French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales • Hacker News Board

Re: French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales

#31

Post by antninja » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 3:05 PM UTC

J3L2404 wrote: post #26

alan_cx wrote: post #21

Well, its all based on the idea that people who "illegally" download would have bought the item otherwise. Really not true. Mostly the reason is either convenience or lack of cash to buy in the first place. I think of all the CD's I bought in the past which turned out to be garbage apart from the two singles released which are the reason for buying the CD. I think of all the DVD's I bought that I watched once. Now I…

>People are valuing your product as zero. Where they don't, they buy. No. The popular content is downloaded more. You can jump thru hoops and do backflips but the fact is people don't want to pay. Period. Everything else is justification.

Consumers don't want to pay at the vendors' price and vendors don't want to sell at the consumers' price. The market is blocked.

(20 euros for 90 minutes of entertainment is a bit high)

Re: French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales

#32

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 3:23 PM UTC

citricsquid wrote: post #3

This article is ridiculous. It has cherry picked statistics and misrepresented them. In 2011 digital downloads of music (through legitimate services, eg: itunes, spotify) GREW almost 20%(!!!). The reason that the overall statistics show a drop is because of physical media being included and that has fallen a huge amount: > Internet music growth was insufficient to offset falling sales of music on physical supports, d…

[deleted]

Re: French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales

#33

Post by Retric » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 3:33 PM UTC

J3L2404 wrote: post #26

alan_cx wrote: post #21

Well, its all based on the idea that people who "illegally" download would have bought the item otherwise. Really not true. Mostly the reason is either convenience or lack of cash to buy in the first place. I think of all the CD's I bought in the past which turned out to be garbage apart from the two singles released which are the reason for buying the CD. I think of all the DVD's I bought that I watched once. Now I…

>People are valuing your product as zero. Where they don't, they buy. No. The popular content is downloaded more. You can jump thru hoops and do backflips but the fact is people don't want to pay. Period. Everything else is justification.

Downloads say nothing about how much people liked the content because for in the vast majority of cases they have not seen it before they download. It's mostly a question of how much advertising something had, with quality only having knock on effects down the line.

Re: French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales

#34

Post by tomp » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 3:53 PM UTC

waterlesscloud wrote: post #27

Of course, the point of laws and law enforcement is to cut crime, which this did.

When 3% of society are criminals, you pass more laws in hope to stop the crimes.

When 30% of the society are criminals, your laws are wrong.

Re: French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales

#35

Post by tsotha » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 3:55 PM UTC

waterlesscloud wrote: post #27

Of course, the point of laws and law enforcement is to cut crime, which this did.

No, the point of laws is not to cut crime. The point of a law is reduce socially damaging behavior.

What is the point of this law?

Re: French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales

#36

Post by pfraze » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:12 PM UTC

J3L2404 wrote: post #29

zanny wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they don't want to buy, they recognize the cost of reproduction is zero. It is hard fact that once someone sets all the trillions of bits in a movie, game, operating system, or anything else we do, just ONCE, you can clone it for nothing as many times as you want. Until we get off the distribution per unit model of retail we will have this war against consumers.

>they recognize the cost of reproduction is zero. That is being very generous to the pimply-faced downloaders. I am quite sure the costs upfront or otherwise have no bearing.

Pimples or no, anybody can recognize that ctrl-c, ctrl-v doesn't cost money.

Re: French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales

#37

Post by J3L2404 » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:29 PM UTC

J3L2404 wrote: post #29

zanny wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they don't want to buy, they recognize the cost of reproduction is zero. It is hard fact that once someone sets all the trillions of bits in a movie, game, operating system, or anything else we do, just ONCE, you can clone it for nothing as many times as you want. Until we get off the distribution per unit model of retail we will have this war against consumers.

>they recognize the cost of reproduction is zero. That is being very generous to the pimply-faced downloaders. I am quite sure the costs upfront or otherwise have no bearing.

Sorry to anyone offended by pimply, but this idea that anything copyable deserves no copyright is childish. Exceedingly so on a site about software.

Re: French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales

#38

Post by waterlesscloud » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:41 PM UTC

tsotha wrote: post #35

waterlesscloud wrote: post #27

Of course, the point of laws and law enforcement is to cut crime, which this did.

No, the point of laws is not to cut crime. The point of a law is reduce socially damaging behavior. What is the point of this law?

To reduce socially damaging behavior.

It is anti-social to attempt to benefit from the work of others without compensating them.

Re: French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales

#39

Post by barrkel » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:45 PM UTC

J3L2404 wrote: post #37

J3L2404 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they recognize the cost of reproduction is zero. That is being very generous to the pimply-faced downloaders. I am quite sure the costs upfront or otherwise have no bearing.

Sorry to anyone offended by pimply , but this idea that anything copyable deserves no copyright is childish. Exceedingly so on a site about software.

Copyright is a red herring. What we want is to encourage creation of valuable information products and services. Historically, copyright was one way of doing that, because copying information directly was difficult and required apparatus and physical tokens that could be policed relatively easily. When copying becomes as simple and trivial as breathing, policing the act of copying becomes intrusive and laborious.

So different mechanisms of encouraging content creation need to be found; the fight we should be fighting has little to do with preserving copyright in its historical form.

Re: French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales

#40

Post by i_cannot_hack » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:47 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #25

i_cannot_hack wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the digital sales "GREW almost 20%(!!!)", as you enthusiastically put it. But you behave as if this is somehow extraordinary, and on top of it all automatically[0] assume that this is due to the reduction in piracy. In UK digital sales grew by 27% in 2011 alone, and they have no similar laws.[1] The truth is that the digital sales are increasing drastically all over the world, not just in France. This does not h…

In UK digital sales grew by 27% in 2011 alone, and they have no similar laws. Actually, we do, primarily under the controversial Digital Economy Act that was pushed through just before the last general election. The laws aren't widely applied yet in the way that they apparently have been in France, but there has been some fairly high profile threatening going on all the same. In other words, while I'm certainly not e…

As you say, the laws aren't widely applied yet, and I hardly think britain has had a 50% cut in piracy.

Buy hey, let's take my country (Sweden) as an example then. Digital sales went up a whopping 65% in 2011[0], and I can promise you that although we've have had some digital rights laws (like IPRED) no pirates here are actually afraid of getting caught, and the Pirate Party are still going strong. Actually, the only country with a sizable reduction in piracy (France) seem to be the one with the least increase in digital sales.

My guess is that the large increase in digital sales in Sweden is mainly due to the popularity of Spotify.

[0] http://www.ifpi.se/wp/wp-content/uploads/GLF-f%C3%B6rs%C3%A4... (in swedish)