9 ms·

"Last year, one study reported that digital video piracy costs the U.S. economy $29.2 billion a year." Well, I'd say that it in fact saves $30 billion a year. P

by hexo 6y ago

"Last year, one study reported that digital video piracy costs the U.S. economy $29.2 billion a year." Well, I'd say that it in fact saves $30 billion a year. People can use it to buy more important stuff - such as food.

Bancakes 6y ago
It's a common misconception that piracy is a loss of business. It's nothing more than an overestimation in profits. How can companies say they lose profit when the only realistic way I see for that is someone getting a refund and spending it on a competitor?
- madamelic 6y ago
  When I have sought out an 'illegal' stream, it is because I deemed that piece of media not worth paying for. Either the price is too high [0] or I can't trust the company to put out good media. [0]: For instance, paying $30 for a limited license to stream Mulan a month early. You don't own it (Disney can and will take it off Disney+), the only benefit is seeing it early and it costs Disney nearly nothing to distribute to another person.
  - garyfirestorm 6y ago
    take f1tv. i enjoy watching f1. but the streaming services really did a poor job in execution. the fps is low, the resolution is low. on race day the service also would break down during start of the race!!! there are illegal streams and many file sharing sites which will give you access to high def high fps races. i am still a paid member of f1tv pro.
- mminer237 6y ago
  It may not be everyone, but there are a number of pirates who would buy a subscription to a legal streaming service if illegal streaming was not as easily available.
  - Bancakes 6y ago
    I've yet to read a really good large-sample study on this. I believe you're right, I just want to know the percentage of people. So far piracy is being treated as a scapegoat for unreached sales.
    - mminer237 6y ago
      It sounds like something that's nearly impossible to study. You can't ask people. Very few people will admit "I pirated this because I didn't feel like paying for it like I normally would." People always find ways to justify their actions, so every response would just be some variation of "I pirated this because the legal options are too inconvenient that I normally wouldn't bother so I didn't hurt anyone." And you never will be able to totally eliminate piracy nor will you be able to definitively attribute gains or losses to changes in piracy. Maybe the quality of the content changed, maybe the economy had a downturn, maybe an advertising campaign was really effective, etc.
  - dessant 6y ago
    There's probably more truth to it when turned around: there are a number of pirates who would buy content, if it would be easily accessible. This is a self-inflicted wound by media companies, and they are attempting to solve the issue by sending people to prison, instead of taking the money people are ready to spend on their content.
    - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      This is so true. Want to watch show X? Oh, you need Amazon prime. Show Y? Netflix. Show Z? HBO Max. Live sports? You need some BS cable package that costs a ridiculous amount. Media companies get all mad about IP and yet create walled gardens everywhere. They get no sympathy from me.
    - mminer237 6y ago
      I'm not saying media companies are perfect, moral angels. But I don't think people should pretend that piracy is some act of justice either.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  The idea is that every pirate copy is a lost sale. Of course, that ignores people who would never buy the product if it cost anything. But it is partly true as some people would pirate over spending if it’s available. There’s also the flipside of some pirates turning into paid customers (think Photoshop). Then there’s the fact that the number is vastly inflated as some people use the $150,000 maximum fine as the cost of a pirate copy. Never mind the fact that it was actually $5 (or whatever) of “lost” revenue.
  - Netcob 6y ago
    It's relatively unusual to have a job as a teenager where I come from. So I had to make do with birthday/christmas gifts and pocket money. During my university days my budget was pretty much just rent and food. I could afford a PC, maybe a console for playing games, but hardly any games unless I'd buy used ones. Movies and TV shows, all pirated. I'd buy some DVDs if I was really obsessed with something. Eventually I got a job, and streaming / affordable PC games caught up with reality and met me half-way. If you put a price on everything I pirated before that time, I'm not sure if I could have afforded that even if I stopped paying rent and buying food completely. Too bad streaming is getting more fractured again. If I want to watch 6 TV shows, I have to subscribe to 5 streaming services.
- blackearl 6y ago
  It's like when police say they got $1B of weed off the streets, but it would only equal that if you sold it as dime bags for $20. It totally ignores that getting the theoretical maximum profit out of a product is impossible.
- bob33212 6y ago
  I value my comments on HN at $5/view. I lose an estimated 50k/year to people not paying for the value they get from reading my comments.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    You already licensed those comments to HN for distribution ;)
    - tartoran 6y ago
      How about negative value, e.g. wasted time reading/consuming worthless content? Is this never talked about because it generates too much funny money?
  - fnord77 6y ago
    if you were a corporation, that would be a tax write-off
- MisterTea 6y ago
  > It's a common misconception that piracy is a loss of business. It's nothing more than an overestimation in profits. I used to think it was beneficial in the old days when most useful software was proprietary and few decent open alternatives existed. A teenager who wanted to make a custom 3D model for a quake mod needed an extremely expensive 3d animation package from maya or 3dstudio max. A teen doesn't have 3ds or maya money. So they pirate it and learned to use 3ds max or maya and in the process build up an actual skill. Later on when they go on to work in the industry their skill now creates actual demand for said software. In a way it was a gain.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    I don't see why movie piracy wouldn't help to sell studio-branded merchandise. Think everyone buying baby Yodas this Christmas paid for the stream? Just a random thought.
znpy 6y ago
I read on a post somewhere that if you replace "the economy" with "rich people yatch money" a lot of headlines make more sense. "Last year, one study reported that digital video piracy costs the U.S. rich people yatch money $29.2 billion a year."
- Evidlo 6y ago
  Yacht?
  - coding123 6y ago
    I was also stuck on that word. Thank you.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    I wonder how hard it would be to get people to start pronouncing the "ch" in yacht. Maybe to rhyme with the German "nacht" rather than a hard "ch" as in "church". I figure there are more people who enjoy doing silly things to bother other people than who enjoying yachting.
    - herbstein 6y ago
      In Danish it's pronounced the same way as the word for hunt - "jagt". I almost forgot what the word sounded like in English just now because my native tongue version of the word, spelled the same, sounds better to my ears.
- IdiocyInAction 6y ago
  Are all the people, from the film crew to the VFX artists and engineers that work on the IP that is being stolen "rich people yatch (sic!) money"? You can say what you want about IP law; you wouldn't be able to enjoy many big-budget productions if it wouldn't exist. Many jobs, high-paying and low-paying, wouldn't exist. Of course, the business model for content distribution is somewhat nonsensical and the time until content gets in the public domain should be 10 years, but that doesn't mean that IP law shouldn't exist. Not to mention that the 29 billion number is probably also BS.
Thaxll 6y ago
As if those $29B would have been purchased if not watched illegally...
tyingq 6y ago
I suspect those figures are assuming three things... a) Wildly inflated estimates of views. b) That the viewer would have purchased the content if the pirated content were not available. c) All purchases in "b)" would be at the highest price the content was ever offered at.
- fatnoah 6y ago
  I think you implied it with b) but availability of content is important as well. I've still got MP3s obtained via Napster and its ilk back in the day. The quality on many of them is below current standards, so I've been trying to upgrade to higher quality sources over the years. I'd say that I've got about a 20-25% success rate in being able to actually purchase that content legitimately. I could probably up that by 10-20% by going with overseas vendors, but I suspect most of those are bootlegged anyway.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
trentnix 6y ago
Next post you'll be complaining that the food the people are buying is unhealthy.
Maarten88 6y ago
Yes, also it's incredible how it is possible to fully automatically recognize and block music and video's, and go after and punish the perpetrators, but this seems wholly impossible for blatant disinformation and lies on the same websites. When there is money at stake, laws en enforcement can accomplish things that are unthinkable when it is at the expense of the common good.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  Not really? Recognition of an exact pattern is computationally very easy. Examination of often subjective truths is objectively very hard?
  - Maarten88 6y ago
    I'm sure that, given the right incentives, that 'objectively very hard problem' would be 95% solved very quickly. Of course there are corner cases that are really hard, but that is no different than audio/video recognition, where a 95% solution (that also has many imperfections) gets forced on users anyway.
    - Mindwipe 6y ago
      > I'm sure that, given the right incentives, that 'objectively very hard problem' would be 95% solved very quickly. I'm sure that it's basically impossible. I think it's impossible even with full, proper general intelligence AI at scale, and that won't happen in my lifetime even if humanity collectively downs tools and works on nothing else. Facebook has thrown a lot (lot lot) of resources at this, and it's clearly totally ineffective.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
This made me realize for the first time that I'm not sure as to what these “cost “the œconomy” x currencies” statements actually mean. Certainly it's not about generating money ex nihilō, so what is the standard?
bccdee 6y ago
Yeah, I hate that kind of language because it's so dishonest. Number one, a pirate is not a lost sale. Only a small number of pirates would have otherwise bought the product. Number two, the $29b didn't disappear, it was just spent elsewhere. The economy didn't "lose" anything. Number three, the entertainment industry is doing perfectly fine these days, so why should we be cracking down on entertainment which is accessible to poor people? Culture shouldn't belong exclusively for the financially comfortable.
ttul 6y ago
Politicians love talking about the war on drugs using similar math. For instance, when 10kg of cocaine are seized, they report the street value of the cocaine, when in truth the wholesale value is what has been lost to the trafficker. Similarly, pirated content does not represent lost retail sales. People who pirate content would not necessarily purchase it legitimately were it available to them.
globular-toast 6y ago
If everyone had more money to spend on food, then food would be more expensive. People having more money doesn't generate value, it just drives inflation. But the quote you are replying to makes no sense anyway. It doesn't "cost the economy". This is that same old fallacy that says if the economy has "grown" and there's more bits of paper moving around that we are somehow better off. If anything a bigger economy just means we spend too much of our finite lives trying to make sure others don't get more than we do. It doesn't correlate to a better way of life at all.
nepthar 6y ago
Using studies like this irks me. Science doesn't just stop there. When citing a study like this, it would be wonderful to see something like "Based on this research, we expect to the economy grow by X additional dollars in this area, using methods XYZ" If the legislation fails to achieve the actual result with a proposed amount of time, then it gets scrapped. Our legal system is missing a feedback loop - adding complexity is cheap (and profitable if you're a politician) but removing it expensive and there's generally not any reason to without SIGNIFICANT public outcry (marijuana legalization, for instance).

by hexo 6y ago

Bancakes 6y ago

It's a common misconception that piracy is a loss of business. It's nothing more than an overestimation in profits. How can companies say they lose profit when the only realistic way I see for that is someone getting a refund and spending it on a competitor?

madamelic 6y ago
When I have sought out an 'illegal' stream, it is because I deemed that piece of media not worth paying for. Either the price is too high [0] or I can't trust the company to put out good media. [0]: For instance, paying $30 for a limited license to stream Mulan a month early. You don't own it (Disney can and will take it off Disney+), the only benefit is seeing it early and it costs Disney nearly nothing to distribute to another person.
- garyfirestorm 6y ago
  take f1tv. i enjoy watching f1. but the streaming services really did a poor job in execution. the fps is low, the resolution is low. on race day the service also would break down during start of the race!!! there are illegal streams and many file sharing sites which will give you access to high def high fps races. i am still a paid member of f1tv pro.
mminer237 6y ago
It may not be everyone, but there are a number of pirates who would buy a subscription to a legal streaming service if illegal streaming was not as easily available.
- Bancakes 6y ago
  I've yet to read a really good large-sample study on this. I believe you're right, I just want to know the percentage of people. So far piracy is being treated as a scapegoat for unreached sales.
  - mminer237 6y ago
    It sounds like something that's nearly impossible to study. You can't ask people. Very few people will admit "I pirated this because I didn't feel like paying for it like I normally would." People always find ways to justify their actions, so every response would just be some variation of "I pirated this because the legal options are too inconvenient that I normally wouldn't bother so I didn't hurt anyone." And you never will be able to totally eliminate piracy nor will you be able to definitively attribute gains or losses to changes in piracy. Maybe the quality of the content changed, maybe the economy had a downturn, maybe an advertising campaign was really effective, etc.
- dessant 6y ago
  There's probably more truth to it when turned around: there are a number of pirates who would buy content, if it would be easily accessible. This is a self-inflicted wound by media companies, and they are attempting to solve the issue by sending people to prison, instead of taking the money people are ready to spend on their content.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    This is so true. Want to watch show X? Oh, you need Amazon prime. Show Y? Netflix. Show Z? HBO Max. Live sports? You need some BS cable package that costs a ridiculous amount. Media companies get all mad about IP and yet create walled gardens everywhere. They get no sympathy from me.
  - mminer237 6y ago
    I'm not saying media companies are perfect, moral angels. But I don't think people should pretend that piracy is some act of justice either.
colejohnson66 6y ago
The idea is that every pirate copy is a lost sale. Of course, that ignores people who would never buy the product if it cost anything. But it is partly true as some people would pirate over spending if it’s available. There’s also the flipside of some pirates turning into paid customers (think Photoshop). Then there’s the fact that the number is vastly inflated as some people use the $150,000 maximum fine as the cost of a pirate copy. Never mind the fact that it was actually $5 (or whatever) of “lost” revenue.
- Netcob 6y ago
  It's relatively unusual to have a job as a teenager where I come from. So I had to make do with birthday/christmas gifts and pocket money. During my university days my budget was pretty much just rent and food. I could afford a PC, maybe a console for playing games, but hardly any games unless I'd buy used ones. Movies and TV shows, all pirated. I'd buy some DVDs if I was really obsessed with something. Eventually I got a job, and streaming / affordable PC games caught up with reality and met me half-way. If you put a price on everything I pirated before that time, I'm not sure if I could have afforded that even if I stopped paying rent and buying food completely. Too bad streaming is getting more fractured again. If I want to watch 6 TV shows, I have to subscribe to 5 streaming services.
blackearl 6y ago
It's like when police say they got $1B of weed off the streets, but it would only equal that if you sold it as dime bags for $20. It totally ignores that getting the theoretical maximum profit out of a product is impossible.
bob33212 6y ago
I value my comments on HN at $5/view. I lose an estimated 50k/year to people not paying for the value they get from reading my comments.
- kube-system 6y ago
  You already licensed those comments to HN for distribution ;)
  - tartoran 6y ago
    How about negative value, e.g. wasted time reading/consuming worthless content? Is this never talked about because it generates too much funny money?
- fnord77 6y ago
  if you were a corporation, that would be a tax write-off
MisterTea 6y ago
> It's a common misconception that piracy is a loss of business. It's nothing more than an overestimation in profits. I used to think it was beneficial in the old days when most useful software was proprietary and few decent open alternatives existed. A teenager who wanted to make a custom 3D model for a quake mod needed an extremely expensive 3d animation package from maya or 3dstudio max. A teen doesn't have 3ds or maya money. So they pirate it and learned to use 3ds max or maya and in the process build up an actual skill. Later on when they go on to work in the industry their skill now creates actual demand for said software. In a way it was a gain.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  I don't see why movie piracy wouldn't help to sell studio-branded merchandise. Think everyone buying baby Yodas this Christmas paid for the stream? Just a random thought.

znpy 6y ago

I read on a post somewhere that if you replace "the economy" with "rich people yatch money" a lot of headlines make more sense. "Last year, one study reported that digital video piracy costs the U.S. rich people yatch money $29.2 billion a year."

Evidlo 6y ago
Yacht?
- coding123 6y ago
  I was also stuck on that word. Thank you.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  I wonder how hard it would be to get people to start pronouncing the "ch" in yacht. Maybe to rhyme with the German "nacht" rather than a hard "ch" as in "church". I figure there are more people who enjoy doing silly things to bother other people than who enjoying yachting.
  - herbstein 6y ago
    In Danish it's pronounced the same way as the word for hunt - "jagt". I almost forgot what the word sounded like in English just now because my native tongue version of the word, spelled the same, sounds better to my ears.
IdiocyInAction 6y ago
Are all the people, from the film crew to the VFX artists and engineers that work on the IP that is being stolen "rich people yatch (sic!) money"? You can say what you want about IP law; you wouldn't be able to enjoy many big-budget productions if it wouldn't exist. Many jobs, high-paying and low-paying, wouldn't exist. Of course, the business model for content distribution is somewhat nonsensical and the time until content gets in the public domain should be 10 years, but that doesn't mean that IP law shouldn't exist. Not to mention that the 29 billion number is probably also BS.

Thaxll 6y ago

As if those $29B would have been purchased if not watched illegally...

tyingq 6y ago

I suspect those figures are assuming three things... a) Wildly inflated estimates of views. b) That the viewer would have purchased the content if the pirated content were not available. c) All purchases in "b)" would be at the highest price the content was ever offered at.

fatnoah 6y ago
I think you implied it with b) but availability of content is important as well. I've still got MP3s obtained via Napster and its ilk back in the day. The quality on many of them is below current standards, so I've been trying to upgrade to higher quality sources over the years. I'd say that I've got about a 20-25% success rate in being able to actually purchase that content legitimately. I could probably up that by 10-20% by going with overseas vendors, but I suspect most of those are bootlegged anyway.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

trentnix 6y ago

Next post you'll be complaining that the food the people are buying is unhealthy.

Maarten88 6y ago

Yes, also it's incredible how it is possible to fully automatically recognize and block music and video's, and go after and punish the perpetrators, but this seems wholly impossible for blatant disinformation and lies on the same websites. When there is money at stake, laws en enforcement can accomplish things that are unthinkable when it is at the expense of the common good.

Mindwipe 6y ago
Not really? Recognition of an exact pattern is computationally very easy. Examination of often subjective truths is objectively very hard?
- Maarten88 6y ago
  I'm sure that, given the right incentives, that 'objectively very hard problem' would be 95% solved very quickly. Of course there are corner cases that are really hard, but that is no different than audio/video recognition, where a 95% solution (that also has many imperfections) gets forced on users anyway.
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    > I'm sure that, given the right incentives, that 'objectively very hard problem' would be 95% solved very quickly. I'm sure that it's basically impossible. I think it's impossible even with full, proper general intelligence AI at scale, and that won't happen in my lifetime even if humanity collectively downs tools and works on nothing else. Facebook has thrown a lot (lot lot) of resources at this, and it's clearly totally ineffective.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

This made me realize for the first time that I'm not sure as to what these “cost “the œconomy” x currencies” statements actually mean. Certainly it's not about generating money ex nihilō, so what is the standard?

bccdee 6y ago

Yeah, I hate that kind of language because it's so dishonest. Number one, a pirate is not a lost sale. Only a small number of pirates would have otherwise bought the product. Number two, the $29b didn't disappear, it was just spent elsewhere. The economy didn't "lose" anything. Number three, the entertainment industry is doing perfectly fine these days, so why should we be cracking down on entertainment which is accessible to poor people? Culture shouldn't belong exclusively for the financially comfortable.

ttul 6y ago

Politicians love talking about the war on drugs using similar math. For instance, when 10kg of cocaine are seized, they report the street value of the cocaine, when in truth the wholesale value is what has been lost to the trafficker. Similarly, pirated content does not represent lost retail sales. People who pirate content would not necessarily purchase it legitimately were it available to them.

globular-toast 6y ago

If everyone had more money to spend on food, then food would be more expensive. People having more money doesn't generate value, it just drives inflation. But the quote you are replying to makes no sense anyway. It doesn't "cost the economy". This is that same old fallacy that says if the economy has "grown" and there's more bits of paper moving around that we are somehow better off. If anything a bigger economy just means we spend too much of our finite lives trying to make sure others don't get more than we do. It doesn't correlate to a better way of life at all.

nepthar 6y ago

Using studies like this irks me. Science doesn't just stop there. When citing a study like this, it would be wonderful to see something like "Based on this research, we expect to the economy grow by X additional dollars in this area, using methods XYZ" If the legislation fails to achieve the actual result with a proposed amount of time, then it gets scrapped. Our legal system is missing a feedback loop - adding complexity is cheap (and profitable if you're a politician) but removing it expensive and there's generally not any reason to without SIGNIFICANT public outcry (marijuana legalization, for instance).