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Wait.. what is this? A Government talking sense! Wow! Most of my friends 'acquire' digital content. All spend money on cinema, entertainment events, video game

Wait.. what is this? A Government talking sense! Wow! Most of my friends 'acquire' digital content. All spend money on cinema, entertainment events, video games and legit DVD's and box sets of things they really like. In all cases the decision to go pirate is convenience + cost. A DVD at £14 is seen as too expensive. Similarly 79p for a single audio track file which you only need to play on your iPod seems a little pricy. Since Spotify came about everyone I know has cut back on music downloaded. Apart from iPod tracks there is no reason to get the actual file. If pirated content disappeared overnight I personally would mostly live without. If I did buy a DVD for a silly price, that would mean I wouldn't be visiting the cinema that week. I think the majority of my friends would do the same. The trouble with law makers is the influence the music and film industry have on them. The facts are there to be seen. Someone who goes out of their way to get a pirate copy of something will typically spend more on entertainment than those who don't. The music industry likes to believe that every track downloaded is 79p they could have had. That isn't the case at all. If you took away all pirated material you would restrict discovery of new entertainment. Film / Music people may get slightly more money from certain people but the majority of this money would come at the expensive of other things. I am not saying piracy is good but it certainly isn't the devil which many law and policy makers make out it is and its nice to see this acknowledged by an EU state.

tripa 15y ago
Switzerland is not an EU state.
- iwwr 15y ago
  No, but you could rent a VPN connection located there and permanently avoid EU harassment.
  - dasil003 15y ago
    Suddenly the Swiss position seems quite enterprising.
    - technomancy 15y ago
      As does Canada's rich and bountiful public domain.
- JSGraef 15y ago
  Correct, but they subscribe to many of the same rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Union_relations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Un...
fsniper 15y ago
You are talking saner than any of the world governments.
thomasgerbe 15y ago
'Since Spotify came about everyone I know has cut back on music downloaded.' Musicians still seem to lose out on this model as they do not make that much money from it.
- VonLipwig 15y ago
  I disagree completely. Artists are loosing out because people who buy legitimate music are switching to Spotify. I buy the music of bands I really like. I buy their albums as a conscious choice to support them. For other bands I would download their music, the artist would get £0 from me unless I went to see them live. Since switching to Spotify, artists whose albums I would have'pirated' are getting a few cents which they wouldn't otherwise have got. They are winning.. if you could call a few cents winning. The problem the music industry has is that non-pirates, people who otherwise would have purchased an album are switching to Spotify for recreational listening. If a CD is worth £8 to various people it means that shops, labels and artists loose about £7.90 if the person chooses Spotify instead of purchasing. Artists and Labels can work around this. They can not put latest albums on Spotify. They can withdraw their music in the hopes they can negotiate a higher streaming price. Both of these would lead to more piracy.. MORE IMPORTANTLY.. this would lead to more casual listeners purchasing music and keeping the wheel's turning for labels. Spotify is reducing piracy at the cost of reducing the number of non-pirates prepared to pay for music ownership. Music label's say that piracy is the devil and they are missing out on millions. Spotify proves there is limited value in ending piracy. Spotify also proves there is a growing desire for people to have access to, but not ownership of, music. This is what should be terrifying labels, not piracy.
  - niels_olson 15y ago
    > Spotify proves there is limited value in ending piracy. Oh, that is a wonderful insight! I might tone down the word "prove", but overall, that's a really important observation!
- joebadmo 15y ago
  I keep seeing this argument and I keep not understanding it. Is it an economic argument? What is the economic point? The economic point to me seems to be that musicians were previously making money on inefficiencies that streaming services have now solved. Just like newspapers made a lot of money on classifieds before craigslist. Sucks for musicians, but it's an economic reality. Or is it a moral argument? That musiciancs deserve to be paid a certain wage, and that streaming services are taking that away? This seems pretty absurd to me. I think musicians need to come to terms with reality, which is not that different from old reality, actually: recorded music is basically a commodity, unless you win the megahit lottery. The way to make money as a working musician is through the scarce products you can provide: live performances, merch, and relationships with your audience. Google Amanda Palmer.
paulhauggis 15y ago
"The trouble with law makers is the influence the music and film industry have on them. The facts are there to be seen. Someone who goes out of their way to get a pirate copy of something will typically spend more on entertainment than those who don't." I have yet to see any concrete evidence of this. "The music industry likes to believe that every track downloaded is 79p they could have had. That isn't the case at all. " It's funny. The excuses as to why people download pirated content changes every couple of years. Maybe it has to do with different age groups. Remember when albums where $20 and everyone complained that the reason they were downloading rather than buying was because it was too expensive and they couldn't buy an individual song? It put many stores out of business and many people lost their jobs. Nobody seem to talk about this though. It's ridiculous to me that with so many legal services and songs at .99, people still pirate music. But it does show that it was all just an excuse. People that pirate just want free stuff. "certainly isn't the devil which many law and policy makers make out it is" Piracy isn't 1-to-1 theft. However, if companies don't do anything about it, people will just expect their content to be free and in the future, they won't be able to charge anything for it. "If pirated content disappeared overnight I personally would mostly live without. If I did buy a DVD for a silly price, that would mean I wouldn't be visiting the cinema that week. I think the majority of my friends would do the same." You think the price is silly, yet you still download it. You are getting enjoyment out of listening or watching the content and you aren't compensating the artists and many people that went into creating it. How is this in any way honest?
- Qz 15y ago
  "I have yet to see any concrete evidence of this." Did you read the article?
- niels_olson 15y ago
  > How is this in any way honest? Through a paradigm shift, which is long overdue. Should the public have free access to scholarly papers and pay to see the doctor, lawyer, and geneticist? Should the public have free access to musical recordings and pay to see the artists live? Seems to me in both cases the net effect, the consequence, would be a higher quality of public discourse and appreciation. And that would be in the public's interest. By comparison, implicit in your argument is an endorsement of the current system, wherein 77 years of copyright is just fine. From a deontological perspective, perhaps. Certainly lawyers make their money perpetuating a purely deontological view of the world, claiming they're the only ones who can parse the ontology of duties. This divide between the deontological position to a consequentalist position is exactly the bridge Lessig believes the Supreme Court wanted him to cross, and he failed to realize it. Free Culture was his mea culpa. I'm not sure how old you are, but my personal observation at 35 is that the quality of public discourse has improved since the advent of the internet. It would be a tough sell to claim that more information is better, but more access to high quality information is worse. Fundamentally, it's not about honoring the terms of scams corporate lobbyists perpetrated as we awoke from a 50-year TV-induced coma. It's about the public interest. In that paradigm, a consequentalist paradigm focused on the public interest, more access to high quality information is better. Building the quantitative body of evidence to examine the consequentalist position is exactly what scholars have been laboring at for the last decade. And arguably the most advanced, sophisticated, educated society on the planet has examined the evidence and found it sufficient to directly, explicitly, reject in whole and in part, the deontological arguments of the old business model. I will stretch this a bit further: if you look at history, I think you will find progress is often a story that starts with a deontology, a consequentalist argument forms, which is then backed up with evidence, adopted, and then forms the foundation of a new, hopefully less misguided deontology. If you can identify a deontology, look for consequentalist arguments that oppose it. edit in reply to geoffschmidt: How to implement? I think we have seen that grandfathering current stakeholders has historically been an effective path to progress in the long term. As the new rules apply to more people, the old rules enjoy progressively fewer supporters, and eventually the new rules prevail. In terms of defining their copyright as "property", we're getting into the merits of the term "intellectual property", which is a red herring. There is no such thing under the law, but it is a very useful conflation of ideas for patent lawyers who need to pay off their Maseratis. The facts will set you free.
fauigerzigerk 15y ago
I don't think the facts are that easy to see. I'm not dogmatic about this issue at all but the constant entertainment spending assumption in this study seems rather questionable to me for two reasons: 1) People could behave very differently if the conclusions of this study became law everywhere, hence the conclusion may be self negating. 2) Even if entertainment budgets remain constant, the cost of providing the services doesn't. If someone downloads music for free and uses the money saved to go to a concert, they are consuming more in terms of other people's labor for the same price.
- kapitalx 15y ago
  " If someone downloads music for free and uses the money saved to go to a concert, they are consuming more in terms of other people's labor for the same price." Though due to the higher distribution of the content (since its at no cost to the consumer), more people are discovering it, and more people are going to the concerts. Lower margins, higher volume.
  - fauigerzigerk 15y ago
    Not if entertainment budgets are constant, which is the assumption in that study. Constant entertainment budgets means there is no room for volume growth in terms of money, unless you are referring to developing countries where it's probably different.
    - niels_olson 15y ago
      Even in a flat market, of course there is room for volume growth for the individual proprietor, in this case, the artist. But a flat market requires more competitive rules to avoid monopolistic tendencies. In the Swiss regime, the distribution of sales will smear out over more small artists and fewer giants. The long tail gets thicker. My brother is an artist. I'm totally fine with that scenario.
    - learc83 15y ago
      I assume entertainment budgets are a constant percentage of total discretionary spending. So they go up as income increases with economic growth.
Tycho 15y ago
Stealing something deprives the owner of 100% of its value or potential earnings. Pirating something does not deprive the owner of 100% of its value or potential earnings. Nor is it 0%. It's obviously somewhere in between, on an aggregate level. Like between 30% and 70%. (you;ve also got to analyse it from the perspective that pirates will download anything and everything, without even watching it. But on aggregate it probably means where they would have spent £30 a month on the industry, now they spend £0). "Film / Music people may get slightly more money from certain people but the majority of this money would come at the expensive of other things." Uh... that's a terrible argument. We're not talking about balancing the budget of the different departments within the same company or something, we're talking about the violation of peoples rights. Just because teens spend all their money on games, rather than music, now, doesn't not make it right.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  > Pirating something does not deprive the owner of 100% of its value or potential earnings. Nor is it 0%. It's obviously somewhere in between, on an aggregate level. Like between 30% and 70%. "potential earnings" does not mean "value". You have no fundamental right to get paid; you need to convince people to pay you. If you don't like it, don't provide your work in the first place. Copyright deprives people of a non-zero percentage of the value of a work in the public domain; you claim people don't have the right to that value in the first place. My ability to resell a used lamp deprives the lamp maker of the value they'd get by selling a new one; they still have no right to prevent me from doing so.
  - Tycho 15y ago
    Whatever. The point is that while content producers would not sell 100% of the stuff that gets pirated, nor would they have sold 0%.
    - JoshTriplett 15y ago
      You seem to have entirely ignored my point and just repeated yours. Your claim probably holds true, and I didn't dispute it, but that doesn't make it relevant.

tripa 15y ago

Switzerland is not an EU state.

iwwr 15y ago
No, but you could rent a VPN connection located there and permanently avoid EU harassment.
- dasil003 15y ago
  Suddenly the Swiss position seems quite enterprising.
  - technomancy 15y ago
    As does Canada's rich and bountiful public domain.
JSGraef 15y ago
Correct, but they subscribe to many of the same rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Union_relations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Un...

fsniper 15y ago

You are talking saner than any of the world governments.

thomasgerbe 15y ago

'Since Spotify came about everyone I know has cut back on music downloaded.' Musicians still seem to lose out on this model as they do not make that much money from it.

VonLipwig 15y ago
I disagree completely. Artists are loosing out because people who buy legitimate music are switching to Spotify. I buy the music of bands I really like. I buy their albums as a conscious choice to support them. For other bands I would download their music, the artist would get £0 from me unless I went to see them live. Since switching to Spotify, artists whose albums I would have'pirated' are getting a few cents which they wouldn't otherwise have got. They are winning.. if you could call a few cents winning. The problem the music industry has is that non-pirates, people who otherwise would have purchased an album are switching to Spotify for recreational listening. If a CD is worth £8 to various people it means that shops, labels and artists loose about £7.90 if the person chooses Spotify instead of purchasing. Artists and Labels can work around this. They can not put latest albums on Spotify. They can withdraw their music in the hopes they can negotiate a higher streaming price. Both of these would lead to more piracy.. MORE IMPORTANTLY.. this would lead to more casual listeners purchasing music and keeping the wheel's turning for labels. Spotify is reducing piracy at the cost of reducing the number of non-pirates prepared to pay for music ownership. Music label's say that piracy is the devil and they are missing out on millions. Spotify proves there is limited value in ending piracy. Spotify also proves there is a growing desire for people to have access to, but not ownership of, music. This is what should be terrifying labels, not piracy.
- niels_olson 15y ago
  > Spotify proves there is limited value in ending piracy. Oh, that is a wonderful insight! I might tone down the word "prove", but overall, that's a really important observation!
joebadmo 15y ago
I keep seeing this argument and I keep not understanding it. Is it an economic argument? What is the economic point? The economic point to me seems to be that musicians were previously making money on inefficiencies that streaming services have now solved. Just like newspapers made a lot of money on classifieds before craigslist. Sucks for musicians, but it's an economic reality. Or is it a moral argument? That musiciancs deserve to be paid a certain wage, and that streaming services are taking that away? This seems pretty absurd to me. I think musicians need to come to terms with reality, which is not that different from old reality, actually: recorded music is basically a commodity, unless you win the megahit lottery. The way to make money as a working musician is through the scarce products you can provide: live performances, merch, and relationships with your audience. Google Amanda Palmer.

paulhauggis 15y ago

"The trouble with law makers is the influence the music and film industry have on them. The facts are there to be seen. Someone who goes out of their way to get a pirate copy of something will typically spend more on entertainment than those who don't." I have yet to see any concrete evidence of this. "The music industry likes to believe that every track downloaded is 79p they could have had. That isn't the case at all. " It's funny. The excuses as to why people download pirated content changes every couple of years. Maybe it has to do with different age groups. Remember when albums where $20 and everyone complained that the reason they were downloading rather than buying was because it was too expensive and they couldn't buy an individual song? It put many stores out of business and many people lost their jobs. Nobody seem to talk about this though. It's ridiculous to me that with so many legal services and songs at .99, people still pirate music. But it does show that it was all just an excuse. People that pirate just want free stuff. "certainly isn't the devil which many law and policy makers make out it is" Piracy isn't 1-to-1 theft. However, if companies don't do anything about it, people will just expect their content to be free and in the future, they won't be able to charge anything for it. "If pirated content disappeared overnight I personally would mostly live without. If I did buy a DVD for a silly price, that would mean I wouldn't be visiting the cinema that week. I think the majority of my friends would do the same." You think the price is silly, yet you still download it. You are getting enjoyment out of listening or watching the content and you aren't compensating the artists and many people that went into creating it. How is this in any way honest?

Qz 15y ago
"I have yet to see any concrete evidence of this." Did you read the article?
niels_olson 15y ago
> How is this in any way honest? Through a paradigm shift, which is long overdue. Should the public have free access to scholarly papers and pay to see the doctor, lawyer, and geneticist? Should the public have free access to musical recordings and pay to see the artists live? Seems to me in both cases the net effect, the consequence, would be a higher quality of public discourse and appreciation. And that would be in the public's interest. By comparison, implicit in your argument is an endorsement of the current system, wherein 77 years of copyright is just fine. From a deontological perspective, perhaps. Certainly lawyers make their money perpetuating a purely deontological view of the world, claiming they're the only ones who can parse the ontology of duties. This divide between the deontological position to a consequentalist position is exactly the bridge Lessig believes the Supreme Court wanted him to cross, and he failed to realize it. Free Culture was his mea culpa. I'm not sure how old you are, but my personal observation at 35 is that the quality of public discourse has improved since the advent of the internet. It would be a tough sell to claim that more information is better, but more access to high quality information is worse. Fundamentally, it's not about honoring the terms of scams corporate lobbyists perpetrated as we awoke from a 50-year TV-induced coma. It's about the public interest. In that paradigm, a consequentalist paradigm focused on the public interest, more access to high quality information is better. Building the quantitative body of evidence to examine the consequentalist position is exactly what scholars have been laboring at for the last decade. And arguably the most advanced, sophisticated, educated society on the planet has examined the evidence and found it sufficient to directly, explicitly, reject in whole and in part, the deontological arguments of the old business model. I will stretch this a bit further: if you look at history, I think you will find progress is often a story that starts with a deontology, a consequentalist argument forms, which is then backed up with evidence, adopted, and then forms the foundation of a new, hopefully less misguided deontology. If you can identify a deontology, look for consequentalist arguments that oppose it. edit in reply to geoffschmidt: How to implement? I think we have seen that grandfathering current stakeholders has historically been an effective path to progress in the long term. As the new rules apply to more people, the old rules enjoy progressively fewer supporters, and eventually the new rules prevail. In terms of defining their copyright as "property", we're getting into the merits of the term "intellectual property", which is a red herring. There is no such thing under the law, but it is a very useful conflation of ideas for patent lawyers who need to pay off their Maseratis. The facts will set you free.

fauigerzigerk 15y ago

I don't think the facts are that easy to see. I'm not dogmatic about this issue at all but the constant entertainment spending assumption in this study seems rather questionable to me for two reasons: 1) People could behave very differently if the conclusions of this study became law everywhere, hence the conclusion may be self negating. 2) Even if entertainment budgets remain constant, the cost of providing the services doesn't. If someone downloads music for free and uses the money saved to go to a concert, they are consuming more in terms of other people's labor for the same price.

kapitalx 15y ago
" If someone downloads music for free and uses the money saved to go to a concert, they are consuming more in terms of other people's labor for the same price." Though due to the higher distribution of the content (since its at no cost to the consumer), more people are discovering it, and more people are going to the concerts. Lower margins, higher volume.
- fauigerzigerk 15y ago
  Not if entertainment budgets are constant, which is the assumption in that study. Constant entertainment budgets means there is no room for volume growth in terms of money, unless you are referring to developing countries where it's probably different.
  - niels_olson 15y ago
    Even in a flat market, of course there is room for volume growth for the individual proprietor, in this case, the artist. But a flat market requires more competitive rules to avoid monopolistic tendencies. In the Swiss regime, the distribution of sales will smear out over more small artists and fewer giants. The long tail gets thicker. My brother is an artist. I'm totally fine with that scenario.
  - learc83 15y ago
    I assume entertainment budgets are a constant percentage of total discretionary spending. So they go up as income increases with economic growth.

Tycho 15y ago

Stealing something deprives the owner of 100% of its value or potential earnings. Pirating something does not deprive the owner of 100% of its value or potential earnings. Nor is it 0%. It's obviously somewhere in between, on an aggregate level. Like between 30% and 70%. (you;ve also got to analyse it from the perspective that pirates will download anything and everything, without even watching it. But on aggregate it probably means where they would have spent £30 a month on the industry, now they spend £0). "Film / Music people may get slightly more money from certain people but the majority of this money would come at the expensive of other things." Uh... that's a terrible argument. We're not talking about balancing the budget of the different departments within the same company or something, we're talking about the violation of peoples rights. Just because teens spend all their money on games, rather than music, now, doesn't not make it right.

JoshTriplett 15y ago
> Pirating something does not deprive the owner of 100% of its value or potential earnings. Nor is it 0%. It's obviously somewhere in between, on an aggregate level. Like between 30% and 70%. "potential earnings" does not mean "value". You have no fundamental right to get paid; you need to convince people to pay you. If you don't like it, don't provide your work in the first place. Copyright deprives people of a non-zero percentage of the value of a work in the public domain; you claim people don't have the right to that value in the first place. My ability to resell a used lamp deprives the lamp maker of the value they'd get by selling a new one; they still have no right to prevent me from doing so.
- Tycho 15y ago
  Whatever. The point is that while content producers would not sell 100% of the stuff that gets pirated, nor would they have sold 0%.
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    You seem to have entirely ignored my point and just repeated yours. Your claim probably holds true, and I didn't dispute it, but that doesn't make it relevant.