9 ms·

It is often claimed that piracy is the entertainment industry's own fault--that they need to evolve to embrace digital media, and because they haven't, people a

by codex 15y ago

It is often claimed that piracy is the entertainment industry's own fault--that they need to evolve to embrace digital media, and because they haven't, people are forced to turn to piracy. There may be a bit of truth to that argument, but if you look at the Apple App Store, you'll find a damning rebuttal. The App Store has embraced digital distribution. Purchasing and downloading apps could not be easier. It's certainly easier than pirating them. And yet app store piracy is a huGe problem [1]. Why? Because if you pirate, you have money left over for other things. It's that simple. So even though you could afford $2 for an app, you'd rather pirate the app and spend the $2 on something else. It's human nature. This is one reason societies make laws and enforce them with police. If we'd let natural evolution dictate the run our societies, then the alpha males would each have fifty wives and most males would be mateless or dead. [1] http://www.everythingicafe.com/apple-cracking-down-on-app-store-piracy/2012/01/04/ http://www.everythingicafe.com/apple-cracking-down-on-app-st...

thomholwerda 15y ago
While your assertion may very well be true, the link you provided is not, in any way, any kind of proof. There's nothing in there - at all - to support your claim that "app store piracy is a huge problem". Do we have any actual figures to support this claim? I highly doubt its validity, you see.
- jobu 15y ago
  There was a blog post linked here on Hacker News that talked about it from the perspective of an iOS game developer. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it right now, but the synopsis was the overwhelming majority of their users had not paid for the game (in iTunes). While this is purely anecdotal, one could argue it's probably representative of the market. For apps and music, I think Apple does a good job of making the process cheap and easy, but there will always be people with more time than money.
  - bediger 15y ago
    "There will always be people with more time than money" - doesn't that mean "so-called pirates will always exist"? If that's the case, why should the rest of us pay money for enforcement actions (in the form of taxes) and why should the rest of us allow a few Giant Immoral Corporations to distort our society and culture? Shouldn't our elected representatives patiently explain the economics to the crybaby corporations, and then politely tell them to go pound sand? This is a control issue, plain and simple. The market for "content" is changing from a very cozy oligopoly to a one where no single firm or cartel has very much monopoly power. It's our sacred duty as Americans and Free Market Advocates to cause a transition to a market that can better serve the needs of consumers. Mercantilism in the form of "DRM" or "Intellectual Property" must not stand!
    - paulhauggis 15y ago
      It's pretty easy: stop buying DRM/protected products (and stop pirating them too). If there was no piracy and you just stopped buying, big companies would lower the price/do something different. But, now that they don't really know why, they will continue to add more protections. But, most people don't have that kind of commitment or discipline and the rest are just part of the movement because they want free stuff.
      - bediger 15y ago
        If there's a legal (or standards-organization) mandate for DRM (and there have been legislative pushes for such in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_... , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Protection_for_Recordable_Media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Protection_for_Recordab... to note just two such efforts) then nothing I can do will move the market. But beyond all that, the whole "Piracy!" excuse doesn't take into account whether the proposed problem actually merits a solution, whether the proposed solution actually cures the problem, and whether the proposed solution causes more problems than it cures. "But, but, Piracy!" is just a way to whip up a confusing semantic fog around an issue, demonize a set of viewpoints, and use that demonization to pursue some kind of agenda that hardly anyone would go along with without the associated confusing and witchhunts. You're doing it yourself, subtly, by implying that I habitually "pirate" stuff, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Although I'm not a church-goer any more, I'm a citizen, and a taxpayer. I don't cuss, I obey the Law of the Sea, Canon Law, and the Laws of Thermodynamics. I do not advocate the violent overthrow of the government, and I have no conflicts of interest.
- efnx 15y ago
  I would also like to see some proof that piracy is a huge problem. Files being available and free for download on the 'black market' does not mean that people who would pirate said files would otherwise pay for those files. It would be nice if someone did a scientific study...
  - drcube 15y ago
    You're in luck: https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-doesnt-affect-us-box-office-returns-study-finds-120210/ https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-doesnt-affect-us-... news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577076
    - teamonkey 15y ago
      Torrentfreak is not a reliable news source by any means. It has a strong agenda and that article spun the findings of the paper.
      - drcube 15y ago
        "Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. By contrast, we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy." (Italics are mine) Here's a link to the actual paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986299 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986299
        teamonkey 15y ago
        Did you read the paper though? "Taking this triple-difference [their metric for determining piracy rate] as a conservative estimate of the effect of piracy on box office sales, we infer that pre-release piracy causes the foreign box office returns for a movie to decrease by 1.3% for each week of lag between the U.S. release and the foreign release of the movie." ... "We estimate that movies in our data would have returned a total of nearly $3.52 billion if not for piracy, implying that piracy caused films to lose $240 million in weekend box office returns in the non-US countries in our data during 2005. Thus we estimate that weekend box office returns in our data were about 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. This estimate may be conservative if the actual losses to piracy are greater than those suggested by our tripledifference estimate or if returns in the US box office are also reduced by piracy." Also, the paper only talks about box-office sales, not even touching the DVD/Blu-ray/download market.
majani 15y ago
I've found that in the recent piracy debates, there has been a high level of dishonesty, where people don't want to admit that the absolute number one reason people resort to piracy is because that shit is free. I'd like to challenge the founders of TPB to charge for their superior distribution system and report the traffic numbers before and after.
- galadriel 15y ago
  Quite a large number of people pay to pirate, like those who paid for Megaupload, and those who pay for Usenet access. The charge is almost what Netflix charges (~10$ a month), but the selection and quality is much better (for pirated content), and catalog is also better. And better yet you don't loose the stuff that can be watched because some licensing agreement failed. I think even if Piratebay starts charging what Netflix charges, it will remain a huge website.
- pyre 15y ago
  > I'd like to challenge the founders of TPB to > charge for their superior distribution system 1) The logistics wouldn't be there. Not necessarily because people won't pay, but because paying is a barrier to entry. Even paying a penny would filter out a number of users. Would you really believe that the reason those people wouldn't pay a penny is because they are cheap? Or is it more likely that the paywall is a barrier that they are too lazy to overcome? 2) Charging out-right for the service vs. making money on advertisements would also be a shift in their image. This may cause a number of people to jump ship out of principle. I.e. a 'hipster filter' if you will ("they're too big and corporate now", "they've sold out", etc).
  - majani 15y ago
    Your argument beats around the bush. You and I both know that if TPB were to charge, their traffic would drop by several orders of magnitude. This is not because of logistics, not because of image, not because of inefficient distribution and not because of DRM. The simple reason for the huge drop off would be that most pirates want that sh't free. Why oh why do people insist on sugar coating this blatant reality?
vibrunazo 15y ago
>Purchasing and downloading apps could not be easier. I wouldn't be so fast here. The app store limits availability by country. For example, you cannot legally buy games here in Brazil on the app store [1]. Which is a huge market. I pirate a lot of stuff, and almost all of it I couldn't possibly have legally acquired. If pirating didn't exist, I would have never listened to Weird Al Yankovic's songs (I spent months with money in my pocket going from store to store looking to buy his cds when I was young), nor watched movies banned in my country for political reasons. There is also the pay wall barrier. Which is also often derived from a location problem. You may have many easy payment options in the USA, but we might not have it as easy here. (There are many startups working on decreasing this barrier, but so far it's still big) Also, your argument is subjective. You cannot make an objective case for "how much potential damage" piracy is making. You cannot know how many pirates would have bought if piracy didn't exist, maybe some wouldn't have bought anyway because of the paywall or location bans. But what you do can prove objectively is that you can make money from digital content without trying to stop piracy. Which is the point that Peter Sunde is making here. Which was also the same point Steve Blank made a while ago [2]. So you cannot simply say "piracy is a huge problem" and just cite that link saying that some pirates exist. Your argument cannot be demonstrated objectively, while the Peter's argument can, and has. [1] http://itunes.apple.com/br/genre/ios-games/id6014?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/br/genre/ios-games/id6014?mt=8 [1] (in portuguese) http://macmagazine.com.br/2011/03/30/ausencia-de-jogos-na-app-store-brasil-e-explicada-por-diretor-do-ministerio-da-justica/ http://macmagazine.com.br/2011/03/30/ausencia-de-jogos-na-ap... [2] http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant-innovate-and-the-result-is-sopa/ http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant...
- freehunter 15y ago
  >I pirate a lot of stuff, and almost all of it I couldn't possibly have legally acquired. If pirating didn't exist, I would have never listened to weird al's songs, nor watched movies banned in my country for political reasons. This still isn't a good argument. Justifying the means by which you acquired content still doesn't make it morally right or legal. "But I can't get it without piracy!" still doesn't give you any right to consume the product. Buying vs pirating... there's a third option. Abstinence. If you can't get Weird Al's media legally, you can always just not get it at all.
joeyespo 15y ago
I don't think it's that simple. Time and reliability are strong factors as well. If the paid service saves you time, then yeah, it'll get lots of use. What's $2 compared the time you might spend to track it down elsewhere? Let alone a clean version of it. Piracy just isn't that reliable over a long period of time. Your sources could be shut down at any moment, or even lead to unintended consequences if you're using some of the more shady websites out there. I'd happily pay for content to get those stronger guarantees. To immediately find that thing that was recommended to me. To not have to question its integrity. And to continue to do the same thing for the next few years without needing to learn something new when I'm not ready to. Unless you're bored / want a challenge. Boredom is a reason people pirate that's probably not really worth solving.
- pyre 15y ago
  > Boredom is a reason people pirate that's > probably not really worth solving. There's also hoarding urges. If everything is free, it's possible to have a huge comprehensive collection of films, tv, etc. More than one could ever actually watch.

by codex 15y ago

thomholwerda 15y ago

While your assertion may very well be true, the link you provided is not, in any way, any kind of proof. There's nothing in there - at all - to support your claim that "app store piracy is a huge problem". Do we have any actual figures to support this claim? I highly doubt its validity, you see.

jobu 15y ago
There was a blog post linked here on Hacker News that talked about it from the perspective of an iOS game developer. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it right now, but the synopsis was the overwhelming majority of their users had not paid for the game (in iTunes). While this is purely anecdotal, one could argue it's probably representative of the market. For apps and music, I think Apple does a good job of making the process cheap and easy, but there will always be people with more time than money.
- bediger 15y ago
  "There will always be people with more time than money" - doesn't that mean "so-called pirates will always exist"? If that's the case, why should the rest of us pay money for enforcement actions (in the form of taxes) and why should the rest of us allow a few Giant Immoral Corporations to distort our society and culture? Shouldn't our elected representatives patiently explain the economics to the crybaby corporations, and then politely tell them to go pound sand? This is a control issue, plain and simple. The market for "content" is changing from a very cozy oligopoly to a one where no single firm or cartel has very much monopoly power. It's our sacred duty as Americans and Free Market Advocates to cause a transition to a market that can better serve the needs of consumers. Mercantilism in the form of "DRM" or "Intellectual Property" must not stand!
  - paulhauggis 15y ago
    It's pretty easy: stop buying DRM/protected products (and stop pirating them too). If there was no piracy and you just stopped buying, big companies would lower the price/do something different. But, now that they don't really know why, they will continue to add more protections. But, most people don't have that kind of commitment or discipline and the rest are just part of the movement because they want free stuff.
    - bediger 15y ago
      If there's a legal (or standards-organization) mandate for DRM (and there have been legislative pushes for such in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_... , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Protection_for_Recordable_Media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Protection_for_Recordab... to note just two such efforts) then nothing I can do will move the market. But beyond all that, the whole "Piracy!" excuse doesn't take into account whether the proposed problem actually merits a solution, whether the proposed solution actually cures the problem, and whether the proposed solution causes more problems than it cures. "But, but, Piracy!" is just a way to whip up a confusing semantic fog around an issue, demonize a set of viewpoints, and use that demonization to pursue some kind of agenda that hardly anyone would go along with without the associated confusing and witchhunts. You're doing it yourself, subtly, by implying that I habitually "pirate" stuff, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Although I'm not a church-goer any more, I'm a citizen, and a taxpayer. I don't cuss, I obey the Law of the Sea, Canon Law, and the Laws of Thermodynamics. I do not advocate the violent overthrow of the government, and I have no conflicts of interest.
efnx 15y ago
I would also like to see some proof that piracy is a huge problem. Files being available and free for download on the 'black market' does not mean that people who would pirate said files would otherwise pay for those files. It would be nice if someone did a scientific study...
- drcube 15y ago
  You're in luck: https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-doesnt-affect-us-box-office-returns-study-finds-120210/ https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-doesnt-affect-us-... news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577076
  - teamonkey 15y ago
    Torrentfreak is not a reliable news source by any means. It has a strong agenda and that article spun the findings of the paper.
    - drcube 15y ago
      "Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. By contrast, we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy." (Italics are mine) Here's a link to the actual paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986299 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986299
      - teamonkey 15y ago
        Did you read the paper though? "Taking this triple-difference [their metric for determining piracy rate] as a conservative estimate of the effect of piracy on box office sales, we infer that pre-release piracy causes the foreign box office returns for a movie to decrease by 1.3% for each week of lag between the U.S. release and the foreign release of the movie." ... "We estimate that movies in our data would have returned a total of nearly $3.52 billion if not for piracy, implying that piracy caused films to lose $240 million in weekend box office returns in the non-US countries in our data during 2005. Thus we estimate that weekend box office returns in our data were about 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. This estimate may be conservative if the actual losses to piracy are greater than those suggested by our tripledifference estimate or if returns in the US box office are also reduced by piracy." Also, the paper only talks about box-office sales, not even touching the DVD/Blu-ray/download market.

majani 15y ago

I've found that in the recent piracy debates, there has been a high level of dishonesty, where people don't want to admit that the absolute number one reason people resort to piracy is because that shit is free. I'd like to challenge the founders of TPB to charge for their superior distribution system and report the traffic numbers before and after.

galadriel 15y ago
Quite a large number of people pay to pirate, like those who paid for Megaupload, and those who pay for Usenet access. The charge is almost what Netflix charges (~10$ a month), but the selection and quality is much better (for pirated content), and catalog is also better. And better yet you don't loose the stuff that can be watched because some licensing agreement failed. I think even if Piratebay starts charging what Netflix charges, it will remain a huge website.
pyre 15y ago
> I'd like to challenge the founders of TPB to > charge for their superior distribution system 1) The logistics wouldn't be there. Not necessarily because people won't pay, but because paying is a barrier to entry. Even paying a penny would filter out a number of users. Would you really believe that the reason those people wouldn't pay a penny is because they are cheap? Or is it more likely that the paywall is a barrier that they are too lazy to overcome? 2) Charging out-right for the service vs. making money on advertisements would also be a shift in their image. This may cause a number of people to jump ship out of principle. I.e. a 'hipster filter' if you will ("they're too big and corporate now", "they've sold out", etc).
- majani 15y ago
  Your argument beats around the bush. You and I both know that if TPB were to charge, their traffic would drop by several orders of magnitude. This is not because of logistics, not because of image, not because of inefficient distribution and not because of DRM. The simple reason for the huge drop off would be that most pirates want that sh't free. Why oh why do people insist on sugar coating this blatant reality?

vibrunazo 15y ago

>Purchasing and downloading apps could not be easier. I wouldn't be so fast here. The app store limits availability by country. For example, you cannot legally buy games here in Brazil on the app store [1]. Which is a huge market. I pirate a lot of stuff, and almost all of it I couldn't possibly have legally acquired. If pirating didn't exist, I would have never listened to Weird Al Yankovic's songs (I spent months with money in my pocket going from store to store looking to buy his cds when I was young), nor watched movies banned in my country for political reasons. There is also the pay wall barrier. Which is also often derived from a location problem. You may have many easy payment options in the USA, but we might not have it as easy here. (There are many startups working on decreasing this barrier, but so far it's still big) Also, your argument is subjective. You cannot make an objective case for "how much potential damage" piracy is making. You cannot know how many pirates would have bought if piracy didn't exist, maybe some wouldn't have bought anyway because of the paywall or location bans. But what you do can prove objectively is that you can make money from digital content without trying to stop piracy. Which is the point that Peter Sunde is making here. Which was also the same point Steve Blank made a while ago [2]. So you cannot simply say "piracy is a huge problem" and just cite that link saying that some pirates exist. Your argument cannot be demonstrated objectively, while the Peter's argument can, and has. [1] http://itunes.apple.com/br/genre/ios-games/id6014?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/br/genre/ios-games/id6014?mt=8 [1] (in portuguese) http://macmagazine.com.br/2011/03/30/ausencia-de-jogos-na-app-store-brasil-e-explicada-por-diretor-do-ministerio-da-justica/ http://macmagazine.com.br/2011/03/30/ausencia-de-jogos-na-ap... [2] http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant-innovate-and-the-result-is-sopa/ http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant...

freehunter 15y ago
>I pirate a lot of stuff, and almost all of it I couldn't possibly have legally acquired. If pirating didn't exist, I would have never listened to weird al's songs, nor watched movies banned in my country for political reasons. This still isn't a good argument. Justifying the means by which you acquired content still doesn't make it morally right or legal. "But I can't get it without piracy!" still doesn't give you any right to consume the product. Buying vs pirating... there's a third option. Abstinence. If you can't get Weird Al's media legally, you can always just not get it at all.

joeyespo 15y ago

I don't think it's that simple. Time and reliability are strong factors as well. If the paid service saves you time, then yeah, it'll get lots of use. What's $2 compared the time you might spend to track it down elsewhere? Let alone a clean version of it. Piracy just isn't that reliable over a long period of time. Your sources could be shut down at any moment, or even lead to unintended consequences if you're using some of the more shady websites out there. I'd happily pay for content to get those stronger guarantees. To immediately find that thing that was recommended to me. To not have to question its integrity. And to continue to do the same thing for the next few years without needing to learn something new when I'm not ready to. Unless you're bored / want a challenge. Boredom is a reason people pirate that's probably not really worth solving.

pyre 15y ago
> Boredom is a reason people pirate that's > probably not really worth solving. There's also hoarding urges. If everything is free, it's possible to have a huge comprehensive collection of films, tv, etc. More than one could ever actually watch.