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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)

#81

Post by tqi »

mandmandam wrote: post #57
tqi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If losing some small portion of their tens of billions to piracy actually helps hundreds of smaller producers to somewhat level the grossly inequitable playing field, then I think the title is fair. If hundreds or thousands of smaller businesses are allowed to flourish or even survive, thanks to the higher sales due to piracy leveling the playing field a bit, then it would be kinda wild to suggest that "piracy harms…

While I also DGAF about disney/sony/wb bottom line, my point is that "Piracy Doesn’t Harm Sales except for companies I don't care about" is not the same as "Piracy Doesn’t Harm Sales."

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

#82

Post by skeaker »

542458 wrote: post #50
ilyt wrote: 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…

I disagree, I think Gabe does genuinely believe service alone can prevent piracy. Steamworks DRM is opt-in for developers and easily broken (which we have to assume is intentional because Valve definitely has the means to make something stronger). People like to assume that a game being on Steam automatically equates to it having DRM, but there are a number of games in my library that can be copied to a thumb stick or any other drive once they're installed and work fine forever just like you would do with a GOG game. The existence of Steamworks always seemed more like a placebo to ease developers onto the platform than anything.

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

#83

Post by kmeisthax »

onepointsixC wrote: post #56
matheusmoreira wrote: post #49

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.

This already happens today.

Copyright does not protect authors, it protects publishers. This is justified as protecting authors in the very narrow sense that authors did get to negotiate with publishers first, but at the most disadvantaged position they will ever be at in their career. They have to pay, but they can pay a pittance and authors will take it because they have no better options.

The low- or zero-copyright world would at least end the practice of publishers buying rights to works and then pushing the artists who made them out of it. For example, there are loads of unfinished trilogies whose authors would love to finish them, but the publishers don't want them to, because they consider it a lost cause. Nor do they want their authors self-publishing or going with another outfit, so they won't revert ownership back to the artists, because an unexploited, worthless copyright is still worth more as part of a horde of gold that they sleep on.

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

#84

Post by bluedino »

voytec wrote: 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…

There are flea markets and party stores where you can buy the same in the US. I don't really think it leads to people buying more of the legitimate stuff. Except in the case where the bootleg quality is really, really bad (hand-held camera in a theatre vs a DVD rip for example)

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

#85

Post by skeaker »

endisneigh wrote: post #80
mensetmanusman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the nature of how computers make copying an initial work nearly zero additional cost. This has never been the case in human history prior to digital/analog recording of content, and it keeps getting closer and closer to zero cost to duplicate. This breaks people’s moral framework because they now have to grasp things like game theory to understand second and third order harm.

I still don't understand - even if the cost is literally zero to copy, that still wouldn't necessarily entitle one to someone else's work without compensation if that is what they require.

For most people it comes down to trying something they aren't sure they will enjoy. If you're not sure you'll like something that costs a significant amount and piracy is not an option, you most likely just won't buy it. If piracy is an option, maybe you still don't buy it, but now you get to try it. Both outcomes have the same effect on the publisher of the work so the act of piracy hasn't harmed anyone, costed anyone anything, and now the user can come away knowing whether or not they liked the work which is a positive. It's not that hard of a concept but easy to be confused by if you look at it from the traditional sense of physical wares where a "stolen" sale causes harm.

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

#86

Post by mensetmanusman »

endisneigh wrote: post #80
mensetmanusman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the nature of how computers make copying an initial work nearly zero additional cost. This has never been the case in human history prior to digital/analog recording of content, and it keeps getting closer and closer to zero cost to duplicate. This breaks people’s moral framework because they now have to grasp things like game theory to understand second and third order harm.

I still don't understand - even if the cost is literally zero to copy, that still wouldn't necessarily entitle one to someone else's work without compensation if that is what they require.

I think people consider a copy of work differently than the original in some abstract sense. Digital is the first medium that makes the copy equivalent to the original.

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

#87

Post by matheusmoreira »

tivert wrote: post #75
matheusmoreira wrote: post #49

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…

> 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. That's not a reasonable compromise. Your proposal of 0 years in a nonstarter, and walking slightly back from that is still a nonstarter. It's pretty clear your prioritizing only your o…

> That's not a reasonable compromise. Your proposal of 0 years in a nonstarter, and walking slightly back from that is still a nonstarter.

On the contrary. Copyright itself is a non-starter. Remember, public domain is the natural state of information. They're the ones who need to convince us to respect whatever social contract they seek to impose. They are doing such a horrible job at it that it can be argued that copyright infringement is civil disobedience and a moral imperative.

> It's pretty clear your prioritizing your own interests, and not even really thinking about anyone else's.

I am. I don't really care about the "interests" of some perpetual information monopolists at all. The fact they even exist at all is offensive to me. I'd rather they didn't.

> For instance, have you considered that abolishing copyright would abolish the GPL? As in, you'd have no right to demand the source to modified GPL code that was distributed.

Yeah. See my other post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35703409

> Copyright was created for good reason. It is not reasonable to get mad and burn it all down without considering those reasons, and the other effects burning it down will cause.

The reasons don't matter. The actual implementation does. That's why 10 years is an exceptionally generous compromise. It's the only thing that would allow these monopolists to continue existing. If that's rejected, the only reasonable alternative is for society to stop recognizing copyright as legitimate and go back to treating everything as public domain by default.

The social contract was: we'd pretend we couldn't copy this stuff, you'd make your money for a while and then your work would enter the public domain. You and I are both gonna be long dead before we see any of those public domain benefits and that's if they don't keep perpetually extending the duration into functional infinity. Clearly they're not keeping up their end of the contract. So why should we keep ours?

> We're also all pretending that we can't easily kill other people (btw, we totally can, and you probably regularly operate a 3,000lb death machine).

You're seriously comparing the killing of human beings to the copying of bits. I'm not sure I want to continue this debate.

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

#88

Post by unmole »

dcow wrote: post #51
hellotomyrars wrote: post #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.

Netflix streams in 4k but you have to pay $4 extra for premium or whatever.

On Linux, there is no way to watch Netflix in 4k irrespective of the plan.

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

#89

Post by [deleted] »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #34
j5155 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with you, but I think the issue with something like this is the sheer volume of lobbying power that companies like Nintendo and Disney have to stop it.

What can be done about that?

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by MitPitt »

onepointsixC wrote: post #56
matheusmoreira wrote: post #49

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.

Netflix subscriptions wouldn't exist in this situation, your example is flawed
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