuff. Oh, to be tried for "conspiracy to plunder a vessel on the high seas" :-/
uhm, missing the point (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:1, Interesting)
Uh, someone who writes music for a living and sells a copy of a piece hasn't worked on it for a day or two. They've worked their entire lives prior to that day, learning and studying and working hard, probably for years and years before they are able to sell a single piece. Do you think an author should only be able to sell a book once? Should authors only get paid for multiple copies of their books if they are printing the copies themselves, by hand?
Re:He sega dreamcast (Score:2, Interesting)
I was going to post the same thing. A friend who had a DC had maybe 2 or 3 purchased games, and a whole spindle of CDRs with downloaded ones.
*Some* people will pay (Score:5, Interesting)
Then people will pay for it.
If the quality is good enough then some people will pay for it.
Chances are, some people also will not.
We know that artistic works can be commercial successes based only on those who do play by the rules and pay for what they take. If this were not true, all kinds of businesses would have failed already. But this is missing the point, twice.
Firstly, only a proportion of people, probably a rather small proportion in some industries, is supporting the work that many people enjoy. Those people are getting screwed, because they are paying considerably more than their "fair share", while the freeloaders contribute nothing.
Secondly, we do not know how much better the incentive would be to create and share more and better works in future if everyone contributed in return for what they take today. Although it's popular to think of Big Media as The Enemy(TM) around these parts, the reality is that a lot of commercial creative work is made and distributed by much smaller organisations, which use a lot of the money they bring in just to pay the salaries and invest the rest in a very few new projects, often only one at once. In a lot of cases, the entire business at risk of failure if any of those new projects doesn't make it, so relatively few new projects are attempted. Instead, much of the follow-up work winds up repeating a previously successful formula that is likely to be a safe bet, rather than going for something innovative that might be a better product with rich rewards, but also carries a much higher risk.
If you doubt this, consider the number of game studios over the years that have produced a string of enjoyable titles but not survived a single bad one. Of those that have survived for a long time, ask yourself what proportion of their recent titles are new and how many are just the latest in a franchise with little real change from the last one. Ask yourself how many popular sci-fi shows that plenty of geeks enjoy still get cancelled in their infancy, because they don't bring in enough money almost immediately for those who bankroll them to continue writing the cheques until the series is established.
Now ask yourself, if there was both more money in the bank following a previously successful product and a greater potential profit from any new project, does this make it more or less likely that new and innovative products will be given more of a chance?
Re:Someone pointed to a study in a previous thread (Score:3, Interesting)
That logic may work from books, where a physical copy is better than a PDF copy on my computer screen. An unauthorized copy of a video game or movie is usually the same if not better (due to drm) than the original copy.
Re:Actually Yes (Score:2, Interesting)
That sounds a lot like Hollywood Accounting [slashdot.org], if you ask me.
Mr. Melies obviously did not make some very good decisions in picking his business partners.
I guess there's some question of whether the usefulness of Thomas Edison's "inventions" make up for the evil he did legally.
Re:Someone pointed to a study in a previous thread (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:5, Interesting)
And I work in residential construction. I have apprenticed and studied for years to gain the skills I employ but I don't get to collect a royalty check every time someone uses a door I installed...
I support the artists I listen to by buying branded merchandise and by paying to see them perform. I don't pay them for the recordings I keep on my mp3 player.
Re:Sega Dreamcast (Score:3, Interesting)
http://xiaopang333.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/piracy-killed-the-dreamcastor-did-it/ [wordpress.com]
Wrong, incredibly tendentiously phrased, question (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Starsiege: Tribes took quite a hit from piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Question I have is: how many of those 300K players would be playing if they had to pay even $1 for the game?
Re:A good example, generally plenty more (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, sales figures for Crysis are hard to come by. From a simple google, 50% of the historical press releases are showing how people aren't buying it because of the heavy system requirements, the other 50% (usually released later on) are saying that sales exceeded expectations, etc. It sold over a million copies worldwide between the November it was released and the following January, according to http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=612 [incrysis.com]
That's a quarter of Counterstrike's *total* sales figures within three months. One fifth of Doom's. One tenth of Half-life / Half-life 2's lifetime sales. That's pretty astounding sales if that's true. Saying piracy harmed that? That's really a stretch. Maybe it wasn't profitable even with all those sales? That's much more a business issue and cost-analysis, but saying that it didn't sell, possibly due to piracy, is really a big stretch. Bear in mind that it was universally recognised as an extremely high cost development because it *WAS* so demanding on the hardware. The Wiki pages says 1Gb of textures, 1,000,000 lines of code and 85,000 shaders. That's WAY, WAY more than predecessor "big hits" ever required. If it wasn't "competitively" profitable, this is probably due to the wrong kind of time-money investment trade-off, which was plainly visible from day one and the reason that the "Can it run Crysis?" jokes are STILL around.
"Piracy is perceived to be a sufficiently significant problem that dealing with piracy is as important as dealing with marketing, deadlines, etc. It's a core business concern."
I call bullshit. Piracy gets little mention in comparison to other things, there are few effective counter-measures and actual prosecutions are rare if not damn-near non-existent. Or, by now, each vendor would have their own hand-rolled DRM instead of just licensing Securom, etc. Spending even 10% of a games budget on DRM would see seriously stringent and complex DRM far beyond what anyone has bundled into a modern game. As it is, we get half-baked, re-re-re-re-licensed standard libraries, like slapping on a sound engine, or something similar. I would hazard a guess that licensing a game engine costs MUCH more than licensing Securom. Even a physics engine would cost a lot more. And you probably find that in-house development is orders-of-magnitude more expensive, and that's the "secret sauce" of any games development shop. The rest is just licensed libraries to save people from reinventing the wheel each time. DRM is one of those. If people are spending more than 10% of their budget on anti-piracy measures and messages, I would be flabbergasted and I would be telling them to stop pissing money away.
Piracy costs money, no doubt. It will cost a few genuine buyers no matter what people say, but to say that it's a core business concern? I doubt it. Getting the sales to even have to *WORRY* about piracy would be the best sign that your games company is doing well. How many types of DRM are there in use in major games studios at the moment? How many hand-roll their own because the console-based ones are insufficient for their needs? So long as you stop "casual" copying (i.e. not a determined person trying to make a copy), that's as far as you can go and as far as it makes sense to go. Once you get a game to the distribution stage, the rest is mostly just licensing some library to save you having to code your own, putting out scary warnings in the press and maybe following up the odd prosecution or two - I should think any large software house pays more in patent-licensing on software patents (in countries that have them) than they ever would on anti-piracy measures.
Your measles analogy would work if it weren't for the fact that we have data pre-measles (and pre-DRM) and that we have modern data about non-immunised people (and non-protected games). The fact that they *aren't* trumpeted from the
We have the counter-example, though (Score:5, Interesting)
The fly in the ointment there is that the same kind and style of painting was judged to be teh suck when it was signed Han van Meegren [wikipedia.org], but praised as a masterpiece when signed Vermeer. You know, they don't make 'em like the old masters any more ;) And when revealed as forgeries, well, today again you get snobs and curators going "yeah, well, it couldn't have fooled _me_. I mean, you can see it's teh suck" in interviews.
Let's face it, some of that old stuff only goes so well because of a perverse form of marketing. People are told that Vermeer or <insert 18'th century composer> are the great stuff and stuff that only properly cultivated people can properly appreciate, and you see the Emperor's New Clothes in action.
How many would go for that stuff if they didn't know the piece and you told them it's composed by some intern working for Disney?
And since you mention music from 60 years ago, you don't think those records may be hard to find only because people who grew up with them bought them? Frankly, it seems to me like most people's tastes end up fixed around a certain age. So you get 80 year olds still swearing that Frank Sinatra is the real music, and 60 year olds swearing by disco, and so on. And each generation thinks the music of the next one is crap and only bought by brainwashed idiots.
In fact, even about the Jazz and Swing music of the likes of Glenn Miller -- just since you used that example -- some old fart back then decried it as the mindless crap kids listen to these days.
Here's a funny thought though: the way people have complained about how everything about the next generation is worse for the last, oh, 2000-3000 years straight, if there were any truth to that, by now we've _all_ been listening only to crap, unlike the wholesome and good music that the likes of Socrates listened to.
So here's my prediction: 60 years from now, you'll have old farts reminiscing about how these new bands kids listen to are all mindless crap, unlike the great music of Eminem, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spear and Lady Gaga that they grew up with. Those were the great musicians. Not because any is objectively better, but just because that's the point in time their tastes remained frozen.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of either of those myself, but I also have no need to delude myself that there's something objectively better about the crap _I_ listen to, compared to the crap kids these days listen to.
Re:If the quality is good enough-but what if it is (Score:5, Interesting)
If Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire 100 million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, without a second thought and irrespective of what that did to the year's profits. What do we do with a crappy movie? We double its advertising budget and hope for a big opening weekend. What have we done for the audience as they walk out of the cinema? We've alienated them. We've sold audiences a piece of junk; we just took twelve dollars away from a couple and we think we've done ourselves no long-term damage. -- David Puttnam, movie producer; GQ magazine, April 1987
Re:too hypothetical (Score:5, Interesting)
MS-DOS's immense success had little - if anything - to do with piracy. In its very early years IBM wouldn't sell you a PC without either PC-DOS or CP/M, and CP/M was more expensive, so most buyers opted for the other one. Later, most large-scale vendors of PC-compatibles pre-installed a licensed copy of MS-DOS on the hard drive, and included it in the price. By the time MS-DOS upgrades became a stand-alone user purchase subject to large-scale piracy, the OS was heavily entrenched, and didn't benefit from the networking effects that piracy can offer.
There are software products out there that became successful from the promotional aspect of piracy. (MS-Windows is arguably one.) MS-DOS did not.
Impossible question (Score:3, Interesting)
Those two are mutually exclusive. If you can't accurately quantify damages then how can you prove that a work's failure was a result of piracy?
You're just setting up a question that can't be answered so you can go "SEE! LYING RIAA BASTARDS, NOBODY COULD PROVE IT!" That doesn't help anybody in the debates swirling around piracy.
Re:Music 60 years from now... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:2, Interesting)
When I first found my album for download on the Pirate Bay, I was overjoyed.
It felt like hitting the big time. :) Most bands don't suffer from piracy simply because no one gives a fuck about their music. The actual amount of different artists available on the Pirate Bay is pretty small. Try searching for a local band.
For most musicians, even though they make take themselves and their music very seriously, it is all a vanity project.
Their music is not a source of income. It is the opposite, due to spending money on equipment/instruments etc. Most bands would benefit greater financially from just giving up, rather than chasing down royalties.
This is perhaps best demonstrated by the music equipment magazines. There are about five of them in my local newsagent, 'Sound on Sound', 'Electronic Musician' etc. If you compare the readership of these magazines to the amount of people working in the music industry, there must be a vast difference. And all the magazines are full of reviews and adverts for expensive studio toys.
I guess my point is that you must have at least a measure of success before piracy starts to become a problem. I've played on and recorded around thirty albums in the last ten years that I have known the CD sales figures for. I don't know what the iTunes etc sales were. Most sold between 1000-3000. Just two from the last five years I could find for torrent. The torrents were virtually unused. I even seeded it myself. :)
Yes, I am small time, but I do make a living from this. I have found that selling any copies at all is the problem, rather than piracy.
Re:sort of.. (Score:1, Interesting)
I wrote video processing software that was much faster (10x) and cheaper (10x) than the competition at the time. was hoping to quit day job to continue making it better. turned up cracked on site, and on others, assholes begging for license keys. right... so go and spend $2000 on camera and then balk at paying $40 for something you want to make it look nice.
i quit working on it. wasn't prepared to ask stupid money for it and wasn't prepared to see people just rip it off.
Re:Actually Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
90% of the money in music is gone (Score:3, Interesting)
There is hardly any money in the music industry anymore. Bootlegging is a tax that most artists can't afford to pay. You have to appeal to a million listeners to get 100,000 to pay. So artists like Lady Gaga have to appeal to a billion to get a million to pay. So the stuff that's being hurt is the stuff with more limited appeal, more niche stuff. Artists who would have sold 100,000 a decade ago now get out of the business, or don't get in at all, or they die from lack of health care in the US. A lot of the infrastructure is gone. Music studios are gone. Local music scenes are much less than they were. The best part of record companies is gone. Live shows cost a fortune, with most going to insurance and security. There are ways you can say it is better for really entrepreneurial artists, but again, that's just a fraction, maybe 10%. Same for artists who can produce their own stuff, it's better in some ways but that's a small fraction.
In the past, no matter how you listened to music, whether buying CD or listening to FM, or even playing the jukebox at a diner, some money made it back to the producer of that music, incentivizing more music production. Now, there are a lot of ways to listen to music now where no money goes to the producer. The difference between low money and no money is profound.
In short, the problem used to be that artists with broad appeal would make a ton of money and artists with niche appeal would scrape by, but now artists with broad appeal are scraping by and niche artists are out. If only a small fraction of your listeners pays then the whole industry changes. You can't point to one album that suffered, they have all suffered, even ones that didn't get made. It's a systemic problem.
Counterpoint (Score:3, Interesting)
> 60 years from now, you'll have old farts reminiscing about how these new bands kids listen to are all mindless crap, unlike the great music of Eminem, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spear and Lady Gaga that they grew up with. Those were the great musicians.
I'd like to interject.
The main reason why 70s music is so widely listened to still is a a big exposure of 70s contemporaries to this little animal (symbiotic molecule?) called LSD-25 and friends.
It really inspired music not otherwise possible, and the beginings of culture not seen before (or after), and a lot of it was phenomenally not motivated by profit.
Some of it was even deep, well, that's subjective of course, but still :P
Re:Excellent call! (Score:3, Interesting)
"It was either Hugh Hefner or someone else at Playboy who said that they realize that their work is pirated and while they have been known to crack the whip when it got out of hand, they also realize that at least their work is good enough for someone to consider to pirate and that it keeps them in the public view even if they aren't directly making money from it."
Why don't we hold the GPL to the same standard? When it's used in proprietary projects and not the source of the project is not given out for free, at least someone is using it.
Instead, like piracy, the person is sued in court (and many of the people here say it's "stealing")
Re:I think there's something to that (Score:3, Interesting)
"Few, if any, sales were lost to my piracy. I simply could not afford the things I was pirating."
It's not a lost sale, but it changes the mindset of people, which results in lost sales. If everyone knows they can get something for free (and continue to download it for free), eventually, they will just expect it.
Look at iPhone apps. Since most are .99-$1, if you try to sell one for $30 (no matter how good it is), you will most likely not get any sales because people expect it to be cheap.
This is why companies need to fight piracy. If not, they will lose the ability to sell any product.
Re:Two-edged Sword of Technology (Score:4, Interesting)
"what I don't understand is why the technology sword does not cut both ways."
You nailed it.
That's because it is not art what is endangered by technology but an industry that made a profit out of a scarcity that technology has avoided.
This is the false debate much pushed by those in control of the old bussiness model (of course): they talk about art when they want to say "my industry as I knew it" much as an ice seller talking about how those new devices, the refrigerators, are going to make a disaster and then no one will be able to have freshed foods at home (because ice sellers are going to be out of bussiness).
The Bilestoad, Apple II, 1980s (Score:5, Interesting)
Excerpt from an interview with the author, Marc Goodman at http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/GOODMAN.HTM [dadgum.com]
The game seemed popular and received great reviews. Did it do well commercially?
Nope. Datamost only sold around 5,000 copies of the game. I've gotten email from a lot of people and even met people who know and love the game and you know what? I've never met or talked to anyone who had an official copy.
Pretty frequently I see the recurring threads on software piracy on various newsgroups. People really believe that there is no impact from their copying software. Well, there is an impact. I couldn't support myself by writing computer games, so "The Bilestoad" was the last game I did.
Re:90% of the money in music is gone (Score:3, Interesting)
In short, the problem used to be that artists with broad appeal would make a ton of money and artists with niche appeal would scrape by, but now artists with broad appeal are scraping by and niche artists are out. If only a small fraction of your listeners pays then the whole industry changes. You can't point to one album that suffered, they have all suffered, even ones that didn't get made. It's a systemic problem.
Those who are using a horse and buggy model in the era of the automobile are having problems. The vast majority of musicians that I know are having a resurgence of being able to do what they love because if they play gigs, they make more money off selling self published CDs and online music. I've had a few friends I've grown up with quit their day jobs because they are making it.
If anything, local music scenes have improved as artists are able to make a living off of playing. Now you can do more than play for whatever the bar is paying (like I did back in the day when I thought I'd grow up an play bass in a band). Now bands can produce ($150/hour for studio time is a thing of the past), get CDs pressed for a couple of bucks and sell them at gigs, get people to friend them on Facebook and MySpace for marketing and sell more music off of iTunes and their own websites than they ever would have back when you were either starving or filling up the local stadium. BTW - you have to sell A METRIC TON of CDs via a traditional label to make what you would selling 1000 CDs off your own website for $7 (or $10 or $15 or $5 or Whatever). It's pretty cool seeing people make $10-$15,000 where 10 years ago, they'd get enough to pay for one hotel room and a bottle of scotch after each show after filling up the car, buying new strings and fixing where the union guy at the venue dropped the drummer's snare.
As for getting performance royalties, composers royalties and so on, it's not that tough to set up your own label (or use a self-publish label), get set up with ASCAP or any of the other performing rights groups and get paid when say, you get radio play or CNN uses your music for cuts to commercials or something.
Re:Music 60 years from now... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep, took me a while to catch the Gaga bug, but in her case it's definitely a case of raw talent with some marketing sheen on top just to get her out there to the masses. She is most certainly not a 'manufactured' artist.
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:3, Interesting)
A glut of the old stuff devalues the new stuff,
No, it doesn't. Bach doesn't devalue Zeppelin.
especially when the old stuff is better
By what measure? Nobody outdoes Bach at what he did. Nobody outdoes Zeppelin at what they did. Nobody can replace Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday, Frederic Chopin, Cole Porter, Jimi Hendrix, Wolfgang Mozart, Bob Dylan, Glenn Miller, Buddy Holly, Antonio Vivaldi. Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Robert Johnson, John Lennon. You and I and anyone else could make this list five times as long, spreading it across the centuries and sticking just to composers just as easily.
Big Media's curious premise is that endless generations of marketers have some right to orthodontics and Caribbean vacations because Pink Floyd recorded Have A Cigar.
Re:Short answer (Score:3, Interesting)
As one who lives in Southeast Asia, I'd like to share my own 2 cents here.
The general indie film's target market here at least belong to the upper middle-income class. They comprise of slightly less than 4% of the total population in the Philippines. (See, the income inequality here is so high that those in the lower middle-income bracket worry about going hungry still.) And considering that indie films aren't marketed extensively, your left with a really very very small market.
It's tough but hey, that's the indie game. Now, you'd also have to understand that the people who buy pirated stuffs here usually don't belong to the indie market. Would the folks who pirated your film ever watch it in the theaters? Hell no. It's not a blockbuster film that everybody else would be talking about for the next three weeks. They'd rather save that money for food.
The good news here is that the people that are able and willing to spend money to see indie films, will, given the opportunity to do so. The bad news is since distributors snubs the small but dedicated market they have here, they're forced to watch the film through other means - be it legal or not. Hell, I know a lot of people here who pays extra for shipping just to watch indie flicks.
I expect any real example will be naysayed, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work in the independent games industry. In 2004, I designed and wrote a little Action-Puzzle game titled Drop! (feel free to look it up on GameFaqs). We sold it in stores for $10, and online for $5, however, we got $.33 per retail copy sold (blame publishers) vs. $2.50 or so per online copy sold. We sold a few hundred thousand copies or so at retail across a 6 month period (#4 for sales for a couple months, but no one pays attention to jewel case games).
Here's the trick: the online version had an online high-score system. You could play the online copy for free, but you didn't get access to the shared high-score system unless you bought it. We sold less than 100 copies online, but saw several hundred thousand unique IP addresses hit the high score system every day (and this kept up for years, not just people "trying out the high score system").
For 6 months of work, I made about $30,000 on that (a couple other guys made similar amounts), which eventually didn't justify the effort - because people who want to play a game don't care about making it possible for the creators to keep making games.
I work for Microsoft now :P
Re:He sega dreamcast (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit. The Dreamcast was the last Sega console because of a number of missteps by the company, and because developers were scared of it turning into a SegaCD or 32x or Saturn, so didn't want to commit the resources to developing titles. It had nothing to do with piracy.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1572800/why_the_dreamcast_failed.html [associatedcontent.com]
Re:Missing the point... (Score:3, Interesting)
>The real damage caused by piracy aren't the works which were created and then failed to produce return on investment (this is all to easy to do without piracy), the real damage is done in works which are never created in the first place due to the perception that piracy would make them financially irrelevant.
Really look at this site. Might not be your type off music but the quality on here is on par or better then commercial releases.
http://www.ektoplazm.com/section/free-music [ektoplazm.com]
If someone doesn't create works because they are afraid or piracy then they have the wrong business plan and were gonna be taken to the cleaners by the record labels anyways. Either way they will be bumped by someone more ambitious and and a chance taker.
Re:I think there's something to that (Score:5, Interesting)
You missed GP's point. Today, he has money to waste on entertainment. He just PAYS FOR IT, because it really is faster, and easier. The pirate who wants to play Super Duper Mario Brothers Meet the Exterminator and Predator has to find a download, find a crack, apply the crack, etc ad nauseum. Then, he probably can't play the online version, which includes the "value added" appearance of Alien.
Piracy is work, in case you hadn't noticed. People who are willing to spend no money, no time, and no effort to get their games/music/entertainment have to do without.
I agree, companies need to fight piracy, but following a mindless nazi doctrine that all pirates are evil and should be exterminated is as stupid as stupid gets.
Jim Baen, over at Baen Books came to understand that. He fought piracy by giving away books. http://www.baen.com/library/ [baen.com] Somewhere on their site, is a rather long discourse, in which Baen Books proves that every time they give away a book, especially an older, out of print book, not only does Baen realize a profit, but so does the author whose books was released for free.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Cooperating with the pirates can be lucrative.
Game producers could take a hint, and release a "pirated" version of their game, put it up on the torrent sites, sit back and allow the wider community to pay for distribution - then wait for a lot of pirates to come back and pay for the "value added" version that includes Alien.
Re:Missing the point... (Score:3, Interesting)
But I do agree with you that if it weren't for protectionism, we would probably be seeing even better products at better prices.
Not P2P (Score:3, Interesting)
Filesharing is a minor issue compared to industrial counterfeiting - I've hear the proportions of loss estimated as 10% online 90% counterfeits. The estimate itself was actually (when I asked) substantially distorted because the research underpinning it (for a major US TV network) showed that the real proportion was 1% to 99%. This was felt not to be credible, and so it was changed to reflect various intangible factors like predicted growth and future impacts due to demographics and exchange rate changes.
Of course, you can't prove that anyone has gone under because their IP was stolen, those lost sales are an opportunity cost so they don't show on any spreadsheet. This is the trick that is used to kill any investment project in any enterprise and to persuade everyone that the status quo is the way to go - because the sales you do see have definite margin and definite costs and these are provable, so new products and different products are choked away.
The question is really - does this have a negative effect on the industry of music, film or TV? At the moment I would say that it's not clear that it is, but again - who can say what the situation would be if the counterfeiters were closed?
I've got a useful answer here (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been writing music for years and sometimes it's really good. Many of you have probably heard some of it - but would never know, because the only way I've ever made any money from this is by selling tunes for commercial use. You might hear it as the background to a educational video or maybe in a low-budget commercial. You'll never hear it on the radio on on the stage - but not because of piracy (although I've had tunes pirated - usually by corporations, not individuals or sailors with peg legs and a parrot on their shoulder).
The biggest obstacle to making any money in the music business isn't pirates - it's the record companies. Through their control of distribution and marketing they pretty much are the gatekeepers. If you don't sign up with them you'll never be heard. If you do, you might be heard but you'll never get paid. You may see some recording star climbing out of a luxury car or limousine and dressed like a king - but those things are rented by the studio and charged to the artist as promotional expenses; the studios use creative accounting to insure that they keep all the money for themselves. The artist's real lives aren't anything like what you've been shown - if they have a real life at all.
To add insult to injury, there are "performing rights" organizations like ASCAP and BMI that keep track of who is playing what and make sure that the royalties are collected and distributed to the artists. Or that's what they'd like you to think - they've got the "collect the royalties" routine down pat - but their "pay the artist" routine is still a work in progress - somehow, they just can figure out how to track down the artists so they just hang onto the money. It's a great business for these folks - they've even got laws in place that insure that they'll be able to shake people down and keep the money for years to come.
If you think that the recording industry associations are there to protect the artist - the truth is that they treat the artists even worse than the way they do the "pirates". In the recent past they've gained new legislation that makes the creative efforts of artists the property of the record company - and the record company can pay the artist as much or little for it as they wish. The artist can't take their creations anywhere else because the law says they belong to the record company.
In case you wonder why there's "no good music being released" perhaps it's because the talented artists don't wish to subject themselves to the recording industry's abusive practices - if you can work your tail off and not get paid, or sit at home and not get paid - what do you think is really happening? It's not the pirates that are causing artists to stay away from the music business, it's the music business and their practices that has caused the artists to stay away.
Is this going to change any time soon? No - the government is in the pocket of corporations like these and their mutual back-scratching will continue for many years to come.
I can think of 2 reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Shareholders.
2. Scapegoating.
Most of the big media/software companies the managements have to answer to the shareholders. If performance (earning) is down, they have to find a way to convince the shareholders that it's not them (the management) that is at fault, rather, it's something else (market, recession, piracy, etc).
That comes to the second item, scapegoating.
Piracy is a ready-made scapegoat for all the media/software companies. They have fine-tune the scapegoat campaign so much so that they can almost blame everything on piracy.
Instead of raising the value on the products their produce (software / music / movie) thus offering more incentive for the consumer to pay for their products, they blame piracy if an album doesn't sell well, for example.
Ask youself: How many of the singer / actor / movie / album / software on the shelf today are worth the price-tag?
The song sux.
The singing sux.
The music sux.
The acting sux.
The story sux.
Everything sux and yet they (the movie/music/software companies) expect us to pay and pay and pay through our nose for their wares.
Enough of this.
In my case, I haven't bought ONE SINGLE COPY OF MUSIC CD for the past 5 years. It's not that I do not like music, I do. But the music on the market, oh please !
And I have NOT downloaded any music (pay or pirated) either. Turn on the radio and you know what I mean --- same old shit, repackaged.
Re:Lady Gaga sucks??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I found her voice interesting. Having an interesting voice to me is more important than being amazingly technical (though being in tune is nice), depending on the type of music.
You found the post-processing interesting. You never get to hear Britney's voice on her albums.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)