8 ms·

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 cla

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.
    - CodeMage 15y ago
      Why do people always resort to the same argument ("stop buying") as if it were a solution? Isn't it obvious by now that it's not a solution and it's not going to happen? Voting with your wallet works when you can stop paying one company and go to its competitor. But if they all get together and decide that you have to do it their way or you're screwed, then guess what's going to happen? The majority will find the best way to procure what they need under the circumstances and the minority will fight to change the situation. It just happens that it in this particular situation the best way to procure what people need is not by choosing the least evil of the providers, but you have a choice to copy stuff for free, instead. Let's make things clear: this doesn't make it legal to pirate stuff. On the other hand, "legal", "correct", "practical" and "optimal" are never the same thing. Just as no amount of arguing will change the fact that piracy is (still) illegal, no amount of arguing will change the fact that the industry needs to evolve.
      - 15y ago
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.

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.
  - CodeMage 15y ago
    Why do people always resort to the same argument ("stop buying") as if it were a solution? Isn't it obvious by now that it's not a solution and it's not going to happen? Voting with your wallet works when you can stop paying one company and go to its competitor. But if they all get together and decide that you have to do it their way or you're screwed, then guess what's going to happen? The majority will find the best way to procure what they need under the circumstances and the minority will fight to change the situation. It just happens that it in this particular situation the best way to procure what people need is not by choosing the least evil of the providers, but you have a choice to copy stuff for free, instead. Let's make things clear: this doesn't make it legal to pirate stuff. On the other hand, "legal", "correct", "practical" and "optimal" are never the same thing. Just as no amount of arguing will change the fact that piracy is (still) illegal, no amount of arguing will change the fact that the industry needs to evolve.
    - 15y ago

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.