"Last year, one study reported that digital video piracy costs the U.S. rich people yatch money $29.2 billion a year."
You can't just take that $4 price tag for streaming a movie through Apple TV or wherever, and multiply it by the number of movies people illegally stream, and get a number that makes any sense. The idea that American households would spend an extra $230/year on average on movie rentals, if only those nasty content pirates would get out of their way, is just absurd. Especially when you consider that most American households were never using these illegal streaming sites in the first place. Most of that average would have to be propped up by teenagers and college students who simply don't have an extra $2000/yr of disposable income to spare.
I remember pirating video games about 10-15 years ago to see if they were worthwhile, since the demo scene had pretty much died down. I'd end up buying the games I played through to completion as well.
Roller coaster tycoon 2 and kotor for example.
The other big thing is that the illegal streaming site has everything. So part of the whole "Okay I want to actually pay for the HD version of this" is "Okay now is this on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, or...?"
I've honestly mostly just gone back to dvd.com. It has everything (except for digital only stuff that never got a Bluray/DVD release), you can actually get 5.1 or 7.1 sound, and since I live 45 miles from the San Jose facility it's 1 day shipping.
Remember all those pictures of drug busts we used to see? Police take the weight seized (including packaging) then multiply it by the the highest price they could justify as an estimate of the "street value". That's how a table full of weed gets valued at $100,000,000.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying every purchase needs to pass some utilitarian moral litmus test; and sometimes luxury spending can have positive externalities, particularly when it incentivizes innovation. But we shouldn't pretend that gold-plated helicopters are inherently a win/win/win just because some subsistence wages got paid along the way, when we could have collected the same revenue as taxes and paid those wages for building infrastructure instead.
You can say what you want about IP law; you wouldn't be able to enjoy many big-budget productions if it wouldn't exist. Many jobs, high-paying and low-paying, wouldn't exist. Of course, the business model for content distribution is somewhat nonsensical and the time until content gets in the public domain should be 10 years, but that doesn't mean that IP law shouldn't exist. Not to mention that the 29 billion number is probably also BS.
I'm also finding very little relation between production budget (which mostly goes into things like SFX) and my enjoyment. Some of my favorite films were very low budget, from Dr. Horrible to some Bruce Campbell flicks.
Good writing makes a huge difference.
Decent acting and performance makes a bit of difference.
Replacing all the SFX with sixties-era Star Trek SFX wouldn't make a wit of difference to my enjoyment.
There is a correlation between finding good writers and having big budgets -- if you're dropping $300 million to make a film you might as well hire good writers -- but it's not a super-strong correlation.
If your enjoyment of big-budget movies doesn't infringe on that, go ahead and enjoy them. Since it does, I'll fight every step of the way. Perhaps I'll lose, but I'll fight.
When my parents were growing up, they could take things apart, tinker, and understand them as deeply as their hearts desired and intellects allowed them to. They could modify books (with pencils), archive them (in their basements), and even quote exerts. Building radios or modifying cars were mainstream hobbies.
I'm okay if your IP laws restrict my right to distribute copies of your work. I'm not okay with a copyright regime that makes it illegal for me to reverse-engineer and understand the software which controls my life, to tweak my car, or to understand my phone.
There's a possible dystopia where elections are de facto controlled by secret algorithms at Facebook, where all my information comes from a Google phone with a locked-down infrastructure I can't peak at or understand, where I can't record a 30 second clip of a movie to discuss it in my classroom, and where my car shuts down if I do an after-market repair.
At the time the DMCA came in, the RIAA and MPAA became major enemies of my personal freedom and my child's ability to learn.
It's an interesting case in that the internet has caused big media to push for stricter copyright enforcement and experiment with giving people less and less rights on their products, but at the same time the internet has made people much more aware of the downsides of copyright.
Truth is most (practically all) people want to watch Game of Thrones and are willing to pay for it.
My claim is that if MPAA profits went down even 50%, society wouldn't be any worse off at all. On the other hand, we are worse off for DRM.
I think most people would say were worse off if game of thrones was produced any different. You don’t like visual effects, but you’re in an extreme minority.
Until we see publishers closing doors due to lack of profits this argument doesn't really work.
I'm not a copyright abolitionist, but I'm curious what the second-order effects are to giving money to companies like Disney that are using that money to expand IP laws, buy up competitors, and impose one specific view of cinema on the entire market?
People should obey laws because generally it's a good idea in a functioning society to obey laws. But to the extent that people can deprive companies like Disney of revenue without breaking the law, I kind of feel like they should do so. Not just by avoiding their products, but by making it harder for them to make money in general. It would be good at this point for companies like Disney to fail and for the media ecosystem to become more diverse.
There are extremely negative effects that come from allowing one corporation to own so much culture. I'm not going to break the law, but I'm also not going to lose sleep over Disney the corporation losing profits, because I want Disney to lose money, and I want them to produce less content. I don't want Disney to be the biggest media producer on the market, they're crowding other people out and using their leverage to control things they shouldn't be able to control.
This is more like me buying from store A than from store B. Am I robbing store B?
Surely not giving to charity is worse than any other economic reallocation?
What do you mean by your first sentence? I am fairly sure that movies do actually cost quite a lot to produce.
That does not even matter since looking at marginal cost of a movie makes no sense. Do you want to see movies? If yes then pay for them, if no then simply don't watch them. Justifying stealing isn't the way to go.
I would guess that a lot of the jobs that are discussed in this thread are fairly specialised ones and if that industry would disappear they would be out of work.
That is an awful lot of time wasted of their lives.
Pay of individuals working on set, which the exception of huge name actors, is not really impacted by total movie revenue and they don’t often get dividends. Once the fixed cost is covered, which for most big movies it easily is, the rest is the gravy train for the investors.
The byzantine logic here on a supposedly 'smart site' really goes sideways on ideological issues were people have a) some ideology and b) they want it for free.
The failure of your comment is really quite evident: basically 'every purchaser' could make the same statement about 'marginal revenue' in which case, if nobody bought the content, then, there would be no content and no yachts.
Criminalising people isn't going to turn back this fundamental sea change.
What is also a problem is that prosecuting copyright infringement presents a nasty threat to privacy protections.
- Making private information available as a common activity is not inevitable.
- Staling private information is a crime by any account.
- The underlying economics are against your logic: it takes many workers, doing real work, to make those things. If they don't get paid, it doesn't get made.
- The 'yacht' analogy wrong - the entertainment industry is full of money losing projects, and zillions of people working really hard on stuff because they care and not earning a lot of money. There surely probably more arbitrarily rich people in tech than in entertainment.
Username checks out.
I figure there are more people who enjoy doing silly things to bother other people than who enjoying yachting.
Netflix and the Studios profit margins are similar to other distributors, and after all is said and done, most of them are not 'rolling in it', at least not any more than the local pharmacy chain corporation operators are - those are regular jobs as well.
FYI: Even studio heads are not rolling in it, they make less than the biggest talent/starts, and there are only literally 5-10 of them, one layer below, and those people are earning the same as senior devs at Google with a small amount of stock options. The rest of the distribution machine are not paid so well.
This 'yacht populism' is ridiculous unless, maybe, you're referring to 'Jim Carrey' or 'Tom Cruise', but even then ...
The content is made by people, just like physical things are, if they don't get paid, it doesn't get made, it's that simple.
This is patently not true. Maybe it's true for a subset of the high end content like Netflix series, but the vast majority of creative content e.g. music or paintings are not made with the primarily goal of being paid. Some good examples are how Myspace gave way to thousands of artists, the works on Deviantart or how Open Source is made by volunteers.
How can companies say they lose profit when the only realistic way I see for that is someone getting a refund and spending it on a competitor?
There’s also the flipside of some pirates turning into paid customers (think Photoshop).
Then there’s the fact that the number is vastly inflated as some people use the $150,000 maximum fine as the cost of a pirate copy. Never mind the fact that it was actually $5 (or whatever) of “lost” revenue.
Movies and TV shows, all pirated. I'd buy some DVDs if I was really obsessed with something.
Eventually I got a job, and streaming / affordable PC games caught up with reality and met me half-way.
If you put a price on everything I pirated before that time, I'm not sure if I could have afforded that even if I stopped paying rent and buying food completely.
Too bad streaming is getting more fractured again. If I want to watch 6 TV shows, I have to subscribe to 5 streaming services.
I used to think it was beneficial in the old days when most useful software was proprietary and few decent open alternatives existed.
A teenager who wanted to make a custom 3D model for a quake mod needed an extremely expensive 3d animation package from maya or 3dstudio max. A teen doesn't have 3ds or maya money. So they pirate it and learned to use 3ds max or maya and in the process build up an actual skill. Later on when they go on to work in the industry their skill now creates actual demand for said software. In a way it was a gain.
Just a random thought.
Either the price is too high [0] or I can't trust the company to put out good media.
[0]: For instance, paying $30 for a limited license to stream Mulan a month early. You don't own it (Disney can and will take it off Disney+), the only benefit is seeing it early and it costs Disney nearly nothing to distribute to another person.
You can't ask people. Very few people will admit "I pirated this because I didn't feel like paying for it like I normally would." People always find ways to justify their actions, so every response would just be some variation of "I pirated this because the legal options are too inconvenient that I normally wouldn't bother so I didn't hurt anyone."
And you never will be able to totally eliminate piracy nor will you be able to definitively attribute gains or losses to changes in piracy. Maybe the quality of the content changed, maybe the economy had a downturn, maybe an advertising campaign was really effective, etc.
This is a self-inflicted wound by media companies, and they are attempting to solve the issue by sending people to prison, instead of taking the money people are ready to spend on their content.
Want to watch show X? Oh, you need Amazon prime. Show Y? Netflix. Show Z? HBO Max. Live sports? You need some BS cable package that costs a ridiculous amount.
Media companies get all mad about IP and yet create walled gardens everywhere. They get no sympathy from me.
I just want some GoG-like store for movies. Have sales like Steam, price competition, keep what you buy, "complete your collection" bundles, etc.
THis could really work with federation: each rightholder sets up their own shop on a common marketplace. Transfer encryption keys. Maybe even use torrents for distribution? But final files should have no DRM.
Not even for "higher" quality versions. I have an AVI of my LotR movies ripped from DVDs from whenever people bought DVDs and ripped AVIs. The quality is still very good, even played on a 4K TV. I've never sat thinking, "I wish I had the 4k Bluray remaster" while watching it.
But its not 0% of face value either.
And a lot of piracy battle is to ensure the movie/tv industry does get "Napstered." Napster annihilated the public's perception of the value of songs because even my tech illiterate mother could pirate.
Right now my mom pays for netflix and cable. But if a pirate streaming service was as easy to find and use as netflix is, she'd start using it. So the current laws and enforcement do protect a lot of value now.
But of course that would send even more to piracy....
It makes you wonder if Steve Jobs was correct that people that pirate (songs, Napster back in the day) would be willing to pay for music if it was easy (iTunes) and cheap ($0.99).
I'm not sure if I agree but it is an interesting foil.
Personally, I don't think consumers have a right to tell creators, "You have to sell that to me for $x or I will take it without paying." Companies certainly aren't good, but they're not typically stupid either. They're not going to price things to a point where people can't afford them. I think pirates just lie to themselves a lot to justify their actions.
Steve literally proceeded to launch a software app store that had DRM out of the wazoo, so even he didn't believe it.
But even it weren't, content creators unwillingness to let Apple sell DRM free media is not evidence that Jobs agrees with them.
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2541387/itunes-starts-... [2] https://www.macworld.com/article/1138000/drm-faq.html
Not to mention the Draconian DRM. I can play 4K games at 60fps on Linux, but I cannot play a 4K film from Netflix or listen to music from TIDAL with certain browsers. Fuck that.
[1] https://kodi.tv/
a) Wildly inflated estimates of views.
b) That the viewer would have purchased the content if the pirated content were not available.
c) All purchases in "b)" would be at the highest price the content was ever offered at.
Similarly, pirated content does not represent lost retail sales. People who pirate content would not necessarily purchase it legitimately were it available to them.
When citing a study like this, it would be wonderful to see something like "Based on this research, we expect to the economy grow by X additional dollars in this area, using methods XYZ" If the legislation fails to achieve the actual result with a proposed amount of time, then it gets scrapped.
Our legal system is missing a feedback loop - adding complexity is cheap (and profitable if you're a politician) but removing it expensive and there's generally not any reason to without SIGNIFICANT public outcry (marijuana legalization, for instance).
But the quote you are replying to makes no sense anyway. It doesn't "cost the economy". This is that same old fallacy that says if the economy has "grown" and there's more bits of paper moving around that we are somehow better off. If anything a bigger economy just means we spend too much of our finite lives trying to make sure others don't get more than we do. It doesn't correlate to a better way of life at all.
Certainly it's not about generating money ex nihilō, so what is the standard?
When there is money at stake, laws en enforcement can accomplish things that are unthinkable when it is at the expense of the common good.
Recognition of an exact pattern is computationally very easy. Examination of often subjective truths is objectively very hard?
Of course there are corner cases that are really hard, but that is no different than audio/video recognition, where a 95% solution (that also has many imperfections) gets forced on users anyway.
I'm sure that it's basically impossible. I think it's impossible even with full, proper general intelligence AI at scale, and that won't happen in my lifetime even if humanity collectively downs tools and works on nothing else.
Facebook has thrown a lot (lot lot) of resources at this, and it's clearly totally ineffective.