13 ms·

The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

580 points by grecy 4y ago

cassianoleal 4y ago
Needs [2017] in the title.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Prob at height of piracy powers before Netflix and music streaming services went popular
  - 226_ebro_treaty 4y ago
    Thought that height was more like 2010-2015 before Netflix got really popular. Heck, I remember listening to Spotify in 2011...
  - tpxl 4y ago
    Netflix has successfully driven me back to piracy. Their catalog is shit, they have only one part of a lot of trilogies, Harry Potter keeps disappearing and their UI is so full of bugs I wonder if anyone working at Netflix actually uses it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
_royadar 4y ago
I own Netflix although I mostly use stremio with torrentino. Seems like statistics got it right.
- eecc 4y ago
  Uh, you don’t own Netflix (unless you’re a shareholder). You’re a subscriber.
  - _royadar 4y ago
    Luckily I'm also a shareholder.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
smugglerFlynn 4y ago
Title is extremely misleading: > The report found that illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games, according to the report. > The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films: “The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”
- bee_rider 4y ago
  It is not extremely misleading. Most movies are not major blockbuster films, and no games are.
  - Garlef 4y ago
    But the plain amount of movies is not a very good metric of size here: I guess major blockbuster films have a big share of the total market size?
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Sure, it depends on what you care about. Just think of it as a friction term, to slow down these runaway franchises.
  - tqi 4y ago
    Of course it is - the title says "Piracy Doesn’t Harm Sales", and most sales aka revenue comes from blockbusters. Global box office in 2019 was $42B[1], and the top 10 highest grossing movies alone accounted for $13B[2]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271856/global-box-office-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/271856/global-box-office... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_in_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_in_film
    - mandmandam 4y ago
      If losing some small portion of their tens of billions to piracy actually helps hundreds of smaller producers to somewhat level the grossly inequitable playing field, then I think the title is fair. If hundreds or thousands of smaller businesses are allowed to flourish or even survive, thanks to the higher sales due to piracy leveling the playing field a bit, then it would be kinda wild to suggest that "piracy harms sales", as if only Disney matters. Btw, 10 out of those top 10 films you cite for 2019 were sequels or remakes. All of them came from huge established megacorps - 7 Disney, 2 Sony, 1 WB. My sympathy for them could dance on the head of a pin.
wizzwizz4 4y ago
The study did not find that piracy does harm sales. There's a difference. (One might infer from the data that it doesn't, but that's different to the study having concluded that.)
suddenclarity 4y ago
The headline seems misleading: > The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally. Remember that absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. The study seems to point at the first one. I don't care enough to be bothered with reading a 300 page report but if you consider taking it as truth, I would recommend you to read and analyse the method before drawing conclusions based on the headline.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Although, it is easy to misinterpret your quote because of the removed context. > The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films:“The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.” This is only true for a subset of films, “major blockbusters.” (Of courses, this is where the “top” in your quote comes from, but it seems easy to miss).
  - nomel 4y ago
    That seems significant, for Hollywood. What am I not understanding here? Why is this wrapped in a "the only" phrasing?
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Hollywood isn’t in the EU. Maybe they didn’t care about big US style blockbusters so much. Serving their constituents and whatnot.
    - dmbche 4y ago
      This is accounting for piracy of games, music and movies - in total, having only one place where sales are affected is quite minimal - and looks like an anomaly if everything else is unaffected.
- ketzu 4y ago
  They call it out directly, citing > [it means that] the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect
_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
Look, I like free stuff as much as the next guy, but I don't buy (no pun intended) the results of this study: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/15/us-recorded-music-revenues-46-percent-lower/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/15/us-recorded-musi...
- ilyt 4y ago
  Can't put CD into your phone; but you can put MP3 on it. As Gaben said, "piracy is a service problem". Look at years; that's when portable music players; then smartphones; started to become popular Pirating is easier than buying CD then ripping MP3 just to listen. If we had the ease of use of today's music streaming the dip would probably be much lower; but between the tech at the time and RIAA cockblocking anyone that tried.
  - 542458 4y ago
    Re: Gaben quote - While there are some grains of truth to the quote, I think it’s oversimplifying the problem. After all, Gaben’s primary product is essentially a DRM platform (one of the first online DRM platforms for that matter!), evidently he believes he can’t compete with piracy on service quality alone. Continuing the game piracy line, game piracy is often a significantly worse service outside of the “free stuff” aspect. You have to learn how torrents work, download risky executable files from the internet, and/or run sketchy cracking utilities. VS Steam or GoG which are generally fairly polished experiences that offer nice value-adds (updating, social features, etc). Take Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. You can buy a DRM free copy from GoG pretty easily… yet the torrents for it are still quite active from what I can see.
    - dcow 4y ago
      You’re kinda arguing the same thing. Just because a torrent is active doesn't mean the volume is high or even remotely comparable to actual sales. For the right price, people will do what is most convenient, generally. The fact that Steam has DRM only matters to users here. Steam/GoG is easier than torrenting is easier than driving to the store. Sure, not everyone has $70 to drop on a AAA, but then you get into the copyleft argument that authors would still benefit by giving their content to people who cant afford the list price for a reduced price or even free since you wouldn’t have sold it at full price anyway so you’re missing out on the word of mouth marketing and any lower revenue paid.
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
If there's a will there's a way.
draw_down 4y ago
[dead]
voytec 4y ago
Before Poland joined the EU, one of leftovers from communism was that IP laws resembled these in China - in reality there were none in effect. Imagine farmers' market but with bootleg VHS and audio cassettes, CDs, brand clothes etc. In every major city. On a weekly basis. Great majority of Poles were poor as shit and buying original copy of music or video cassette was a very distant thought. Piracy was "normal". I was introduced to The Prodigy by my math teacher, who lent me a copy-copy of their Music for the Jilted Generation. I learned English from pirated movies. Got to know a lot of great music and TV shows. I now own all of Prodigy's CDs as well as hundreds of other legal music CDs and BluRay sets/boxes. Not a chance in hell I'd buy all this without a taste of a product beforehand. Looking at this from 2023, I believe that our access to affordable (pirated) creations of western culture allowed up to leave Soviet (or communist as we were not a part of CCCP) mentality behind more quickly.
- wslh 4y ago
  Argentina was not poor as shit but have the same experience as Poland and many other parts of the world. I think it is more connected to the culture and economic "platform" than to economic means: piracy is linked to the "fungible" nature of media and software. I think now less piracy is connected to subscription services where you never own the software. On the other hand, anti-piracy means for software such as Microsoft Office or Adobe should be considered malware.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I remember my friend basically paid for all his PC upgrades by investing in CD writer and just ripping stuff for people for equivalent of $5 a pop. If we didn't pirate we wouldn't "buy more games", maybe once a year, coz we were poor. Once steam become a thing and once I started earning wages and just bought stuff, it was easier and it come with updates. Piracy is mostly a service problem. And it also enables gamepass-like usage, download, play for 2 hours ,if you don't like it just delete it. I guess Steam refunds cover that angle well now. Sure, from time to time someone will go "fuck you Squeenix, I won't pay $70 for port 2 years after the release", but overall people who massively pirate usually can't afford most of what they pirate in the first place.
jobs_throwaway 4y ago
It makes absolute sense. There's tons of music/movies/books that I never would have been exposed to if it weren't for piracy. As a result, I've bought a ton of legal media from those artists that I wouldn't have otherwise.
godzillabrennus 4y ago
I’ve worked to prevent piracy of a SaaS software for a niche industry. When we put the first anti piracy solution in place during the winter of 2020 they tripled the number of subscribers within a week. Some might argue this was due to Covid lockdowns but this was months after most businesses had already been locked down and the timing directly coincided with the implementation. Support was inundated with requests to disable the new feature that had prevented piracy. Subscriptions have kept growing nicely. On the other hand, I got started in software development as a kid by learning about how to use hex editors to implement hacks in games. The warez scene was big in those days. Not sure what the right answer is to addressing piracy. I’m sure it helps kids and those in developing countries get into the industry but if people don’t pay for something it’ll no longer be offered.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  How was the SaaS product pirated? I've always used that to refer to a delivery model where the software is centrally hosted. Was it that people were sharing their logins?
  - hultner 4y ago
    I’ve seen my fair share of web-apps where the subscription check is entirely client side JS and a simple self MITM is enough to bypass payments. Not saying this is the case in this particular instance but it’s definitely something I’ve seen more then once. I’ve brought it up as an issue with some companies but I’m usually met with a shrug and a response in the realms of “our users wouldn’t know how to do that”. I’ve even seen car charging poles with entirely client side JS to validate account/login to charge for the electricity. I too have grown up, playing games with a hex editor in one hand and tcpdump in another so I have a habit of poking around to see how stuffs made.
  - skrebbel 4y ago
    I assume it was locally hosted with some register/licensing thing. Eg Photoshop and IntelliJ are effectively SaaS but run on your computer.
photochemsyn 4y ago
The best way to reduce piracy of copyrighted works is to cut the copyright period by 75% relative to current standards. To be fair to individual living authors who hold their own copyrights, this would mean copyrights persisted 18 years past the author's death, or for 24 years after date of publication for for-hire contract jobs. This is comparable to the lifetime of technical patents, and so would allow for a reasonable period to collect revenue from the work that can be used to finance new works and so on. Otherwise, you just have consolidated interests squatting on material and collecting rents for no justifiable reason. It's entirely ridiculous, for example, that a 1957 film like the Seventh Seal isn't yet in the public domain. This kind of reasonable change to copyright law would go a long ways towards justifying legal crackdowns on piracy of more recent works, I think.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > It's entirely ridiculous, for example, that a 1957 film like the Seventh Seal isn't yet in the public domain. That's way too generous. It's ridiculous that films made before 2010 aren't in the public domain. We're all going to be long dead before this stuff enters the public domain. Our culture should belong to us, not a bunch of corporations. If they want to keep making money, they should have to make new stuff instead of endless remakes of past successful IPs.
  - Entinel 4y ago
    I disagree with your disagreement. 10 years is too short, 70 years is too long. There should definitely be a reduction but 10 years isn't it.
    - dcow 4y ago
      How about 14 years?
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      Even 10 years is too generous. I'd rather make it 0 instead. I said 10 years because it's what would make copyright tolerable. The right thing as far as I'm concerned is abolishing it straight up. 10 years is a reasonable compromise. Remember, copyright exists at all because we allow it. The raw reality these monopolists face is that public domain is the default state of all information. We're all just pretending that we can't easily copy this stuff. The social contract was: we pretend we don't know how to copy their stuff, they get to make their money and then the works enter the public domain. They're clearly not keeping up their end of the social contract. Why should we? We should all just stop pretending we're dumb enough not to download their stuff at zero cost.
tric 4y ago
If the technology to distribute/consume the content were more restrictive, would content producers at every level have a global reach? Piracy is an acceptable loss enabled by the tech that allows global distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting)
dudul 4y ago
Now do DRMs.
karaterobot 4y ago
The study was an online questionnaire, for what it's worth.
hellotomyrars 4y ago
I have a Netflix account and I still torrent the content because unless I use edge I don’t get greater than 720p. I torrent a lot of games because 2 hours (steam refund) is a very narrow window for a lot of games. The reality is 90% of them I don’t end up meshing with. The ones that I do, I buy.
- dcow 4y ago
  Netflix streams in 4k but you have to pay $4 extra for premium or whatever.
  - unmole 4y ago
    On Linux, there is no way to watch Netflix in 4k irrespective of the plan.
    - FalconSensei 4y ago
      Yeah, and all because stupid DRM. Easier to torrent than to watch officially
  - FalconSensei 4y ago
    4k is in the most expensive (4 screens) plan. If you only have 1 tv, that's 2 steps up (going to 2 screens for full hd, and 4 screens for 4k)
  - the_mungler 4y ago
    Even then, I don't believe they stream 4k to browsers. They only stream to devices like smart tvs or official Netflix apps with high quality. Your average browser is limited to 720p. This is the quintessential "pirating is better" example.
    - hellotomyrars 4y ago
      It’s so often a services problem. I honestly probably wouldn’t pay if it weren’t a family shared account, but my parents use it and they don’t know or care about the video quality like that. I also just prefer the video player of my choice. Paying customers should never have a worse experience than pirating customers. I think this is a huge reason for the success of music streaming. Less so for video streaming now with the huge fragmentation.
endisneigh 4y ago
To be honest I’ve never understood why people believe they’re entitled other people’s work for free. Perhaps someone can clarify?
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  It’s the nature of how computers make copying an initial work nearly zero additional cost. This has never been the case in human history prior to digital/analog recording of content, and it keeps getting closer and closer to zero cost to duplicate. This breaks people’s moral framework because they now have to grasp things like game theory to understand second and third order harm.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    I still don't understand - even if the cost is literally zero to copy, that still wouldn't necessarily entitle one to someone else's work without compensation if that is what they require.
    - skeaker 4y ago
      For most people it comes down to trying something they aren't sure they will enjoy. If you're not sure you'll like something that costs a significant amount and piracy is not an option, you most likely just won't buy it. If piracy is an option, maybe you still don't buy it, but now you get to try it. Both outcomes have the same effect on the publisher of the work so the act of piracy hasn't harmed anyone, costed anyone anything, and now the user can come away knowing whether or not they liked the work which is a positive. It's not that hard of a concept but easy to be confused by if you look at it from the traditional sense of physical wares where a "stolen" sale causes harm.
    - mensetmanusman 4y ago
      I think people consider a copy of work differently than the original in some abstract sense. Digital is the first medium that makes the copy equivalent to the original.
  - 4y ago
dang 4y ago
Discussed at the time: EU suppressed results of a study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 - Sept 2017 (38 comments)
8jef 4y ago
Let's say IP such and such is protected by copyright, which is bound to restrict piracy, which can be defined as enjoyment and/or distribution of copyrighted IP without retribution to rightful ownership. This is all fine when you have some control over distribution, which is not the case anymore, mainly because torrent protocole. IP rightful owners went the easy way, weaponizing willfully abiding legal systems and what not (paid with our taxes), while dealing directly with large IP distribution platforms, before launching their own distribution platforms. This is where we're at. Big deal. Torrents are still a thing, as much as sharing on other protocoles, through territories outside the rule of law, but not only. How about trying something else? How about putting up a realistic price on IP, so anyone willing to pay (and get a receipt for it) could enjoy and distribute IP legally, no matter how and from where they got said IP in the first place? How about a price per head per event (phe fare?), a price that is affordable enough for anyone to compete any big corporations? Even with some temporal and/or geographical restrictions, I'd gladly pay, if that means I can legally enjoy and share stuff outside platform limitations. How about I open my own repertoire theater and show any movie I want, or start my own niche platform? Suits, please, think about it. If it's simple and affordable enough, people will gladly use it.
sylvain_kerkour 4y ago
The best way I have found to prevent the piracy of my book (https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust) is to inundate pirate platforms with only the first chapter and with a discount code inside for those who can't afford the original price. My hypothesis is that if they enjoyed the first chapter, most people would want to support my work instead of being freeriders. So far it worked really well. Thinking that you can prevent bits flowing from internet is delusional, it's better to think about how to align incentives.
- ecnahc515 4y ago
  I assume the discount code you give in the "pirate" copy is unique, so do you have any stats on how many people are buying with the "pirate discount"?
- quazar 4y ago
  Please stop spamming these websites with fake content.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Hum... The morality here is certainly not simple.
    - mitchdoogle 4y ago
      OP could've told his anecdote without linking to his website
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Why not simply give away the book and ask them to donate if they enjoyed it, then?
juanani 4y ago
[dead]
amiga1200 4y ago
I'm more interested in addressing the suppression issue. This kind of suppression stinks of lobbyists and corruption.
hatsune 4y ago
Not judging the law or ethics around piracy here, but the idea of EU suppressing a commissioned report that "goes south" is absolutely diabolical to its reputation. That does not sound very progressive.
- melesian 4y ago
  Not publishing is not suppressing. The EU's reputation is that of the greatest regulator on the planet. It acts in the collective interest of EU citizens not the libertarian (or progressive) fantasies of American capitalists.
rado 4y ago
“Would you steal a report?”
DragonL80 4y ago
This video explains quite well why copyrights are complete bs in general. https://youtu.be/5SaFTm2bcac https://youtu.be/5SaFTm2bcac
arjmandi 4y ago
Most of the comments were about either piracy is harmful or not. Another point here is that, for me, it's natural that the EU rejects or neglects a comprehensive report because it contradicts previous findings, especially in cases like piracy that have innate harmful characteristics.
miragecraft 4y ago
But it does harm free and freemium copyrighted content, because now they don’t just compete with their costlier (but likely better produced) alternatives, but also their pirated copies as well. It basically kill competition and helps big players.
HeavyStorm 4y ago
Well... To be fair "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", the study concluded that they couldn't prove there was a relation, but didn't proved there no such relation. In that regard, the study is inconclusive and the EU is right in not publishing it, lest the media take it to mean that piracy had no effect on sales.

580 points by grecy 4y ago

cassianoleal 4y ago

Needs [2017] in the title.

m3kw9 4y ago
Prob at height of piracy powers before Netflix and music streaming services went popular
- 226_ebro_treaty 4y ago
  Thought that height was more like 2010-2015 before Netflix got really popular. Heck, I remember listening to Spotify in 2011...
- tpxl 4y ago
  Netflix has successfully driven me back to piracy. Their catalog is shit, they have only one part of a lot of trilogies, Harry Potter keeps disappearing and their UI is so full of bugs I wonder if anyone working at Netflix actually uses it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

_royadar 4y ago

I own Netflix although I mostly use stremio with torrentino. Seems like statistics got it right.

eecc 4y ago
Uh, you don’t own Netflix (unless you’re a shareholder). You’re a subscriber.
- _royadar 4y ago
  Luckily I'm also a shareholder.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

smugglerFlynn 4y ago

Title is extremely misleading: > The report found that illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games, according to the report. > The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films: “The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”

bee_rider 4y ago
It is not extremely misleading. Most movies are not major blockbuster films, and no games are.
- Garlef 4y ago
  But the plain amount of movies is not a very good metric of size here: I guess major blockbuster films have a big share of the total market size?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Sure, it depends on what you care about. Just think of it as a friction term, to slow down these runaway franchises.
- tqi 4y ago
  Of course it is - the title says "Piracy Doesn’t Harm Sales", and most sales aka revenue comes from blockbusters. Global box office in 2019 was $42B[1], and the top 10 highest grossing movies alone accounted for $13B[2]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271856/global-box-office-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/271856/global-box-office... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_in_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_in_film
  - mandmandam 4y ago
    If losing some small portion of their tens of billions to piracy actually helps hundreds of smaller producers to somewhat level the grossly inequitable playing field, then I think the title is fair. If hundreds or thousands of smaller businesses are allowed to flourish or even survive, thanks to the higher sales due to piracy leveling the playing field a bit, then it would be kinda wild to suggest that "piracy harms sales", as if only Disney matters. Btw, 10 out of those top 10 films you cite for 2019 were sequels or remakes. All of them came from huge established megacorps - 7 Disney, 2 Sony, 1 WB. My sympathy for them could dance on the head of a pin.

wizzwizz4 4y ago

The study did not find that piracy does harm sales. There's a difference. (One might infer from the data that it doesn't, but that's different to the study having concluded that.)

suddenclarity 4y ago

The headline seems misleading: > The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally. Remember that absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. The study seems to point at the first one. I don't care enough to be bothered with reading a 300 page report but if you consider taking it as truth, I would recommend you to read and analyse the method before drawing conclusions based on the headline.

bee_rider 4y ago
Although, it is easy to misinterpret your quote because of the removed context. > The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films:“The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.” This is only true for a subset of films, “major blockbusters.” (Of courses, this is where the “top” in your quote comes from, but it seems easy to miss).
- nomel 4y ago
  That seems significant, for Hollywood. What am I not understanding here? Why is this wrapped in a "the only" phrasing?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Hollywood isn’t in the EU. Maybe they didn’t care about big US style blockbusters so much. Serving their constituents and whatnot.
  - dmbche 4y ago
    This is accounting for piracy of games, music and movies - in total, having only one place where sales are affected is quite minimal - and looks like an anomaly if everything else is unaffected.
ketzu 4y ago
They call it out directly, citing > [it means that] the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect

_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago

Look, I like free stuff as much as the next guy, but I don't buy (no pun intended) the results of this study: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/15/us-recorded-music-revenues-46-percent-lower/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/15/us-recorded-musi...

ilyt 4y ago
Can't put CD into your phone; but you can put MP3 on it. As Gaben said, "piracy is a service problem". Look at years; that's when portable music players; then smartphones; started to become popular Pirating is easier than buying CD then ripping MP3 just to listen. If we had the ease of use of today's music streaming the dip would probably be much lower; but between the tech at the time and RIAA cockblocking anyone that tried.
- 542458 4y ago
  Re: Gaben quote - While there are some grains of truth to the quote, I think it’s oversimplifying the problem. After all, Gaben’s primary product is essentially a DRM platform (one of the first online DRM platforms for that matter!), evidently he believes he can’t compete with piracy on service quality alone. Continuing the game piracy line, game piracy is often a significantly worse service outside of the “free stuff” aspect. You have to learn how torrents work, download risky executable files from the internet, and/or run sketchy cracking utilities. VS Steam or GoG which are generally fairly polished experiences that offer nice value-adds (updating, social features, etc). Take Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. You can buy a DRM free copy from GoG pretty easily… yet the torrents for it are still quite active from what I can see.
  - dcow 4y ago
    You’re kinda arguing the same thing. Just because a torrent is active doesn't mean the volume is high or even remotely comparable to actual sales. For the right price, people will do what is most convenient, generally. The fact that Steam has DRM only matters to users here. Steam/GoG is easier than torrenting is easier than driving to the store. Sure, not everyone has $70 to drop on a AAA, but then you get into the copyleft argument that authors would still benefit by giving their content to people who cant afford the list price for a reduced price or even free since you wouldn’t have sold it at full price anyway so you’re missing out on the word of mouth marketing and any lower revenue paid.

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

If there's a will there's a way.

draw_down 4y ago

[dead]

voytec 4y ago

Before Poland joined the EU, one of leftovers from communism was that IP laws resembled these in China - in reality there were none in effect. Imagine farmers' market but with bootleg VHS and audio cassettes, CDs, brand clothes etc. In every major city. On a weekly basis. Great majority of Poles were poor as shit and buying original copy of music or video cassette was a very distant thought. Piracy was "normal". I was introduced to The Prodigy by my math teacher, who lent me a copy-copy of their Music for the Jilted Generation. I learned English from pirated movies. Got to know a lot of great music and TV shows. I now own all of Prodigy's CDs as well as hundreds of other legal music CDs and BluRay sets/boxes. Not a chance in hell I'd buy all this without a taste of a product beforehand. Looking at this from 2023, I believe that our access to affordable (pirated) creations of western culture allowed up to leave Soviet (or communist as we were not a part of CCCP) mentality behind more quickly.

wslh 4y ago
Argentina was not poor as shit but have the same experience as Poland and many other parts of the world. I think it is more connected to the culture and economic "platform" than to economic means: piracy is linked to the "fungible" nature of media and software. I think now less piracy is connected to subscription services where you never own the software. On the other hand, anti-piracy means for software such as Microsoft Office or Adobe should be considered malware.
ilyt 4y ago
I remember my friend basically paid for all his PC upgrades by investing in CD writer and just ripping stuff for people for equivalent of $5 a pop. If we didn't pirate we wouldn't "buy more games", maybe once a year, coz we were poor. Once steam become a thing and once I started earning wages and just bought stuff, it was easier and it come with updates. Piracy is mostly a service problem. And it also enables gamepass-like usage, download, play for 2 hours ,if you don't like it just delete it. I guess Steam refunds cover that angle well now. Sure, from time to time someone will go "fuck you Squeenix, I won't pay $70 for port 2 years after the release", but overall people who massively pirate usually can't afford most of what they pirate in the first place.

jobs_throwaway 4y ago

It makes absolute sense. There's tons of music/movies/books that I never would have been exposed to if it weren't for piracy. As a result, I've bought a ton of legal media from those artists that I wouldn't have otherwise.

godzillabrennus 4y ago

I’ve worked to prevent piracy of a SaaS software for a niche industry. When we put the first anti piracy solution in place during the winter of 2020 they tripled the number of subscribers within a week. Some might argue this was due to Covid lockdowns but this was months after most businesses had already been locked down and the timing directly coincided with the implementation. Support was inundated with requests to disable the new feature that had prevented piracy. Subscriptions have kept growing nicely. On the other hand, I got started in software development as a kid by learning about how to use hex editors to implement hacks in games. The warez scene was big in those days. Not sure what the right answer is to addressing piracy. I’m sure it helps kids and those in developing countries get into the industry but if people don’t pay for something it’ll no longer be offered.

renewiltord 4y ago
How was the SaaS product pirated? I've always used that to refer to a delivery model where the software is centrally hosted. Was it that people were sharing their logins?
- hultner 4y ago
  I’ve seen my fair share of web-apps where the subscription check is entirely client side JS and a simple self MITM is enough to bypass payments. Not saying this is the case in this particular instance but it’s definitely something I’ve seen more then once. I’ve brought it up as an issue with some companies but I’m usually met with a shrug and a response in the realms of “our users wouldn’t know how to do that”. I’ve even seen car charging poles with entirely client side JS to validate account/login to charge for the electricity. I too have grown up, playing games with a hex editor in one hand and tcpdump in another so I have a habit of poking around to see how stuffs made.
- skrebbel 4y ago
  I assume it was locally hosted with some register/licensing thing. Eg Photoshop and IntelliJ are effectively SaaS but run on your computer.

photochemsyn 4y ago

The best way to reduce piracy of copyrighted works is to cut the copyright period by 75% relative to current standards. To be fair to individual living authors who hold their own copyrights, this would mean copyrights persisted 18 years past the author's death, or for 24 years after date of publication for for-hire contract jobs. This is comparable to the lifetime of technical patents, and so would allow for a reasonable period to collect revenue from the work that can be used to finance new works and so on. Otherwise, you just have consolidated interests squatting on material and collecting rents for no justifiable reason. It's entirely ridiculous, for example, that a 1957 film like the Seventh Seal isn't yet in the public domain. This kind of reasonable change to copyright law would go a long ways towards justifying legal crackdowns on piracy of more recent works, I think.

matheusmoreira 4y ago
> It's entirely ridiculous, for example, that a 1957 film like the Seventh Seal isn't yet in the public domain. That's way too generous. It's ridiculous that films made before 2010 aren't in the public domain. We're all going to be long dead before this stuff enters the public domain. Our culture should belong to us, not a bunch of corporations. If they want to keep making money, they should have to make new stuff instead of endless remakes of past successful IPs.
- Entinel 4y ago
  I disagree with your disagreement. 10 years is too short, 70 years is too long. There should definitely be a reduction but 10 years isn't it.
  - dcow 4y ago
    How about 14 years?
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Even 10 years is too generous. I'd rather make it 0 instead. I said 10 years because it's what would make copyright tolerable. The right thing as far as I'm concerned is abolishing it straight up. 10 years is a reasonable compromise. Remember, copyright exists at all because we allow it. The raw reality these monopolists face is that public domain is the default state of all information. We're all just pretending that we can't easily copy this stuff. The social contract was: we pretend we don't know how to copy their stuff, they get to make their money and then the works enter the public domain. They're clearly not keeping up their end of the social contract. Why should we? We should all just stop pretending we're dumb enough not to download their stuff at zero cost.

tric 4y ago

If the technology to distribute/consume the content were more restrictive, would content producers at every level have a global reach? Piracy is an acceptable loss enabled by the tech that allows global distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting)

dudul 4y ago

Now do DRMs.

karaterobot 4y ago

The study was an online questionnaire, for what it's worth.

hellotomyrars 4y ago

I have a Netflix account and I still torrent the content because unless I use edge I don’t get greater than 720p. I torrent a lot of games because 2 hours (steam refund) is a very narrow window for a lot of games. The reality is 90% of them I don’t end up meshing with. The ones that I do, I buy.

dcow 4y ago
Netflix streams in 4k but you have to pay $4 extra for premium or whatever.
- unmole 4y ago
  On Linux, there is no way to watch Netflix in 4k irrespective of the plan.
  - FalconSensei 4y ago
    Yeah, and all because stupid DRM. Easier to torrent than to watch officially
- FalconSensei 4y ago
  4k is in the most expensive (4 screens) plan. If you only have 1 tv, that's 2 steps up (going to 2 screens for full hd, and 4 screens for 4k)
- the_mungler 4y ago
  Even then, I don't believe they stream 4k to browsers. They only stream to devices like smart tvs or official Netflix apps with high quality. Your average browser is limited to 720p. This is the quintessential "pirating is better" example.
  - hellotomyrars 4y ago
    It’s so often a services problem. I honestly probably wouldn’t pay if it weren’t a family shared account, but my parents use it and they don’t know or care about the video quality like that. I also just prefer the video player of my choice. Paying customers should never have a worse experience than pirating customers. I think this is a huge reason for the success of music streaming. Less so for video streaming now with the huge fragmentation.

endisneigh 4y ago

To be honest I’ve never understood why people believe they’re entitled other people’s work for free. Perhaps someone can clarify?

mensetmanusman 4y ago
It’s the nature of how computers make copying an initial work nearly zero additional cost. This has never been the case in human history prior to digital/analog recording of content, and it keeps getting closer and closer to zero cost to duplicate. This breaks people’s moral framework because they now have to grasp things like game theory to understand second and third order harm.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  I still don't understand - even if the cost is literally zero to copy, that still wouldn't necessarily entitle one to someone else's work without compensation if that is what they require.
  - skeaker 4y ago
    For most people it comes down to trying something they aren't sure they will enjoy. If you're not sure you'll like something that costs a significant amount and piracy is not an option, you most likely just won't buy it. If piracy is an option, maybe you still don't buy it, but now you get to try it. Both outcomes have the same effect on the publisher of the work so the act of piracy hasn't harmed anyone, costed anyone anything, and now the user can come away knowing whether or not they liked the work which is a positive. It's not that hard of a concept but easy to be confused by if you look at it from the traditional sense of physical wares where a "stolen" sale causes harm.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    I think people consider a copy of work differently than the original in some abstract sense. Digital is the first medium that makes the copy equivalent to the original.
- 4y ago

dang 4y ago

Discussed at the time: EU suppressed results of a study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 - Sept 2017 (38 comments)

8jef 4y ago

Let's say IP such and such is protected by copyright, which is bound to restrict piracy, which can be defined as enjoyment and/or distribution of copyrighted IP without retribution to rightful ownership. This is all fine when you have some control over distribution, which is not the case anymore, mainly because torrent protocole. IP rightful owners went the easy way, weaponizing willfully abiding legal systems and what not (paid with our taxes), while dealing directly with large IP distribution platforms, before launching their own distribution platforms. This is where we're at. Big deal. Torrents are still a thing, as much as sharing on other protocoles, through territories outside the rule of law, but not only. How about trying something else? How about putting up a realistic price on IP, so anyone willing to pay (and get a receipt for it) could enjoy and distribute IP legally, no matter how and from where they got said IP in the first place? How about a price per head per event (phe fare?), a price that is affordable enough for anyone to compete any big corporations? Even with some temporal and/or geographical restrictions, I'd gladly pay, if that means I can legally enjoy and share stuff outside platform limitations. How about I open my own repertoire theater and show any movie I want, or start my own niche platform? Suits, please, think about it. If it's simple and affordable enough, people will gladly use it.

sylvain_kerkour 4y ago

The best way I have found to prevent the piracy of my book (https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust) is to inundate pirate platforms with only the first chapter and with a discount code inside for those who can't afford the original price. My hypothesis is that if they enjoyed the first chapter, most people would want to support my work instead of being freeriders. So far it worked really well. Thinking that you can prevent bits flowing from internet is delusional, it's better to think about how to align incentives.

ecnahc515 4y ago
I assume the discount code you give in the "pirate" copy is unique, so do you have any stats on how many people are buying with the "pirate discount"?
quazar 4y ago
Please stop spamming these websites with fake content.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Hum... The morality here is certainly not simple.
  - mitchdoogle 4y ago
    OP could've told his anecdote without linking to his website
endisneigh 4y ago
Why not simply give away the book and ask them to donate if they enjoyed it, then?

juanani 4y ago

[dead]

amiga1200 4y ago

I'm more interested in addressing the suppression issue. This kind of suppression stinks of lobbyists and corruption.

hatsune 4y ago

Not judging the law or ethics around piracy here, but the idea of EU suppressing a commissioned report that "goes south" is absolutely diabolical to its reputation. That does not sound very progressive.

melesian 4y ago
Not publishing is not suppressing. The EU's reputation is that of the greatest regulator on the planet. It acts in the collective interest of EU citizens not the libertarian (or progressive) fantasies of American capitalists.

rado 4y ago

“Would you steal a report?”

DragonL80 4y ago

This video explains quite well why copyrights are complete bs in general. https://youtu.be/5SaFTm2bcac https://youtu.be/5SaFTm2bcac

arjmandi 4y ago

Most of the comments were about either piracy is harmful or not. Another point here is that, for me, it's natural that the EU rejects or neglects a comprehensive report because it contradicts previous findings, especially in cases like piracy that have innate harmful characteristics.

miragecraft 4y ago

But it does harm free and freemium copyrighted content, because now they don’t just compete with their costlier (but likely better produced) alternatives, but also their pirated copies as well. It basically kill competition and helps big players.

HeavyStorm 4y ago

Well... To be fair "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", the study concluded that they couldn't prove there was a relation, but didn't proved there no such relation. In that regard, the study is inconclusive and the EU is right in not publishing it, lest the media take it to mean that piracy had no effect on sales.