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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)

#41

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 in…

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.

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

#42

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 in…

It's sort of humorous that "rule against perpetuities" is a fundamental legal concept [1] [2] but copyright just sidesteps that and allows for locking up culture for almost two centuries.

[1] https://youtu.be/j1jkilao3MQ?t=903

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

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

#43

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…

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?

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.

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

#45

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…

The other 'best way' to reduce piracy would be to sell all electronic works through the same online interface without the need for any other apps or DRM.

Otherwise, the pirated product is actually better than the paid one.

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

#46
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.

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

#47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 in…

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.

How about 14 years?

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

#48

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…

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?

I assume it was locally hosted with some register/licensing thing.

Eg Photoshop and IntelliJ are effectively SaaS but run on your computer.

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

#49
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 in…

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.

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.

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

#50
post #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 th…

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.

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