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

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

#21
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not extremely misleading. Most movies are not major blockbuster films, and no games are.

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?

Sure, it depends on what you care about. Just think of it as a friction term, to slow down these runaway franchises.

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

#22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

That seems significant, for Hollywood. What am I not understanding here? Why is this wrapped in a "the only" phrasing?

Hollywood isn’t in the EU. Maybe they didn’t care about big US style blockbusters so much. Serving their constituents and whatnot.

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

#23

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. ”

It is not extremely misleading. Most movies are not major blockbuster films, and no games are.

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... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_in_film

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

#24
post #20

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 wa…

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.

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

#25

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-musi...

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.

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

#26
post #20

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 wa…

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.

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

#27
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.

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

#28
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.

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

#29
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)

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

#30

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 reason…

> 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.

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