6 ms·

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

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.
- Traster 6y ago
  Look at Spotify, iTunes, YouTube and Netflix. Laws don’t stop piracy, good legal options stop piracy. The reason people pirated music wasn’t because the piracy sites were great, it’s because music companies wanted to charge ridiculous prices for something they would broadcast on the radio for free.
  - vel0city 6y ago
    Music companies don't broadcast music on the radio for free, they charge radio companies certain amounts per play depending on the reach of that radio station.
  - mminer237 6y ago
    Obviously if you release something for free like Spotify or YouTube, few people will mess with torrents for it; but that also makes artists a lot less money. You'll never stop piracy. But laws can reduce it. And some probably-impossible-to-know portion of that reduction will pay for the legal option. 99% of people will never download qBitTorrent. It's a small portion that will even get PopcornTime. It's easy to get disconnected as more technically-inclined people, but you have to remember that most people that pirate things just Google "stream avengers endgame free" and click through the links until they find a site that works. If that gets too hard, plenty will just give up and buy the DVD or whatever.
- jfindley 6y ago
  I think the inverse is more accurate. Services like spotify have very significantly reduced music piracy. If a reasonably priced legal alternative exists, people will tend to use it. Piracy only thrives at large scale when content is too difficult or expensive to access legally.
- Green_man 6y ago
  The converse relationship seems well represented by some recent digital music access like iTunes and Spotify. Many would-be customers turn to piracy when piracy is _more_ convenient than legitimate alternatives. I think movies and tv shows have become more accessible through legitimate channels, but the fragmentation of the streaming platforms certainly limits future convenience.
  - kivlad 6y ago
    I see people calling for an all-in-one service for movies & TV shows, but that isn't likely to happen since the licensing and pay distribution for those work on a much different scale than music. A big reason is that in most cases at least 100x the amount of people will work on any professional video broadcast media as compared to a music album. It will continue to hinder consumer convenience, and the only halfway solution is the stream hardware giants giving you a unified interface to pick any piece of content you want and then display where it's available.
- jamesponddotco 6y ago
  If legal streaming services were not profiling the crap out of me and what I do in their platforms, I would have stayed with them. I had a subscription with pretty much every single service available in my country, but back to Kodi[1], seed boxes, and private trackers I went. Not to mention the Draconian DRM. I can play 4K games at 60fps on Linux, but I cannot play a 4K film from Netflix or listen to music from TIDAL with certain browsers. Fuck that. [1] https://kodi.tv/ https://kodi.tv/
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Personally, my issue is more with DRM. I considered buying a few Blu-rays, but I have little use for a bunch of copyrigh-protected plastic, and circumventing the DRM on it might be a hassle, plus drives cost quite a bit. I just want some GoG-like store for movies. Have sales like Steam, price competition, keep what you buy, "complete your collection" bundles, etc. THis could really work with federation: each rightholder sets up their own shop on a common marketplace. Transfer encryption keys. Maybe even use torrents for distribution? But final files should have no DRM.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    Providing DRM-free downloads would probably kill the studio's long-tail revenue streams. Once people have a copy of the content in a format that's going to be indefinitely forward-portable, they will never buy another copy again. Not even for "higher" quality versions. I have an AVI of my LotR movies ripped from DVDs from whenever people bought DVDs and ripped AVIs. The quality is still very good, even played on a 4K TV. I've never sat thinking, "I wish I had the 4k Bluray remaster" while watching it.
  - bccdee 6y ago
    Yeah, god, DRM. Sometimes I'll buy an ebook to support the author and then pirate it anyway just so I can have a proper DRM-free version that will run on my ebook reader.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Interesting. Perhaps the studios should quadruple the price of streaming to recoup their losses. But of course that would send even more to piracy.... It makes you wonder if Steve Jobs was correct that people that pirate (songs, Napster back in the day) would be willing to pay for music if it was easy (iTunes) and cheap ($0.99). I'm not sure if I agree but it is an interesting foil.
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    > It makes you wonder if Steve Jobs was correct that people that pirate (songs, Napster back in the day) would be willing to pay for music if it was easy (iTunes) and cheap ($0.99). I'm not sure if I agree but it is an interesting foil. Steve literally proceeded to launch a software app store that had DRM out of the wazoo, so even he didn't believe it.
    - JKCalhoun 6y ago
      Good point. Although certainly the labels insisted on this.
    - prewett 6y ago
      Jobs convinced the music tracks studios to let him sell DRM free tracks on iTunes, so it seems to me like he believed it. I don't know if iTunes music is still DRM free, though. But even it weren't, content creators unwillingness to let Apple sell DRM free media is not evidence that Jobs agrees with them. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2541387/itunes-starts-selling-drm-free-music.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2541387/itunes-starts-... [2] https://www.macworld.com/article/1138000/drm-faq.html https://www.macworld.com/article/1138000/drm-faq.html
  - mminer237 6y ago
    Obviously there's some balance in pricing stuff. Selling all your movies for $1 a pop may kill most piracy, but it will kill your movie studio too. Selling streams for $500 per person will price most people out, regardless of whether piracy exists or not. Piracy hurts profits regardless of pricing. iTunes did not make up for the death of CDs at all. Digital sales have never even made up a third of what physical sales used to be: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ Personally, I don't think consumers have a right to tell creators, "You have to sell that to me for $x or I will take it without paying." Companies certainly aren't good, but they're not typically stupid either. They're not going to price things to a point where people can't afford them. I think pirates just lie to themselves a lot to justify their actions.
- rhino369 6y ago
  Right. Obviously, you can't value every stream as a loss of of face value price. But its not 0% of face value either. And a lot of piracy battle is to ensure the movie/tv industry does get "Napstered." Napster annihilated the public's perception of the value of songs because even my tech illiterate mother could pirate. Right now my mom pays for netflix and cable. But if a pirate streaming service was as easy to find and use as netflix is, she'd start using it. So the current laws and enforcement do protect a lot of value now.
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.

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.
Traster 6y ago
Look at Spotify, iTunes, YouTube and Netflix. Laws don’t stop piracy, good legal options stop piracy. The reason people pirated music wasn’t because the piracy sites were great, it’s because music companies wanted to charge ridiculous prices for something they would broadcast on the radio for free.
- vel0city 6y ago
  Music companies don't broadcast music on the radio for free, they charge radio companies certain amounts per play depending on the reach of that radio station.
- mminer237 6y ago
  Obviously if you release something for free like Spotify or YouTube, few people will mess with torrents for it; but that also makes artists a lot less money. You'll never stop piracy. But laws can reduce it. And some probably-impossible-to-know portion of that reduction will pay for the legal option. 99% of people will never download qBitTorrent. It's a small portion that will even get PopcornTime. It's easy to get disconnected as more technically-inclined people, but you have to remember that most people that pirate things just Google "stream avengers endgame free" and click through the links until they find a site that works. If that gets too hard, plenty will just give up and buy the DVD or whatever.
jfindley 6y ago
I think the inverse is more accurate. Services like spotify have very significantly reduced music piracy. If a reasonably priced legal alternative exists, people will tend to use it. Piracy only thrives at large scale when content is too difficult or expensive to access legally.
Green_man 6y ago
The converse relationship seems well represented by some recent digital music access like iTunes and Spotify. Many would-be customers turn to piracy when piracy is _more_ convenient than legitimate alternatives. I think movies and tv shows have become more accessible through legitimate channels, but the fragmentation of the streaming platforms certainly limits future convenience.
- kivlad 6y ago
  I see people calling for an all-in-one service for movies & TV shows, but that isn't likely to happen since the licensing and pay distribution for those work on a much different scale than music. A big reason is that in most cases at least 100x the amount of people will work on any professional video broadcast media as compared to a music album. It will continue to hinder consumer convenience, and the only halfway solution is the stream hardware giants giving you a unified interface to pick any piece of content you want and then display where it's available.
jamesponddotco 6y ago
If legal streaming services were not profiling the crap out of me and what I do in their platforms, I would have stayed with them. I had a subscription with pretty much every single service available in my country, but back to Kodi[1], seed boxes, and private trackers I went. Not to mention the Draconian DRM. I can play 4K games at 60fps on Linux, but I cannot play a 4K film from Netflix or listen to music from TIDAL with certain browsers. Fuck that. [1] https://kodi.tv/ https://kodi.tv/
MayeulC 6y ago
Personally, my issue is more with DRM. I considered buying a few Blu-rays, but I have little use for a bunch of copyrigh-protected plastic, and circumventing the DRM on it might be a hassle, plus drives cost quite a bit. I just want some GoG-like store for movies. Have sales like Steam, price competition, keep what you buy, "complete your collection" bundles, etc. THis could really work with federation: each rightholder sets up their own shop on a common marketplace. Transfer encryption keys. Maybe even use torrents for distribution? But final files should have no DRM.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Providing DRM-free downloads would probably kill the studio's long-tail revenue streams. Once people have a copy of the content in a format that's going to be indefinitely forward-portable, they will never buy another copy again. Not even for "higher" quality versions. I have an AVI of my LotR movies ripped from DVDs from whenever people bought DVDs and ripped AVIs. The quality is still very good, even played on a 4K TV. I've never sat thinking, "I wish I had the 4k Bluray remaster" while watching it.
- bccdee 6y ago
  Yeah, god, DRM. Sometimes I'll buy an ebook to support the author and then pirate it anyway just so I can have a proper DRM-free version that will run on my ebook reader.
JKCalhoun 6y ago
Interesting. Perhaps the studios should quadruple the price of streaming to recoup their losses. But of course that would send even more to piracy.... It makes you wonder if Steve Jobs was correct that people that pirate (songs, Napster back in the day) would be willing to pay for music if it was easy (iTunes) and cheap ($0.99). I'm not sure if I agree but it is an interesting foil.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  > It makes you wonder if Steve Jobs was correct that people that pirate (songs, Napster back in the day) would be willing to pay for music if it was easy (iTunes) and cheap ($0.99). I'm not sure if I agree but it is an interesting foil. Steve literally proceeded to launch a software app store that had DRM out of the wazoo, so even he didn't believe it.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    Good point. Although certainly the labels insisted on this.
  - prewett 6y ago
    Jobs convinced the music tracks studios to let him sell DRM free tracks on iTunes, so it seems to me like he believed it. I don't know if iTunes music is still DRM free, though. But even it weren't, content creators unwillingness to let Apple sell DRM free media is not evidence that Jobs agrees with them. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2541387/itunes-starts-selling-drm-free-music.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2541387/itunes-starts-... [2] https://www.macworld.com/article/1138000/drm-faq.html https://www.macworld.com/article/1138000/drm-faq.html
- mminer237 6y ago
  Obviously there's some balance in pricing stuff. Selling all your movies for $1 a pop may kill most piracy, but it will kill your movie studio too. Selling streams for $500 per person will price most people out, regardless of whether piracy exists or not. Piracy hurts profits regardless of pricing. iTunes did not make up for the death of CDs at all. Digital sales have never even made up a third of what physical sales used to be: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ Personally, I don't think consumers have a right to tell creators, "You have to sell that to me for $x or I will take it without paying." Companies certainly aren't good, but they're not typically stupid either. They're not going to price things to a point where people can't afford them. I think pirates just lie to themselves a lot to justify their actions.
rhino369 6y ago
Right. Obviously, you can't value every stream as a loss of of face value price. But its not 0% of face value either. And a lot of piracy battle is to ensure the movie/tv industry does get "Napstered." Napster annihilated the public's perception of the value of songs because even my tech illiterate mother could pirate. Right now my mom pays for netflix and cable. But if a pirate streaming service was as easy to find and use as netflix is, she'd start using it. So the current laws and enforcement do protect a lot of value now.

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.