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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)

#61

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…

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

Well, that's not that different. That's 21 years after the life of some person in being. If you want it to last a long time, you say youngest living descendant of someone well-known, like the King of England, as then you presumably get the full ~90 years of some baby plus 21 years.

Corporate copyrights last a flat 95 years from publication.

Also, half of the US states have effectively done away the rule against perpetuities and statutorily allow perpetual trusts now: http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/S...

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

#62
post #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 gamepas…

Yeah, I think piracy harms the guys who rely on tons of DLC on a good base product.

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

#63
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.

Why is 10 years too short and what should the period be?

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

#64
post #3

Needs [2017] in the title.

Prob at height of piracy powers before Netflix and music streaming services went popular

Thought that height was more like 2010-2015 before Netflix got really popular. Heck, I remember listening to Spotify in 2011...

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

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Would you be pleased if that applied to all of your work too? That immediately anyone can start taking your work and making money off of it? Copyright at least makes big players pay the original creators for the rights to the works. Netflix going ahead and making money off of subscribers while paying nothing to creators would be a significantly worse situation.

> Would you be pleased if that applied to all of your work too? That immediately anyone can start taking your work and making money off of it?

Sure. From now on I either release my software as AGPLv3 or I don't release it at all. Truth is even if someone violates my license I'm not gonna waste my limited time on this earth litigating against them in court over it. I have better things to do.

Stallman would disagree but I think licenses like GPL shouldn't even exist at all: they all depend on copyright to enforce their terms and copyright shouldn't exist in the first place. It's fair as long as nobody is protected: billion dollar corporations can make money off my code but I can make money off of theirs too. Netflix code gets leaked? Oops, looks like it's our code now.

Also, Netflix literally exists to solve the problems created by copyright itself. It's ironic how it was ultimately destroyed by copyright holders when they pulled their precious content and started their own shitty streaming services instead. Were it not for copyright, we'd all be using peer to peer technology invented decades ago to consume content much more efficiently. Everything humanity ever created would be available at our fingertips.

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

#66

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.

I’m not sure one single interface is the solution, but making a product that people actually want to buy is. At the moment you can subscribe to half a dozen different streaming services, only to end up with some of the content you want to watch. Spotify basically solved music pirating. Today it doesn’t really matter if you subscribe to Spotify, or Apple Music, or Tidal, or YouTube Music… most people can get most of the music they want to listen to from one of them, and the experience is good enough that pirating music would just be needlessly tedious (for most consumers).

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

#68
post #50
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stuf…

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.

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

#69

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…

Maybe the answer is free versions that are fully featured and then become disabled after a few months (human usage hours) depending on utilization.
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