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EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales (2017)

987 points by seesawtron 5y ago

einpoklum 5y ago
EU rep: We couldn't help it, the study was stolen by pirates!
deleted 5y ago
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radicalbyte 5y ago
Page didn't load for me, thankfully we have outline to the rescue: https://outline.com/6XShGU https://outline.com/6XShGU
sharken 5y ago
It's worth noting that the EU-paid study was done in 2013, back when streaming and YouTube was on the rise. Billboard called streaming unignorable in 2013. https://www.billboard.com/amp/articles/business/8545169/2013-year-of-streaming https://www.billboard.com/amp/articles/business/8545169/2013... Still, there probably needs to be some legislation around piracy, even though it seems to not affect sales much.
- kebman 5y ago
  I think there's something to be said about simply supplying a superior service. While I would watch more TV and movies before, now I simply watch YouTube or Odysee. And that's it. I don't really have a need for much more. I wonder if more people have the same experience. Of course, it could also be my age and my strange interests at play though.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    I cannot watch youtube. The quality of image and sound is just terrible. 4k videos with compression artifacts? Where you can see the how the image is divided for compression ? Best sound quality: opus 176 kbps ? Maybe my television and media proffessor was right: everything is negociated at the level of first telephony multiplexer: 64kbps.
    - kebman 5y ago
      I feel you! OTOH it seldom matters to me, because I mostly watch tech and docu stuff that do not require crystal clear or hifi video. Kind of like illustrated podcasts. I do see the need for a better experience when watching feature films, though, which you can also get on YouTube. But being a bit of a film buff (and one who's also shot film for cinema I might add), I don't even enjoy Netflix. Instead I try to watch films where they're supposed to be watched: At the movies. ;)
    - nvarsj 5y ago
      Youtube is probably the worst, but even Netflix has this problem. I have seen so many terrible encodes on there and the streaming bitrate is usually quite low overall. Watching dark scenes in shows on an OLED is particularly aggravating.
marshallbananas 5y ago
As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, with a a taste for Western media, especially movies, and the Internet becoming a widespread thing, it was infuriating waiting for movies to come to theaters months behind the rest of the world. Not to mention the horrible country specific posters and advertising, limited availability and titles. Piracy was the only option. It felt like the Internet would solve all these problems, like you'd be able to experience culture from any part of the world however you liked and at the same time as the rest of the world. Sadly that never happened. It's much better now but it still feels like the media is crippled by old local distributor deals. The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it. When I got my first Kindle 12 years ago my Amazon account was registered with my local European address so the books available in store were all complete trash romance pulp novels. Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise.
- bserge 5y ago
  Think of entertainment as a hard drug (most of it actually is). And the distribuitors are the dealers. Some will be friendly or make deals with each other, others will keep everyone else off their turf or go to war.
- croes 5y ago
  The internet is only a medium. It's just used by businesses and businesses are all about profit. Businesses want to be able to choose where they produce and where they pay taxes, but customers should be able to choose where they buy their goods. If you hear the term "free market" it's always about the companies not about the customer.
- Boulth6 5y ago
  > The Internet never delivered on its promise. The commercial internet never did. Don't forget about Torrents and lib gen rus. They're part of the internet too. > The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it. People "accept" it because it's convenient and they are not aware that there are other options. How would you suggest people reject it?
AussieWog93 5y ago
I just can't believe this. Almost every single person I knew back in the day who installed Limewire/Kazaa/Bearshare, bought an R4 cartridge or modded their Wii went from buying at least a couple of pieces of genuine media each year to never buying one again. That being said, perhaps a more useful metric for calculating lost sales would be how many people acquired the technology used for piracy, rather than how many times they used it.
- gscott 5y ago
  At some point you get old enough to not want to bother with piracy because of the hassle if you have a decent first world income.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    As an adult, I tend to pirate or buy knockoff goods precisely when it becomes more of a hassle than buying the real thing. For example, having to go through every streaming app to work out which one has the show you want, or buying a piece of hardware sold by an American that hasn't even thought about logistics to any country that isn't the USA.
    - 12ian34 5y ago
      Side note: in case you didn't know, Google TV kind of solves the problem of having to go through every streaming app to find which one has the desired programme with a universal search. I just got it and find it useful.
      - AussieWog93 5y ago
        That's handy. Hopefully it stays universal - if they started charging a fee to streaming services to be included in the search we'd be back to square one.
        throwaway3699 5y ago
trompetenaccoun 5y ago
Of course, they don't want to get in trouble with powerful American lobbyist groups. Same reason local authorities went after the Pirate Bay guys despite them not having broken any laws in Sweden.
- hulitu 5y ago
  But they did brake laws. And even when they could not find anything they could have found somebody who was "raped". /s
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Sweden has such a bad reputation as a place where the is corrupt. I wonder if the public feels that?
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      High praise for Sweden: > a place where the <<nothing>> is corrupt.
sleavey 5y ago
The study mentioned in the article notes the only downside to piracy is for recently released blockbusters, where 10 pirated downloads leads to 4 fewer cinema visits. I wonder how much of that would be offset if streaming of blockbusters was available from day 1. No one would expect it to be included in Netflix subscriptions but available as an additional one-off purchase equivalent to say one month of subscription. The only losers here would be cinemas, but after decades of price gauging I think plenty would have little sympathy. It'd be interesting to find out of film companies have studied this idea. Presumably there is some limit where blockbuster "viewing parties" with N or more people would make less money for the film than some fraction of those N people going to the cinema. They can't (yet) DRM living rooms.
- croes 5y ago
  Price gauging thanks to the movie companies that want an ever larger share.
  - sleavey 5y ago
    So cinemas are the Ticketmaster of movies?
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  When I was growing up I remember paying like $5 to see a movie. Used to see movies often. But as I grew up I became too busy with school to go. After I moved to Australia is went to see Avatar. The tickets in Sydney on the imax screen were $48 each… Now I just rent them from iTunes when they are avaliable.
- ketzu 5y ago
  > No one would expect it to be included in Netflix subscriptions Wasn't a large reaction to disney doing this during the pandemic "I already paid for the service why should I pay again"?
  - glandium 5y ago
    Wasn't it more about the price being higher than visiting a movie theater?
hulitu 5y ago
From eastern europe: piracy cannot hurt sells when: 1. The title is not available in your country and 2. When the title is too expensive for the people to buy it. Piracy however helps sells. When i like some movie or music that i pirated, chances are big that i will buy it. When i don't know about it, the MPAA can keep it. Marketing failure all the way.
- josefx 5y ago
  From western Europe: I pay for Netflix and Amazon. Getting titles on them seems easy until you run into localization, while Netflix seems to support dozens of languages with its own titles I still run into too many videos that only offer a subtitle instead of having the English language dub to fall back to. Can we please throw all copyright lawyers into an active volcano and try to set up a system that doesn't make it intentionally impossible to legally watch the English language version of a video hosted by Amazon while in a non English speaking country? Also throw the Amazon execs who signed those licensing agreements after them.
  - stefandesu 5y ago
    Yeah, this seems to be an Amazon problem. Every time I rent a movie on Amazon, I triple check whether they have the original audio. Some have English audio but no English subs which really doesn't make any sense.
    - glenneroo 5y ago
      The UI to determine these details is also frustrating. My friend had never seen Something About Mary so we decided to pay 3.99€ to watch it. It ended up being 480p and dubbed horribly in German. Never again.
- agilob 5y ago
  3. Quality of service in your country is so bad that you wouldn't watch it legally for free. If I remember correctly, in some EU countries GoT was available only with reader - no native English and subtitles, all episodes destroyed by a reader. In another country GoT was available in max resolution 480p, in another... you had to be subscribed to one particular ISP AND have HBO subscription. GoT was the most pirated content on torrents for quite some time.
anfogoat 5y ago
I wouldn't worry about this too much. The Commissioners they swear an oath you know. An oath to be wholly independent, so we can rule out this having been them serving special interests or anything of the sort.
- intricatedetail 5y ago
  They are also unelected, because they are so virtuous there is no need for people to change them.
  - zaik 5y ago
    This is only half-true: "[...] candidates are chosen individually by the 27 national governments. Within the EU, the legitimacy of the commission is mainly drawn from the vote of approval that is required from the European Parliament, along with its power to dismiss the body." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission
    - intricatedetail 5y ago
      This argument is boring. Like that pushy salesmen trying to tell you the product has the feature you want, but it doesn't. There are no European Commission elections.
      - advanced-DnD 5y ago
        EU Commission does has some democratic element in it. As though they are not elected by the Europeans directly, they are proxy voted by their respective government. This is not new. For example, there are also no ministry election or, yet the government of the day still put people onto that position. This is just one example, if you're coming from the US, you can even think of the even more examples of non-directly elected official making important policies. But judging by your two comments here, you have given this matter very little thought.
      - sbuk 5y ago
scaramanga 5y ago
"Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?" - Mario Savio, quoting UC President Clark Kerr
injidup 5y ago
So funny. An article on how piracy doesn't hurt sales followed by so many posts by people boasting how they would never pay for anything because they can download it for free.
- leadingthenet 5y ago
  You're making the implicit assumption that they would've bought the thing either way, just chose not to because they could get it for free, which might not be the case.
- bbarn 5y ago
  To be fair, you're on a forum of largely highly technical people. If every one of us pirated movies and music, we still don't make a dent in the overall market.
- deleted 5y ago
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beckman466 5y ago
“Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists. Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon. The sea pirates take away by force others' properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology. In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is expressed in various ways including the following. First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other. Second, “pirate” activists illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books. These activists are either from poorer countries or classes, or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and offline protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting." - Professor Jakob Rigi https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146 https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146
aneutron 5y ago
I was born and raised in an African country. My father had a salary of 500$ a month. I could never afford a 50$ book about resiliency engineering or about Java Concurrency when I was 17 years old, neither could my father. The reason I love computer science and tech and excel at some parts of it, is simply because I could access any book, pirated. I have a huge will to learn, and piracy was quite literally the only means to learn. Once I worked and got on my feet, I started buying a lot of the books that marked my learning (because nostalgia and also great resources), and if and when I can, I always buys the books. Let's not talk about movies. My town STILL has no cinema. Nearest one is 100Km away, and costs about 15$ for a ticket. So if it wasn't for piracy, I would've probably never watched Iron Man, and never dreamed of having my own Jarvis, and hence never taking up speech recognition and deep learning. Again, now that I can, I had periods where I watched 3 to 5 movies a week in the cinema, because I have the means to. I believe people are more likely to buy books/movies when they can. But for those who can't, I believe it's almost always a net positive to society to give them access to those resources.
- emerged 5y ago
  I think the state of software and media piracy have been in somewhat of a sweet spot. It’s technically illegal and not just every random person can easily find what they want. But those who are motivated enough to find the content and skirt the laws are able to do it. This way the industry is still able to monetize and those without the resources can still get access with some effort. I pirated like crazy growing up poor but internet savvy, but now that I’m a well paid professional it isn’t necessary and isn’t even worth the effort when I can just rent/buy.
  - hh3k0 5y ago
    > It’s technically illegal and not just every random person can easily find what they want. But those who are motivated enough to find the content and skirt the laws are able to do it. «I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.» Robert A. Heinlein
  - 5y ago
varsketiz 5y ago
Piracy is showing that the business model for products being pirated is supposed to be freemium.
lampe3 5y ago
I was born in Poland in the end of the 80s and lived from the 90s in Germany. Back then the only way to watch Polish Media in Germany was either via Satellite TV or VHS. Around the 00s I was into Polish Rap. Buying a CD in Germany from a polish Artist was something that you just couldn't do. So the only option I had was to download it. Later when I wanted to buy the CD I couldn't because either the store did not had it or it was sold out. If I wanted to watch polish tv shows or cartoons I either needed to later download them or my family needed to record them on VHS. In this regard the Internet helped when it comes to Music. But when it comes to tv shows and movies... Its a mess and you will end up with 10 subscriptions and hope that you find that show. I also think that with movies and tv shows, piracy and will come back because of that reason alone.
wiradikusuma 5y ago
I played pirated games when I was a kid (actually I didn't know it was pirated, I bought them off CD shops). Growing up with more money to spend, I bought legit copies of those games (and more) from GOG just feeling nostalgic. Heck I don't even play them. Now I don't play pirated games, simply because the potential problems (virus etc) outweighs the cost (I usually wait for Steam/GOG/Epic sale anyway). Same thing for software. For books.. during uni time I usually borrow books from uni library, and make a copy for personal use (so I can highlight the pages). I guess that's piracy.
rob74 5y ago
What the article doesn't mention: Julia Reda, who "unearthed" the report, was an MEP for the Pirate Party at the time. She left the party in 2019 to protest against the nomination of a candidate who was under investigation for sexual harassment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Reda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Reda).
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Why the scare quotes? She did unearth it, through an FOI request. It was buried. Tiny parts were cherry-picked by commissioners, to support a conclusion diametrically opposed to the researchers' conclusions.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - sp332 5y ago
    Not all quotes are scare quotes.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      But these sure seemed to be.
      - sp332 5y ago
        It's not literal unearthing. So the quotes are to set off the figure of speech. Style guides say not to do it but it's a matter of style, not correctness. I guess that's as strong as you're going to get in colloquial English though :)
        denton-scratch 5y ago
        Literal unearthing is a fairly rare usage, compared to "to discover through the expenditure of effort". The more-common usage doesn't need quotes; they imply either that it's reported speech, or that the author is sceptical.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
I've read the whole study. TLDR: Correlation, not causation. Basically, they found that Customer A spent $100 on games, and consumed 50 units worth of Piracy. But Customer B spent only $30 on games, and consumed 10 units of piracy. They then concluded that piracy lead to more consumption. The obvious rebuttals are: 1. More voracious consumers of games will probably buy more and pirate more anyway 2. It sucks if you are one of the pirated games (eg. singleplayer, non-DRM), who loses out from this equation 3. Its great if you're eg. Fortnite or Steam, where pirated games serve as the enticement to join the ecosystem, and when customers do eventually spend, it comes to you given your huge size.
vagrantJin 5y ago
Yeah. To be fair. The people who pirate were likely never going to buy it in the first place. Like FIFA games. I've never bought one even though Ive been playing for years. But I grew up with no money to buy them amd when I did have the money, the game was all about microtransactions. So its still a no.
- freeflight 5y ago
  > Yeah. To be fair. The people who pirate were likely never going to buy it in the first place. That's a tad bit too simplified. There have by now been several studies/reports [0] [1] that found people pirating a certain media, are also spending most of their disposable income on said media. Sure, there's also the "I don't want to waste my money on possible garbage" curiosity/test-drive piracy. But a very large chunk are just people who enjoy the medium so much that they can't get enough of it. So they will spend all their monthly disposable income on it, and when that's gone, they will pirate because of the FOMO created by marketing hype around the newest release getting thrown at them. It's very much a manifestation of the consumerism that gets glorified in most modern societies. [0] https://torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consumers-130510/ https://torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consu... [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-pirates-tend-to-be-the-biggest-buyers-of-legal-content https://www.vice.com/en/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-pir...
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > That's a tad bit too simplified. Pet peeve: "tad bit". A tad is a bit, so either "that's a tad too simplified" or "that's a bit too simplified", but not both. Sorry, it's just... That stuff like this bothers the shit out of me.
- lesquivemeau 5y ago
  Well, it seems everybody is different. Personally I bought a lot of games I pirated when I was younger and I'm glad because I wouldn't have bought them in the first place If I hadn't the option of trying it beforehand
Bancakes 5y ago
Piracy has only become a supposed problem because corporations expect every consumer to purchase the product separately. I can't buy a game or album off ebay - I must buy the real thing. As far as videogames go, you can't blame piracy if your game doesn't have a demo version. No, I'm not paying Steam 100 euros for 2 hours that I may or may not get refunded.
beezischillin 5y ago
I grew up poor in Eastern Europe. Very poor, in fact. Without piracy I probably wouldn’t ever have been able to learn English, find my passion and make it in life. And not just for monetary reasons but due to access as well. Ironically enough the Internet never mattered too much because we were able to get what we wanted hand to hand. The 56k modem was completely useless when your friend had a zip drive with the games you drooled over. But it taught me to appreciate things. Even today I love physical copies of things, it is like a little trophy to the thing I love. My biggest problem nowadays is not that I can’t afford the things I love but that there is hardly anything I actually want. But when I do I often get multiple copies, whether it is on different platforms or to share the joy with friends. That being said the effects of piracy are both severe and negligible due to the quality. While it probably doesn’t affect big corporations at all, the small indie people sometimes suffer catastrophically from it.
globular-toast 5y ago
> with ten downloads leading to about four fewer cinema visits. These things aren't equal, though. As someone who loves the cinema I find it very sad, but maybe people just want to watch these things at home on their small screens now? The cinema industry hasn't helped matters by essentially turning cinemas into giant, automated TV screens. If piracy actually hurt movie sales, they simply wouldn't do home media. They'd print film on reels making it very difficult to pirate (in high quality, at least). But they don't because home media makes them tons of money, despite the piracy.
jpalomaki 5y ago
I think software piracy hurts/benefits companies in complicated ways. When kids trade copies of Photoshop, Adobe benefits from this. This allows people to learn the tool and strenghtens Adobe’s status. On the other hand more affordable options suffer. Why pay even $20 for the second best, if you can get the best for free.
JohnStrangeII 5y ago
I have a bit of a stupid question related to the topic. I'm self-publishing German sci fi and fantasy novels, nothing special, just some good entertainment (if you like my writing style). Since you cannot have a readership without Amazon and do appreciate the pocket money, I sell them on Amazon. At the same time Amazon does not allow me to give them away for free. Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author? It would probably even boost sales and also help people with less money, I just don't know how to do it. :(
- taneq 5y ago
  > Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author? A few well regarded authors (Charlie Stross, Cory Doctrow and Peter Watts spring to mind, I'm sure there are others) have been commercially successful despite (or because of) releasing some of their work for free download. Might be worth looking into how they approached it?
- afarviral 5y ago
  There are other websites that allow you to do a static upload, under a pseudonym. Just have a look on somewhere like reddit for a name of such a site. Another option would be getting in touch with a popular uploader on one of these sites or a torrent tracker and have them upload and seed. If they are a member of a private tracker they may get some sort of reward for seeding, as an incentive.
- freeflight 5y ago
  > Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author? The big torrent alternative in the German warez scene are direct downloads from filehosters. Which means there is no real "central place" where you can just put it for widespread exposure because it's a whole bunch of different portals/forums with individual uploads. There's a couple of well known bigger forums, like Gulli, Boerse or Bloodsuckerz, and countless "blog style" ones often specialized on certain media, those can be found on the Raidrush Toplist. So in practice you would need to sign up to a whole lot of places and post the links to your filehosted books there.
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deltron3030 5y ago
Kinda funny how the overall interest in Photoshop tanked since they introduced their cloud service. (If you look it up on Google Trends you can clearly see a big dip from 2012 onwards).
IgorPartola 5y ago
This has been my argument for a while now: people pirate content because they wouldn’t be customers if they had to pay for it. In other words while RIAA/MPAA can argue that by torrenting the latest blockbuster you cost them $20 in rental fees or a movie ticket in reality you wouldn’t have bought those things, to a first approximation.
55555 5y ago
I didn't read the article, and I agree with the premise, but don't get carried away. Ofcourse piracy _can_ detract from purchases. Pornography was a massive pay-for-content industry that was pretty much entirely decimated by the rise of tube sites.
__m 5y ago
what's the point though? If you make it legal it will definitely hurt sales
- sp332 5y ago
  The point, as the article says later, is that piracy is used as an excuse to implement invasive surveillance of all file uploads. This just highlights that it's a pure power grab with no justification at all.
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arpa 5y ago
piracy is the only answer when you get bullshit like this: https://watannetwork.com/tools/blocked/#url=oRqjVPljSGQ https://watannetwork.com/tools/blocked/#url=oRqjVPljSGQ
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Why? Were they worried that releasing the study would increase piracy and hurt sales?
GuB-42 5y ago
The thing is: people have a budget, whether they want it or not. So, when they spend $50 to buy a video game, that's $50 less for theaters. It is all connected, so I think that in the end, free piracy (like torrenting) doesn't change much on the global scale.
tasubotadas 5y ago
Can't help but think that this is Germany's influence - there are extremely strong IP groups that try to push ridiculous IP protection laws EU-wide and, obviously, this paper didn't help to push their discourse so it had to be buried.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Can't help but think that this is Germany's influence OTOH, this was pre-Brexit, and AFAIK Britain is much bigger in the media, film and music industries than Germany. So why would this be Germany's influence and not Britain's?
JohnHaugeland 5y ago
It's weird how, when you read the study, or even the first concrete sentence they say about it, it actually says something very, very different > It concluded that one specific category, blockbuster movies, is negatively impacted by piracy, with ten downloads leading to about four fewer cinema visits. Overall, that reduced sales for certain films by about 4.4 percent on average.
fleaaaaa 5y ago
I don't know much about other medium but I know some folks who's sharing shit tons of library on soulseek are spending much more money on local music scene than average. Kinda make sense..
MilkyFloor 5y ago
Good <a href="https://ru.wikipedia.org/">informationen</a> https://ru.wikipedia.org/">informationen</a>
neycoda 5y ago
Well, stealing is bad, you know?
- Siira 5y ago
  Stupidity is vile, you know?
BringerOfChaos 5y ago
I'm a book author of several titles from multiple publishers. This correlates with my experience. In fact, when I've found my books on pirate sites it has tended to correlate with a bump in sales, presumably because someone who wouldn't have seen them downloaded and decided they were worth the price and threw some money my way.
oliwarner 5y ago
Distribution bullshit hurts sales more than piracy. "You can only watch this two months after the US release", "This isn't available in your country", "You need an internet connection to watch this", "You can't watch this on Linux", "You need to pay for 170 channels to watch one", "This that one show you want to watch requires a £12.99 monthly subscription", "You will pay cinema prices but will have to supply the TV, seating and only get to play it back once", "You will pay new-DVD prices but won't be able to share it with a friend" We pretend that the surge of Netflix, Prime, Disney online services means this is getting more open, more free, but it the same game via a different medium. Piracy still offers a better service, less bullshit. If they stopped treating people like criminals, yes, they might lose some cash, but they'd also pull in the people they've lost to years of abuse.

987 points by seesawtron 5y ago

einpoklum 5y ago

EU rep: We couldn't help it, the study was stolen by pirates!

deleted 5y ago

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radicalbyte 5y ago

Page didn't load for me, thankfully we have outline to the rescue: https://outline.com/6XShGU https://outline.com/6XShGU

sharken 5y ago

It's worth noting that the EU-paid study was done in 2013, back when streaming and YouTube was on the rise. Billboard called streaming unignorable in 2013. https://www.billboard.com/amp/articles/business/8545169/2013-year-of-streaming https://www.billboard.com/amp/articles/business/8545169/2013... Still, there probably needs to be some legislation around piracy, even though it seems to not affect sales much.

kebman 5y ago
I think there's something to be said about simply supplying a superior service. While I would watch more TV and movies before, now I simply watch YouTube or Odysee. And that's it. I don't really have a need for much more. I wonder if more people have the same experience. Of course, it could also be my age and my strange interests at play though.
- hulitu 5y ago
  I cannot watch youtube. The quality of image and sound is just terrible. 4k videos with compression artifacts? Where you can see the how the image is divided for compression ? Best sound quality: opus 176 kbps ? Maybe my television and media proffessor was right: everything is negociated at the level of first telephony multiplexer: 64kbps.
  - kebman 5y ago
    I feel you! OTOH it seldom matters to me, because I mostly watch tech and docu stuff that do not require crystal clear or hifi video. Kind of like illustrated podcasts. I do see the need for a better experience when watching feature films, though, which you can also get on YouTube. But being a bit of a film buff (and one who's also shot film for cinema I might add), I don't even enjoy Netflix. Instead I try to watch films where they're supposed to be watched: At the movies. ;)
  - nvarsj 5y ago
    Youtube is probably the worst, but even Netflix has this problem. I have seen so many terrible encodes on there and the streaming bitrate is usually quite low overall. Watching dark scenes in shows on an OLED is particularly aggravating.

marshallbananas 5y ago

As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, with a a taste for Western media, especially movies, and the Internet becoming a widespread thing, it was infuriating waiting for movies to come to theaters months behind the rest of the world. Not to mention the horrible country specific posters and advertising, limited availability and titles. Piracy was the only option. It felt like the Internet would solve all these problems, like you'd be able to experience culture from any part of the world however you liked and at the same time as the rest of the world. Sadly that never happened. It's much better now but it still feels like the media is crippled by old local distributor deals. The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it. When I got my first Kindle 12 years ago my Amazon account was registered with my local European address so the books available in store were all complete trash romance pulp novels. Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise.

bserge 5y ago
Think of entertainment as a hard drug (most of it actually is). And the distribuitors are the dealers. Some will be friendly or make deals with each other, others will keep everyone else off their turf or go to war.
croes 5y ago
The internet is only a medium. It's just used by businesses and businesses are all about profit. Businesses want to be able to choose where they produce and where they pay taxes, but customers should be able to choose where they buy their goods. If you hear the term "free market" it's always about the companies not about the customer.
Boulth6 5y ago
> The Internet never delivered on its promise. The commercial internet never did. Don't forget about Torrents and lib gen rus. They're part of the internet too. > The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it. People "accept" it because it's convenient and they are not aware that there are other options. How would you suggest people reject it?

AussieWog93 5y ago

I just can't believe this. Almost every single person I knew back in the day who installed Limewire/Kazaa/Bearshare, bought an R4 cartridge or modded their Wii went from buying at least a couple of pieces of genuine media each year to never buying one again. That being said, perhaps a more useful metric for calculating lost sales would be how many people acquired the technology used for piracy, rather than how many times they used it.

gscott 5y ago
At some point you get old enough to not want to bother with piracy because of the hassle if you have a decent first world income.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  As an adult, I tend to pirate or buy knockoff goods precisely when it becomes more of a hassle than buying the real thing. For example, having to go through every streaming app to work out which one has the show you want, or buying a piece of hardware sold by an American that hasn't even thought about logistics to any country that isn't the USA.
  - 12ian34 5y ago
    Side note: in case you didn't know, Google TV kind of solves the problem of having to go through every streaming app to find which one has the desired programme with a universal search. I just got it and find it useful.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      That's handy. Hopefully it stays universal - if they started charging a fee to streaming services to be included in the search we'd be back to square one.
      - throwaway3699 5y ago

trompetenaccoun 5y ago

Of course, they don't want to get in trouble with powerful American lobbyist groups. Same reason local authorities went after the Pirate Bay guys despite them not having broken any laws in Sweden.

hulitu 5y ago
But they did brake laws. And even when they could not find anything they could have found somebody who was "raped". /s
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Sweden has such a bad reputation as a place where the is corrupt. I wonder if the public feels that?
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    High praise for Sweden: > a place where the <<nothing>> is corrupt.

sleavey 5y ago

The study mentioned in the article notes the only downside to piracy is for recently released blockbusters, where 10 pirated downloads leads to 4 fewer cinema visits. I wonder how much of that would be offset if streaming of blockbusters was available from day 1. No one would expect it to be included in Netflix subscriptions but available as an additional one-off purchase equivalent to say one month of subscription. The only losers here would be cinemas, but after decades of price gauging I think plenty would have little sympathy. It'd be interesting to find out of film companies have studied this idea. Presumably there is some limit where blockbuster "viewing parties" with N or more people would make less money for the film than some fraction of those N people going to the cinema. They can't (yet) DRM living rooms.

croes 5y ago
Price gauging thanks to the movie companies that want an ever larger share.
- sleavey 5y ago
  So cinemas are the Ticketmaster of movies?
philliphaydon 5y ago
When I was growing up I remember paying like $5 to see a movie. Used to see movies often. But as I grew up I became too busy with school to go. After I moved to Australia is went to see Avatar. The tickets in Sydney on the imax screen were $48 each… Now I just rent them from iTunes when they are avaliable.
ketzu 5y ago
> No one would expect it to be included in Netflix subscriptions Wasn't a large reaction to disney doing this during the pandemic "I already paid for the service why should I pay again"?
- glandium 5y ago
  Wasn't it more about the price being higher than visiting a movie theater?

hulitu 5y ago

From eastern europe: piracy cannot hurt sells when: 1. The title is not available in your country and 2. When the title is too expensive for the people to buy it. Piracy however helps sells. When i like some movie or music that i pirated, chances are big that i will buy it. When i don't know about it, the MPAA can keep it. Marketing failure all the way.

josefx 5y ago
From western Europe: I pay for Netflix and Amazon. Getting titles on them seems easy until you run into localization, while Netflix seems to support dozens of languages with its own titles I still run into too many videos that only offer a subtitle instead of having the English language dub to fall back to. Can we please throw all copyright lawyers into an active volcano and try to set up a system that doesn't make it intentionally impossible to legally watch the English language version of a video hosted by Amazon while in a non English speaking country? Also throw the Amazon execs who signed those licensing agreements after them.
- stefandesu 5y ago
  Yeah, this seems to be an Amazon problem. Every time I rent a movie on Amazon, I triple check whether they have the original audio. Some have English audio but no English subs which really doesn't make any sense.
  - glenneroo 5y ago
    The UI to determine these details is also frustrating. My friend had never seen Something About Mary so we decided to pay 3.99€ to watch it. It ended up being 480p and dubbed horribly in German. Never again.
agilob 5y ago
3. Quality of service in your country is so bad that you wouldn't watch it legally for free. If I remember correctly, in some EU countries GoT was available only with reader - no native English and subtitles, all episodes destroyed by a reader. In another country GoT was available in max resolution 480p, in another... you had to be subscribed to one particular ISP AND have HBO subscription. GoT was the most pirated content on torrents for quite some time.

anfogoat 5y ago

I wouldn't worry about this too much. The Commissioners they swear an oath you know. An oath to be wholly independent, so we can rule out this having been them serving special interests or anything of the sort.

intricatedetail 5y ago
They are also unelected, because they are so virtuous there is no need for people to change them.
- zaik 5y ago
  This is only half-true: "[...] candidates are chosen individually by the 27 national governments. Within the EU, the legitimacy of the commission is mainly drawn from the vote of approval that is required from the European Parliament, along with its power to dismiss the body." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission
  - intricatedetail 5y ago
    This argument is boring. Like that pushy salesmen trying to tell you the product has the feature you want, but it doesn't. There are no European Commission elections.
    - advanced-DnD 5y ago
      EU Commission does has some democratic element in it. As though they are not elected by the Europeans directly, they are proxy voted by their respective government. This is not new. For example, there are also no ministry election or, yet the government of the day still put people onto that position. This is just one example, if you're coming from the US, you can even think of the even more examples of non-directly elected official making important policies. But judging by your two comments here, you have given this matter very little thought.
    - sbuk 5y ago

scaramanga 5y ago

"Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?" - Mario Savio, quoting UC President Clark Kerr

injidup 5y ago

So funny. An article on how piracy doesn't hurt sales followed by so many posts by people boasting how they would never pay for anything because they can download it for free.

leadingthenet 5y ago
You're making the implicit assumption that they would've bought the thing either way, just chose not to because they could get it for free, which might not be the case.
bbarn 5y ago
To be fair, you're on a forum of largely highly technical people. If every one of us pirated movies and music, we still don't make a dent in the overall market.
deleted 5y ago
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beckman466 5y ago

“Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists. Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon. The sea pirates take away by force others' properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology. In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is expressed in various ways including the following. First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other. Second, “pirate” activists illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books. These activists are either from poorer countries or classes, or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and offline protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting." - Professor Jakob Rigi https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146 https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146

aneutron 5y ago

I was born and raised in an African country. My father had a salary of 500$ a month. I could never afford a 50$ book about resiliency engineering or about Java Concurrency when I was 17 years old, neither could my father. The reason I love computer science and tech and excel at some parts of it, is simply because I could access any book, pirated. I have a huge will to learn, and piracy was quite literally the only means to learn. Once I worked and got on my feet, I started buying a lot of the books that marked my learning (because nostalgia and also great resources), and if and when I can, I always buys the books. Let's not talk about movies. My town STILL has no cinema. Nearest one is 100Km away, and costs about 15$ for a ticket. So if it wasn't for piracy, I would've probably never watched Iron Man, and never dreamed of having my own Jarvis, and hence never taking up speech recognition and deep learning. Again, now that I can, I had periods where I watched 3 to 5 movies a week in the cinema, because I have the means to. I believe people are more likely to buy books/movies when they can. But for those who can't, I believe it's almost always a net positive to society to give them access to those resources.

emerged 5y ago
I think the state of software and media piracy have been in somewhat of a sweet spot. It’s technically illegal and not just every random person can easily find what they want. But those who are motivated enough to find the content and skirt the laws are able to do it. This way the industry is still able to monetize and those without the resources can still get access with some effort. I pirated like crazy growing up poor but internet savvy, but now that I’m a well paid professional it isn’t necessary and isn’t even worth the effort when I can just rent/buy.
- hh3k0 5y ago
  > It’s technically illegal and not just every random person can easily find what they want. But those who are motivated enough to find the content and skirt the laws are able to do it. «I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.» Robert A. Heinlein
- 5y ago

varsketiz 5y ago

Piracy is showing that the business model for products being pirated is supposed to be freemium.

lampe3 5y ago

I was born in Poland in the end of the 80s and lived from the 90s in Germany. Back then the only way to watch Polish Media in Germany was either via Satellite TV or VHS. Around the 00s I was into Polish Rap. Buying a CD in Germany from a polish Artist was something that you just couldn't do. So the only option I had was to download it. Later when I wanted to buy the CD I couldn't because either the store did not had it or it was sold out. If I wanted to watch polish tv shows or cartoons I either needed to later download them or my family needed to record them on VHS. In this regard the Internet helped when it comes to Music. But when it comes to tv shows and movies... Its a mess and you will end up with 10 subscriptions and hope that you find that show. I also think that with movies and tv shows, piracy and will come back because of that reason alone.

wiradikusuma 5y ago

I played pirated games when I was a kid (actually I didn't know it was pirated, I bought them off CD shops). Growing up with more money to spend, I bought legit copies of those games (and more) from GOG just feeling nostalgic. Heck I don't even play them. Now I don't play pirated games, simply because the potential problems (virus etc) outweighs the cost (I usually wait for Steam/GOG/Epic sale anyway). Same thing for software. For books.. during uni time I usually borrow books from uni library, and make a copy for personal use (so I can highlight the pages). I guess that's piracy.

rob74 5y ago

What the article doesn't mention: Julia Reda, who "unearthed" the report, was an MEP for the Pirate Party at the time. She left the party in 2019 to protest against the nomination of a candidate who was under investigation for sexual harassment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Reda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Reda).

denton-scratch 5y ago
Why the scare quotes? She did unearth it, through an FOI request. It was buried. Tiny parts were cherry-picked by commissioners, to support a conclusion diametrically opposed to the researchers' conclusions.
- deleted 5y ago
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- sp332 5y ago
  Not all quotes are scare quotes.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    But these sure seemed to be.
    - sp332 5y ago
      It's not literal unearthing. So the quotes are to set off the figure of speech. Style guides say not to do it but it's a matter of style, not correctness. I guess that's as strong as you're going to get in colloquial English though :)
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        Literal unearthing is a fairly rare usage, compared to "to discover through the expenditure of effort". The more-common usage doesn't need quotes; they imply either that it's reported speech, or that the author is sceptical.

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

I've read the whole study. TLDR: Correlation, not causation. Basically, they found that Customer A spent $100 on games, and consumed 50 units worth of Piracy. But Customer B spent only $30 on games, and consumed 10 units of piracy. They then concluded that piracy lead to more consumption. The obvious rebuttals are: 1. More voracious consumers of games will probably buy more and pirate more anyway 2. It sucks if you are one of the pirated games (eg. singleplayer, non-DRM), who loses out from this equation 3. Its great if you're eg. Fortnite or Steam, where pirated games serve as the enticement to join the ecosystem, and when customers do eventually spend, it comes to you given your huge size.

vagrantJin 5y ago

Yeah. To be fair. The people who pirate were likely never going to buy it in the first place. Like FIFA games. I've never bought one even though Ive been playing for years. But I grew up with no money to buy them amd when I did have the money, the game was all about microtransactions. So its still a no.

freeflight 5y ago
> Yeah. To be fair. The people who pirate were likely never going to buy it in the first place. That's a tad bit too simplified. There have by now been several studies/reports [0] [1] that found people pirating a certain media, are also spending most of their disposable income on said media. Sure, there's also the "I don't want to waste my money on possible garbage" curiosity/test-drive piracy. But a very large chunk are just people who enjoy the medium so much that they can't get enough of it. So they will spend all their monthly disposable income on it, and when that's gone, they will pirate because of the FOMO created by marketing hype around the newest release getting thrown at them. It's very much a manifestation of the consumerism that gets glorified in most modern societies. [0] https://torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consumers-130510/ https://torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consu... [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-pirates-tend-to-be-the-biggest-buyers-of-legal-content https://www.vice.com/en/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-pir...
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > That's a tad bit too simplified. Pet peeve: "tad bit". A tad is a bit, so either "that's a tad too simplified" or "that's a bit too simplified", but not both. Sorry, it's just... That stuff like this bothers the shit out of me.
lesquivemeau 5y ago
Well, it seems everybody is different. Personally I bought a lot of games I pirated when I was younger and I'm glad because I wouldn't have bought them in the first place If I hadn't the option of trying it beforehand

Bancakes 5y ago

Piracy has only become a supposed problem because corporations expect every consumer to purchase the product separately. I can't buy a game or album off ebay - I must buy the real thing. As far as videogames go, you can't blame piracy if your game doesn't have a demo version. No, I'm not paying Steam 100 euros for 2 hours that I may or may not get refunded.

beezischillin 5y ago

I grew up poor in Eastern Europe. Very poor, in fact. Without piracy I probably wouldn’t ever have been able to learn English, find my passion and make it in life. And not just for monetary reasons but due to access as well. Ironically enough the Internet never mattered too much because we were able to get what we wanted hand to hand. The 56k modem was completely useless when your friend had a zip drive with the games you drooled over. But it taught me to appreciate things. Even today I love physical copies of things, it is like a little trophy to the thing I love. My biggest problem nowadays is not that I can’t afford the things I love but that there is hardly anything I actually want. But when I do I often get multiple copies, whether it is on different platforms or to share the joy with friends. That being said the effects of piracy are both severe and negligible due to the quality. While it probably doesn’t affect big corporations at all, the small indie people sometimes suffer catastrophically from it.

globular-toast 5y ago

> with ten downloads leading to about four fewer cinema visits. These things aren't equal, though. As someone who loves the cinema I find it very sad, but maybe people just want to watch these things at home on their small screens now? The cinema industry hasn't helped matters by essentially turning cinemas into giant, automated TV screens. If piracy actually hurt movie sales, they simply wouldn't do home media. They'd print film on reels making it very difficult to pirate (in high quality, at least). But they don't because home media makes them tons of money, despite the piracy.

jpalomaki 5y ago

I think software piracy hurts/benefits companies in complicated ways. When kids trade copies of Photoshop, Adobe benefits from this. This allows people to learn the tool and strenghtens Adobe’s status. On the other hand more affordable options suffer. Why pay even $20 for the second best, if you can get the best for free.

JohnStrangeII 5y ago

I have a bit of a stupid question related to the topic. I'm self-publishing German sci fi and fantasy novels, nothing special, just some good entertainment (if you like my writing style). Since you cannot have a readership without Amazon and do appreciate the pocket money, I sell them on Amazon. At the same time Amazon does not allow me to give them away for free. Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author? It would probably even boost sales and also help people with less money, I just don't know how to do it. :(

taneq 5y ago
> Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author? A few well regarded authors (Charlie Stross, Cory Doctrow and Peter Watts spring to mind, I'm sure there are others) have been commercially successful despite (or because of) releasing some of their work for free download. Might be worth looking into how they approached it?
afarviral 5y ago
There are other websites that allow you to do a static upload, under a pseudonym. Just have a look on somewhere like reddit for a name of such a site. Another option would be getting in touch with a popular uploader on one of these sites or a torrent tracker and have them upload and seed. If they are a member of a private tracker they may get some sort of reward for seeding, as an incentive.
freeflight 5y ago
> Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author? The big torrent alternative in the German warez scene are direct downloads from filehosters. Which means there is no real "central place" where you can just put it for widespread exposure because it's a whole bunch of different portals/forums with individual uploads. There's a couple of well known bigger forums, like Gulli, Boerse or Bloodsuckerz, and countless "blog style" ones often specialized on certain media, those can be found on the Raidrush Toplist. So in practice you would need to sign up to a whole lot of places and post the links to your filehosted books there.

deleted 5y ago

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deltron3030 5y ago

Kinda funny how the overall interest in Photoshop tanked since they introduced their cloud service. (If you look it up on Google Trends you can clearly see a big dip from 2012 onwards).

IgorPartola 5y ago

This has been my argument for a while now: people pirate content because they wouldn’t be customers if they had to pay for it. In other words while RIAA/MPAA can argue that by torrenting the latest blockbuster you cost them $20 in rental fees or a movie ticket in reality you wouldn’t have bought those things, to a first approximation.

55555 5y ago

I didn't read the article, and I agree with the premise, but don't get carried away. Ofcourse piracy _can_ detract from purchases. Pornography was a massive pay-for-content industry that was pretty much entirely decimated by the rise of tube sites.

__m 5y ago

what's the point though? If you make it legal it will definitely hurt sales

sp332 5y ago
The point, as the article says later, is that piracy is used as an excuse to implement invasive surveillance of all file uploads. This just highlights that it's a pure power grab with no justification at all.

deleted 5y ago

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arpa 5y ago

piracy is the only answer when you get bullshit like this: https://watannetwork.com/tools/blocked/#url=oRqjVPljSGQ https://watannetwork.com/tools/blocked/#url=oRqjVPljSGQ

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Why? Were they worried that releasing the study would increase piracy and hurt sales?

GuB-42 5y ago

The thing is: people have a budget, whether they want it or not. So, when they spend $50 to buy a video game, that's $50 less for theaters. It is all connected, so I think that in the end, free piracy (like torrenting) doesn't change much on the global scale.

tasubotadas 5y ago

Can't help but think that this is Germany's influence - there are extremely strong IP groups that try to push ridiculous IP protection laws EU-wide and, obviously, this paper didn't help to push their discourse so it had to be buried.

CRConrad 5y ago
> Can't help but think that this is Germany's influence OTOH, this was pre-Brexit, and AFAIK Britain is much bigger in the media, film and music industries than Germany. So why would this be Germany's influence and not Britain's?

JohnHaugeland 5y ago

It's weird how, when you read the study, or even the first concrete sentence they say about it, it actually says something very, very different > It concluded that one specific category, blockbuster movies, is negatively impacted by piracy, with ten downloads leading to about four fewer cinema visits. Overall, that reduced sales for certain films by about 4.4 percent on average.

fleaaaaa 5y ago

I don't know much about other medium but I know some folks who's sharing shit tons of library on soulseek are spending much more money on local music scene than average. Kinda make sense..

MilkyFloor 5y ago

Good <a href="https://ru.wikipedia.org/">informationen</a> https://ru.wikipedia.org/">informationen</a>

neycoda 5y ago

Well, stealing is bad, you know?

Siira 5y ago
Stupidity is vile, you know?

BringerOfChaos 5y ago

I'm a book author of several titles from multiple publishers. This correlates with my experience. In fact, when I've found my books on pirate sites it has tended to correlate with a bump in sales, presumably because someone who wouldn't have seen them downloaded and decided they were worth the price and threw some money my way.

oliwarner 5y ago

Distribution bullshit hurts sales more than piracy. "You can only watch this two months after the US release", "This isn't available in your country", "You need an internet connection to watch this", "You can't watch this on Linux", "You need to pay for 170 channels to watch one", "This that one show you want to watch requires a £12.99 monthly subscription", "You will pay cinema prices but will have to supply the TV, seating and only get to play it back once", "You will pay new-DVD prices but won't be able to share it with a friend" We pretend that the surge of Netflix, Prime, Disney online services means this is getting more open, more free, but it the same game via a different medium. Piracy still offers a better service, less bullshit. If they stopped treating people like criminals, yes, they might lose some cash, but they'd also pull in the people they've lost to years of abuse.