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."
Short answer (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
Gone must be the days when a creative work was loved for its contribution to the arts... Plato, Socrates -- failures, all of them, because their works are no longer copyrighted and thus can no longer make a contribution to society. /sarcasm
Excellent call! (Score:5, Insightful)
When I first read the title, I thought that kdawson (I know, I know) was asking if a creative work failed in the sense that no one accepted it, it was not disseminated, etc. Then TFS says "financial" failure.
Problem is, the question (in any aspect) is too one-dimensional. Paul Gauguin was a financial failure, as were most painters who weren't sponsored by some aristocrat or other. Yet one would hardly call his (or their) works "failures" in most aspects of the term. Meanwhile, even in just the one aspect - money - well? Today, just try and buy an original Gauguin and say it's a failure. I dare you.
Even with recent/modern creative endeavors, the question is stupid. If you're creating a work of (art, music, or similar) just for the money, that creation is almost guaranteed to suck. See also the products of Britney Spears (...remember her? no worries if you don't), "Lady Gaga", or whatever manufactured 'star' of the moment you care to name. Viewed dispassionately and apart from the personality, the music quite frankly sucks ass. If we shift to works of writing, you can almost always tell at which point a writer loses his/her passion for the craft, and instead just does it for the money - the quality drops accordingly. Visual art? Heh - I'll pick on The Simpsons... about five years ago, it was glaringly obvious that Matt was just doing it for the paycheck.
But anyway, long story short - IMHO, the only way a work succeeds or fails is in the metric of how widely accepted it is, and in how long it remains in the public consciousness. The successes become treasures that never die in spite of passing centuries, the failures are forgotten in less than a decade no matter how widely marketed.
Re:Excellent call! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Excellent call! (Score:5, Insightful)
http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/08/piracy-is-progressive-taxation.html [oreilly.com]
"Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy."
I think there's something to that (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in my highschool and university days, I pirated a lot. Reason was money. I had little discretionary income so I'd take things where I could get it. However as I've gotten older and moved on to the working world, I've little need to pirate stuff. I simply buy it. It is faster and easier, plus I really do like doing the right thing.
Few, if any, sales were lost to my piracy. I simply could not afford the things I was pirating.
Re: (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 compan
Re:I think there's something to that (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why companies need to fight piracy. If not, they will lose the ability to sell any product.
I'd argue this. Competition is what scares these companies to death (and primarily for them, potential competition). Piracy might be one piece of the problem for them, but as far as I see it, they have a much larger issue: value. People will pay for something if its value is greater than or equal to the price. Think of Blu-Ray. To many, the value of having a copy of a movie was not the $25-$35+ the movie companies were charging for them at first. But, as is usually the case, the price came down over time, and now people are buying them for $15-20, or maybe $25 for a new release. Also, players are selling much better. It's true that those did come down in price as well, and it's hard to determine if the price of players dropping caused the price of the media to drop, or vice versa. However, I have talked to a lot of people about this, and from what I have been told, and I do agree, is that people couldn't justify paying an extra $10-20 per movie just to have the hi-def. In other words, they would have bought the player if the discs cost about the same as DVDs. So, basically, prices went down, sales went up, and value stayed the same.
Software, however has a completely different problem, even though it still stems directly from value. 10-15 years ago, if you wanted to do high end photo editing, Photoshop was the only real game in town. As time progressed, so did technology, and programmers were able to write photo editors with much more ease, and distribution of software matured. No longer did someone with a large program have to pay a company to do CD stamping, box design, etc. Now we even have quite good OSS to do many of the same things (GIMP, obviously). So, now the value of any particular piece of software is declining due to competition, not to piracy. Professional photographers, I promise you, will still shell-out for a legitimately licensed copy of Photoshop. If they don't need something quite like that but still want support, maybe they buy Paint Shop Pro or the like. GIMP is for those who want the freebie (don't get me wrong--if it was a closed product, it would sell at a decent price, assuming it is as well known as it is now).
So, I guess I just see it as simple economics, and piracy is nothing more than a barely discernible blip on the radar. What has changed the game is competition, but some companies just want to whine about pirates who cost them practically nothing in lost sales (maybe increase sales in a try-before-you-buy way). They are trying to scare the competition out of the marketplace in order to keep the value of their products high, because once you have multiple options for doing the same kind of thing, the value of all programs in the group begins to fall off a cliff do to competition. Seems pretty simple to me. Play the piracy card, scare away new entrants to the market, keep the value of your stuff high, and you have it made.
Re:I think there's something to that (Score:4, Insightful)
>>Software, however has a completely different problem, even though it still stems directly from value.
I knew the person that wrote some popular BBS code. I'm tempted to say it was Searchlight BBS, but it's been a long time.
He released it as shareware, got massively popular, but he said he made hardly any money out of it. And the people that were pirating it would constantly ask him for tech support, as well. So it's not quite true that software has no overhead.
He was kind of bitter about the whole thing, and really hated software pirates because they screwed the small guy a lot worse than companies like Microsoft. Even though the dollar amounts are obviously much larger for Microsoft, if he can't put food on his plate writing software, the software is going to go away.
So, TFA - there's your answer.
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: (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 fr
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.
Missing the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even in patented space many works (especially medical devices) struggle to make a profit before patent protection runs out. Patents are more beneficial to the world at large in this respect - ideas which can be realized in a reasonable time are pursued, and then within 20 years they become public domain. The effective infinite life of Copyright is wrong on so many levels. I think a reasonably time limited copyright scheme would be more respected / less violated, and more productive in the creation of new works, as opposed to the infinite repackaging of existing brands that we have today.
Two-edged Sword of Technology (Score:4, Insightful)
...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.
This was my initial thought too. However what I don't understand is why the technology sword does not cut both ways. It is true that technology makes it far easier than it has ever been before to pirate material but it also makes it far easier than ever before to produce that material. Unlike the past there is no need to risk a massive budget on every new act. Give the riskier acts smaller budgets and see what they can do with them. After all if they are less popular they will probably also be less pirated and the ones which do take off can give you a great return on your small investment.
Re: (Score:3)
heck, some of the more impressive creations have been done on shoestring budgets. I dont think star wars had much to go on back when it was made, for instance.
then there are projects like pioneer one: http://vodo.net/pioneerone [vodo.net]
if donations keep ticking in, that series could in theory go on forever rather then be killed off by some media exec because it fails some arbitrary metric or other.
i wonder, what kind of hardware would it take to render babylon 5 quality animations today?
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).
Re:Missing the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
How many walk away because their product will not make a profit... based on how many in the past have failed, due to piracy? You have to have one before the other will happen. So, the question is: have any actually failed? If not, why would they walk away?
The Movie industry has been crying foul (one major studio CEO recently said in a speech that piracy is "killing the industry")... while that same industry has been racking up record profits. Sorry, but that made my bullshit detector go off the charts.
The music industry has seen declining CD sales... but there are numerous possible reasons for CD sales to be in decline without even considering piracy (like the fact that the music industry refused to change and give people what they want today). Some of those reasons no doubt actually apply.
So the question still comes back to: has anything really failed financially because of piracy? And "creative accounting" is not acceptable... we all know how the movie studios make movies look like they are losing money so they don't have to pay out percentages. An example from just the other day was how Harry Potter brought in $977 million (almost a billion) dollars, yet the studios used creative accounting to "show" that this most successful series of all time "lost" $167 million. And the courts are starting to call them on it.
I do agree that the extension of Copyright beyond all reason needs to change. Copyright was created for the good of the public. But the public does not benefit if the Copyright lasts 100 years or more!
Re:Missing the point... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Movie industry has been crying foul (one major studio CEO recently said in a speech that piracy is "killing the industry")... while that same industry has been racking up record profits. Sorry, but that made my bullshit detector go off the charts.
It should. Back in their lawsuit against the video recorder, the movie industry put in a sworn statement that they would go bancrupt unless the video recorder would be outlawed.
The fact that this perjury was never followed up on is one of the reasons they continue to think they can tell blatant lies in full view of everyone and nothing will happen to them.
Re:Missing the point... (Score:4, Insightful)
Which investors? Which project? Citations needed.
Re:Missing the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The law needs to be built on facts: If there aren't some provable cases, how can the law impose punitive damages fairly? Remember, for the US, there's the cruel and unusual punishment angle - if there are no provable cases of piracy stifling creative expression, then one of the grounds for the law's severity is undermined, and so the argument that the law is unconstitutionally cruel gains weight.
2. How can there possibly be works that were never made because of piracy without there also being works that were attempted and failed? Are you seriously claiming that every film that bombed at the box office for one reason or another somehow proves the producers have perfect judgement about avoiding the risks caused by piracy, so they never attempt to make the ones that fail from that cause? If the various Heaven's Gate's and Howard the Duck's don't prove that Hollywood, at least, can fail abysmally to evaluate risks rationally, then no wonder you're arguing against proof, because to you nothing what-so-ever can be proved. Admit that they sometimes get it wrong, and if piracy is one of the factors in any significant way, there will simply have to be the product that failed from piracy. Provably.
With that said, a possible damage caused by piracy might well be works never created in the first place. If there are some provable cases where someone can demonstrate investors at least should have walked away because of piracy, then we can infer that piracy caused damage, either in the form of losses if they went ahead anyway, or your 'damage if the project was never made'. But claiming that piracy causes only the type of damage that, by you, can't be proved is also claiming that a bunch of big commercial content holders have perfect track records - obviously false to fact.
Re:Excellent call! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Cancerous growths have more talent than Ms. Spears.
Re:Excellent call! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Excellent call! (Score:5, Insightful)
Lady Gaga does it all for the money? You've got to be the biggest blistering idiot I've seen on slashdot. She went to NYU, performed in burlesque shows, and writes the songs she performs--not to mention she came from humble beginnings. And for Britney Spears, she has averaged 1 album every 2 years so she is definitely not "forgotten". You don't know anything about the stars you've mentioned and you don't know anything about the performance art of Lady Gaga. You're just another jackass blathering on about how much he hates a certain genre of music. It's very easy throw out bullshit and get a crowd of idiots to agree with you as you've so wonderfully demonstrated. Well, I'm here to tell you that you're an ignorant buffoon and you don't know anything about the artists you've listed. Maybe you should mind your own business and listen to whatever it is you listen to--probably a chest full of 8-track's of the Bee Gees, Chicago, and Styx.
Also one more thing. EVERYONE DOES IT FOR THE MONEY. If you're going to hold artists to the money standard, then I want to see you go to work and refuse to accept your paycheck. Go ahead. DO IT. Stop being a hypocrite.
Re:Lady Gaga sucks??? (Score:4, Funny)
That's an interesting way to murder.
Re:Lady Gaga sucks??? (Score:5, Funny)
Leeaavvee GAGAA AAAALONNEE!!!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
More like leave Britney alone. At least she had an interesting voice.
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.
Music 60 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll pass on discussing the relative merits of being a fan of Ms. Gaga, to get to something you mentioned:
And how the heck do you propose to judge her music dispassionately? Counting the number of chords per second or something?
I guess I was imprecise. What I meant was this: If you just heard the song; without the marketing, the media-pumping, or even a picture of her. Or even better, if you heard the song played 50 years in the future, without ever hearing of her beforehand.
A case in point: I collect (half-assedly, I admit) old 78 RPM records to test on an old 1947 Trav-Ler record player and radio that I rebuilt (finding the tubes was the most challenging part). I have stuff that was "pressed" in 1918 (this is pre-vinyl, so they were made the hard way back then). The non-successful musicians' records are drop-easy to find - Goodwill's clearance warehouse occasionally has bins of them... and in spite of excellent quality materials (and a new needle), the music is, well, awful. Little wonder I can buy them at roughly $0.25 per pound. OTOH, finding something from a successful musician (e.g. Glenn Miller) means having to hunt the records down, and sometimes paying a lot more for a mint-quality record than one would for a modern CD of the same musician's work.
To that end, what do you think a Lady Gaga CD will go for in (roughly) 2070, do you think? More importantly, how widely do you think her songs would be played by then? Would anyone still alive then even know or care who she was? That my friend is the big metric of success or failure concerning creative works.
Re:Music 60 years from now... (Score:4)
Re:Music 60 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know who it was, but someone here in /. had a sig I totally agree with:
"Remember kids, if they're not playing real instruments, it's not real music"
Techno fans, flame away, I won't respond to them.
On the other hand, I once heard a very skilled keyboard player in a band comment "I'll use whatever technology is available to get the sound I want."
Re:Music 60 years from now... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's a "real instrument"?
Is an electric guitar less real than an acoustic guitar? Why?
Is a synthesizer driven by keyboard less real than a violin? Why?
Why does the mechanism to create the sound waves make a difference to whether something is music or not?
Re:Music 60 years from now... (Score:4, Insightful)
Techno fans, flame away, I won't respond to them.
Looks like they didn't need to flame - they had mod points!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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 begi
Re:Lady Gaga sucks??? (Score:5, Funny)
Speak for yourself there buddy, I love lady Gaga to death!
Sounds to me like a case of.... bad romance...
<Insert groans here>
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
God, I can't believe I'm about to comment on this. I am almost entirely unfamiliar with Lady Gaga and wouldn't know any of her songs if you sat me down and played them for me. That's just not the universe I live in.
However, it was your comparison to Marilyn Manson that got me thinking. I am not a Manson fan by any means, I don't like his music, I don't like his image, I don't like him. But! I can step back from that enough to realize that the music that he's performing isn't really his art. His image and th
Re:Short answer (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Short answer (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish they would go straight to $3 million films. Cut out the overpaid actors, there's a great start. There are plenty of talented actors who would fill the headliners' shoes completely, and possibly better. The only reason they get so much money is because the name draws people into theaters.
look what happens then. $25 million payday to star in a medicre movie, and the star agrees to do it, and their box office value starts dropping. They are using my ticket price to hire someone I know so I evaluate the movie on its stars instead of its plot. Then audiences enjoy the movie based on its writing or cinematography, or hate it for those reasons plus the actors' poor delivery.
I loved Cruise in Tropic Thunder until I realized it was him. I can still enjoy the movie but it makes me feel uncomfortable because I've seen so many of his overacted crapfests. I loved Vanilla Sky despite him, mostly because the story was stolen (Obre los ojos) and slightly updated. There are people I will see in any movie because they only select good scripts and good directors/producers to work with, and the result is good. The actor does the filtering for me.
Box office name recognition is the worst thing to happen to movies ever. I'm not just talking about actors, I'm talking about expensive licensing deals too. Pay a bunch of money, make a Batman movie, and it doesn't matter how terrible it is you're a millionaire. Video game movies, novel-based movies, anything with a well-known name. Name recognition is crap.
Get a good script, good actors, and actually spend money promoting it like they do the big blockbusters. That's how you get people in the seats. Stop spending money on name recognition and the costs go down and audiences will return to movie-going. A $3 million movie with a $3 million advertising budget needs to sell maybe a million tickets to break even.
Actors and licensees don't need to be set up for life on one movie. If acting is your job, you can live on $500k per year. That will cover plane tickets and expensive clothes. Do 2 movies per year and, minus taxes and expenses, you'll have a very comfortable life *working*, not spending my ticket money on hookers and blow and mansions for MTV's Cribs.
Let's have the $3 million movie movie, I'm all for it.
If the quality is good enough. (Score:3, Insightful)
Then people will pay for it.
If it's half-good it may still be worth listening to/watching, but not necessarily worth to pay for. (I'll wait until it comes on TV)
And then there is the rest - that's mediocre at best. Downloaded, test listened and then scrapped.
*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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Chances are, some people also will not.
So what? It's not like anyone's losing any money in that case, because the money wasn't there in the first place. Those that wouldn't have bought it wouldn't have bought it.
I don't see how this is any different from making copies of cassette tapes when I was 10. That was also rampant at the time, everyone did it, they even put out specially designed tape decks that would play through the cassette at double speed specifically so you could make copies of it without havin
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok I am seeing what you meant now. It is unfair for the ethical people to support the content for the unethical, regardless of finance.
If everyone freeloaded bad stuff would happen to the existing model of buying bytes. Free advertising would not work for discs or downloads because by definition none would be bought.
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
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]
Actually, vastly more than one. (Score:5, Insightful)
You ever hear about hollywood accounting? Virtually anyone important enough that they'll receive "points" has been defrauded by their own studio/label.
You'll figure out why the RIAA/MPAA are so anti-piracy as soon as you grok that single fact. Any distribution channel or even publicity that doesn't trace back to efforts they may label their own will create a scenario where they face more serious lawsuits from their talent, plus more talent founding competitors.
It's time to put this dog to sleep. Don't buy their shit. Don't talk about their shit. Don't even watch their shit pirated unless you absolutely must based upon your childhood comic book consumption.
The next two time you feel like watching a movie, try Let The Right One In and Primer. I promise you they're both better than anything released by Hollywood during the last 5 years.
Re:Actually Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (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" :-/
Re:Actually Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it was piracy in Defoe's original use of it wrt copying. What it wasn't was copyright infringement (in the US) (at the time).
Let the rationalizations begin (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh - I've never heard of a retail outlet that failed because of women stealing bras from the packages, but it's still illegal and wrong.
There are a tremendous number of people who have grown up in an age where it is so easy to copy information, and where it is so easy to self-publish so you *think* you're creative, and the idea that it's not theft to benefit from someone else's hard work just because their work is easily copyable in a computer...it boggles my mind.
YOU sell widgets in a store, don't you? You and your store should definitely get paid for that. I write music for a living...I should only get paid for the first copy sold?
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:5, Insightful)
I write music for a living...I should only get paid for the first copy sold?
Depends. If you're any good, I'd like to see you paid for about 7 years after you wrote the work. Then I'd like to see your work go into the public domain to be used by others in any way they want, for free. Meanwhile, you're going to write other stuff, because you're good at what you do, aren't you? If not, fuck off and stack shelves for a living, like me.
The big problem at the moment is NOT that people are copying stuff, it's that artists (well, publishers really) are demanding payment for works for literally hundreds of years after they were first produced. That's wrong, and it must stop because without a public domain, you can forget about anyone producing any art at all.
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest threat to Big Media is ultimately their own back catalogs.
It doesn't matter if it is SOLD, pirated, viewed for free (with commercials) or if it's in the public domain.
A glut of the old stuff devalues the new stuff, especially when the old stuff is better.
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:4, Insightful)
It's all about information distribution channels. Read about the outcry of book publishers and some authors about public libraries in the beginning of the 20th century -- same arguments as today. Should a writer publish a book which anyone can read for free? Where is the profit in this?
Well, the profit is, of course, that people in districts with public libraries buy more books. You cannot print and sell a book that you have no right to distribute but it is OK to lend it thus distributing the knowledge. To give a friend a copy the book is also OK in my book (pun intended) because of three reasons (all of them apply to music as well):
-- I'd most likely give or take the whole book for some time instead of buying a new copy if it is not possible to copy it.
-- If a person likes the copy it will more likely buy a new book from the same author.
-- No author or publisher can strongarm me to buy their book -- they have to convince me, make me want to buy it. Called marketing it is. I am much less likely to purchase a book if the publisher is copyright-crazy or plain greedy.
Same applies to modern media -- the author is the only person who should decide how to sell his work but good luck forbidding sharing. You'll shot yourself in the foot anyway.
If you create a product that can easily be copied than it will be copied. You can try and fight it, you can try and profit from it. Your call. Don't like the distribution media? Make live concerts only. Couldn't care less.
To make it clear -- I am strongly opposed of the people that illegally make profits from other's hard work. Only the author has the right to decide who sells his works and (e.g. with software) on what conditions a copy should be used to earn money. But sharing involves no financial gain for anyone and therefore the author doesn't actually lose anything -- in fact you get free publicity and expose which will more than cover any theoretical loss you might have suffered from sharing.
Re:Let the rationalizations begin (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (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 Matthe
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: (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: (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 som
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Failed to get funding (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Halo Series for Mac (Score:5, Insightful)
none of the other halo titles were released on Mac and one of the reasons cited...
...was that Mac is rarely the primary platform for game developers? Most mac games are ported from the PC or co-developed. Piracy has been blamed for everything from the terrorism to low birth rate. Also, while on the topic of 'citing' -- citation needed. When discussing piracy, the level of hysteria surrounding the issue thanks to corporate interests makes it imperative that you list your sources and facts, not just a vague conclusion.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=9021 [insidemacgames.com]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Bias alert: The author used to work for Bungie Software (the creators of the Halo series).
Harry Potter Films! (Score:3, Insightful)
At least by Hollywood accounting practices.
Someone pointed to a study in a previous thread (Score:3)
I wish I could find the link. The study was commissioned by a book publisher trying to find our how much piracy hurt book sales. Generally when a book is published, sales spike a few days later then drop, and it's a couple of weeks before it's scanned and on the internet. What they found was that when it hit the internet, rather than a drop there was a second spike.
Piracy doesn;t hurt sales at all, it generates sales.
Cory Doctorow explains it succinctly in Little Brother. Nobody ever lost sales from piracy, but obscurity guarantees lack of sales.
Re: (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: (Score:3, Interesting)
too hypothetical (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is inherently speculative. It isn't terribly difficult to find examples of, say a comic book series that was canceled because sales were 10% below what was needed to break even, or a movie that didn't quite make back the investment (even assuming non-Hollywood accounting). The number of creative endeavors which are just on the edge of financial solvency is pretty darn large. But what's essentially impossible to determine is what the actual impact of "sharing" on what-sales-would-have-been was in any given case. The best you could do would be to estimate a general range, and stipulate that any work that was within that range of being profitable "failed" because of it.
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.
effects could be on future works (Score:5, Insightful)
what newer creative works were never done because a previous
one never succeeded enough due to piracy?
(so, how would you even define "tanked" for a creative work anyway?)
He sega dreamcast (Score:3, Informative)
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]
what about fair use? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be useful to compare this survey with one that estimated the gains or productivity arrived from fair use of other works. What literature, art, music, programs, inventions, etc. derived from building upon other works have contributed to the GDP?
You can begin by adding most of the annual income and net worth of Disney.
The question is (Score:4, Insightful)
no (Score:3, Insightful)
now.. can you prove God doesn't exist?
And despite the popular claim of the opposite, you can prove a negative, generally by proving a different paradoxical positive, but still...
For my actual thoughts on it... I think there is a balancing act to be had in it. If you work is good enough that enough people will buy it to make it a success, then enough people will be willing to pirate it to hurt sales also. One of the big reasons for the online "pirating" today isn't the ease of copying (though it contributes) it is that the balance on the opposite side (copyright) has grown too heavy.
With copyrights as long as they are now, there is very little content that CAN'T be pirated, by definition. With shorter copyrights, more content would be available unencumbered. If you knew that you could get it legally, for free in a couple of years, (wait for it to come out on DVD... Wait till it is out on TV... etc arguments) would you be in such a rush to steal it? Again, only if the work was "good enough" to warrant the risk. Even then, the risk would have to be seen as less than the costs of buying it legally.
Not really the whole answer, but enough for a /. post
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.
Re:Starsiege: Tribes took quite a hit from piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
A good example of the absurdity of the "we wouldn't have bought it anyway argument." If Slashdotters weren't in denial because of their addiction to mass media content and aversion to paying a fair price for it (what rational person thinks 0 is a fair price for something they want?), they'd be able to see that some fraction of those 220k+ people would have bought the game in the absense of piracy. Maybe 5%, maybe 75%. Either way, infringement hurts producers of intellectual property and causes the market to produce and inefficiently low amount of it.
Re: (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?
Protection is not an issue (Score:3)
Spore had the brand new SecuROM PA activation system when it launched. If you had a look on Pirate Bay, there were something like 100,000 peers on the torrent.
The protection gets you nothing. The amount of piracy on release is a representation of the amount of interest there is in a product. In particular with both of those games, people were curious but skeptical.
Also I'd note Stardock considers Demigod a success. They've continued to support it and so on.
You have to remember that no matter what, your game
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.
Compare PS3 vs Xbox 360 (Score:3)
Those two consoles are more or less even technically. Most titles are released on both consoles with roughly the same price with the difference being that it is quite easy to pirate games on the 360 but impossible (or at least extremely hard) on the ps3. So to figure out if piracy hurt sales, compare how well often pirated titles sell on the 360 vs the ps3, while taking into account market share differences.
So if it is substanially less profitable to develop titles for the xbox than the ps3, then piracy hurt sales. Otherwise no. Seems simple enough to me?
Different market can be taken advantage of (Score:3)
Okay, so the question is piracy the straw that breaks the camels back?
It's an easy scapegoat, especially for those who have failures.
However there was a great article I don't have the time to search for at the moment, which demonstrated the folks who pirate are not the market who buys, and conversely, as has already been pointed out, greater exposure is a wonderful thing. So little is lost to pirates, because they are less likely to have purchased the product to begin with. Meanwhile there is a gain, if they share the product with someone who generates revenue.
An example of this is free services that try to switch to charging. They usually lose most of their client base, since it's a different market that's attracted to free services than those who prefer paying.
A LOT is paid for exposure, PR and marketing, imo, piracy should be covered in those budgets and perceived as a boon rather than doom. The key is to get it into the right hands, the reviewer how has a strong committed following, the pirate who has the greatest dissemination.
Ultimately, what would be most wonderful is to have metrics covering various piracy outlets, to determine which offer the greatest conversion rate. Perhaps those coupon codes redeemable at purchase which already track which outlet was the referral would be useful here?
Finally, once entities start to take advantage of the (currently free) piracy channels of PR and marketing, and have useful metrics to measure their campaigns, I could see pirates going professional and charging for their services.
Pirating the pirates if you will.
Bilestoad for the apple II (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong, incredibly tendentiously phrased, question (Score:5, Interesting)
Dumb question (Score:3)
Ok, bear with me for the analogy I'm about to make, because I understand that not all copyright violation is piracy, and piracy isn't theft... but this is like asking if any businesses have failed due to theft.
What I mean by that is: If the business failed, probably you never heard about it. It's rare that a business would fail due to theft after becoming well known. Real, successful businesses experience theft, and it harms them, but they can account for it in their business model and control it to a degree that the theft does not cause them to fail. But if they don't control adequately, they can certainly fail due to theft. But it's a known, solved problem and so well-known businesses generally do not fail due to inability to control theft.
On the other hand, if something is pirated a lot of something, probably you have heard of it. Because things are pirated a lot because they're popular. You don't pirate things you've never heard of, because you've never heard of it to know about it in order to think about pirating it in the first place.
So piracy won't cause something to fail. It sucking will cause it to fail.
The real question is will piracy have a net positive or a net negative effect on the revenue generated by a popular, successful product. Something can be harmful without causing it to fail. And a secondary question is, is a net negative harm caused by piracy something that cannot be accounted for in the business model, such that the business can succeed despite the harm.
My guess is that completely unchecked piracy can be harmful, but that there seems to be no way possible to adequately control it. Thus, the business model needs to change from one of selling copies of something, to something else.
What that is, no one has any clear idea of, and what works for some may not work universally. Thus, the collective constant shitting and re-shitting of the industry's collective pants.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Or more likely the fact that they never seem to have anything good in.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
http://xiaopang333.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/piracy-killed-the-dreamcastor-did-it/ [wordpress.com]
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
Re:A good example, generally plenty more (Score:5, Insightful)
To the readers of my comment: my point is that there's clear, reasonable evidence of the harms of piracy. But we're faced with a questioner who has an adversarial and unconvertible frame of mind.
Okay, let's look at Crysis. You say that Crysis sold fewer copies than previous games "of its scope." You cherry pick one of the most successful games of all time, Doom 3, but the most direct comparison is the one previous game produced by Crytek: Far Cry. Far Cry sold 730,000 copies in its first 4 months (http://www.wiki4games.com/Far_Cry#cite_note-1).
Crysis exceeded sales expectations according to EA, selling 1 million copies in its first 3.5 months (http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=612&Itemid=2), eliminating your argument. This came despite the fact that Crysis could barely run even on enthusiast PCs for a year after release, while Far Cry was released to a much larger audience of computers that could run it acceptably.
We know that Crysis was a very popular target of pirates, and Crytek tells us that this is proof that their sales were hurt by piracy, but there's absolutely no evidence connecting the two. Of every 100 downloads, how many would have purchased the game if they hadn't pirated it? Of every 100 downloads, how many see the game, like it, and then buy it in order to play online or out of respect for the developers? People like you assume that the first number is vastly larger than the second, but there's never been any evidence to support that position. I suggest that it's just as likely that piracy increases game sales, and I believe that the automatic assumption that piracy is the scourge claimed by some within the industry is incredibly naive.
Re: (Score:3)