EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
People compose music. Should they be compensated every time the music is played? There's no clear "yes" answer here--the counterpoint being that otherwise no one would compose music is disproven by hundreds of years of wonderful music still performed today.
People record music and codify this in a big number (a wav file). Should they be paid every time such a number is put in a particular software? Should the number be kept secret so they can be paid by people that want to know it? Of course not, and this is ridiculous. When there were actual (plastic) records, there was an industry whose job was to produce this special plastic. Their business was plastic. They got a license to print special plastic and then sell it. Of course the "designer" of the special plastic wanted a bit of the sale. But now, this industry is only in the business of keeping numbers secret. And this is not a viable business, and we should not support them.
There's an obviously failing business with little to no added value: that of big record companies and rock stars. They were viable propositions when printing records was expensive (high marginal cost business). Now the cost of music distribution is effectively zero (zero marginal cost business). Why should they insist they are allowed to maintain their business model?
If making pizza becomes essentially free, why would we pass laws that prevent people from getting free pizzas? It's absurd.
Just because we want some copyright, doesn't mean we want the current system. There's lots of room to have mixed strategies, eg personal use copying of music is free but public performance requires a license. (Basically, the de facto state now.) And there's lots of reason to believe we should adjust the current system (and business models built around it) somehow, because it's clear that what we have legislated isn't optimal... or in some ways even workable.
Secondly, why not Kickstarter it? (or Patreon? or sell merchandise? etc.) There's no reason not to collect a pool of money, escrow it (with some payments to live on during), and hand it over when they release an album. They get paid for certain and the public can listen to the album as much as they want. This seriously hurts the machine that is pop music, but is that really a bad thing? I think we can do better as a culture than what we presently have (in the form of big, centrally controlled companies/networks).
There are lots of ways to fund music and musicians without the current paradigm. People like art and want to support art they enjoy. (And for that matter, music managed to get funded for all of human history without the present system... So I suspect the concern is overstated.)
It's a pretty big change too, considering that just a couple decades ago the only feasible way to make recordings of any kind at home was cassette tapes.
Recording can be done essentially for free (less than 10,000$). In fact many artists chose to have a studio at home and do away with that cost entirely.
As a lot of artists effectively work for free: the cost is zero.
In fact, the expectation nowadays, in many cases I've personally heard from them, is that new artists proposing themselves to a label are expected to come with a full master of their debut, self paid.
Why are creators of popular public statues or significant landmarks treated differently than, for instance, music composers or book authors?
They get a one time fee for their creation and, with some exceptions (e.g. no unauthorized pictures of Brussels' Atomium), that's it?
In some cases this is based on a voluntary contract and in some it is based on a public lending right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right
There are no record companies there.
I do not consider piracy theft, but I do consider there to be economic issues that must be handled. If the creators aren't compensated, there are limits that wind up occurring. For music, because of factors such as the ability to be compensated through concerts and through fame (fame can't directly pay your rent, but I think it still counts as compensation because of the impact of having high fame), it is possible for people to still make money. But in other medias this may not be possible. Look at movies, if we allowed infinite copying how would we get the budget to create the expensive movies currently created? Imagine if a theater only had to make a copy and could continue to show the movie and make profits without giving any back to the creator.
If you look at indie video games, you see a truce of sorts. Most indie games have little protection, but many people still buy them even though they could copy them. Some do this because they want to support people who aren't developing game with always online DRM or similar techniques. But is this model sustainable? What happens if people begin feeling entitled to such an extent that the producers aren't able to sustain their livelihoods?
And I'm not sure my personal experiences are relevant or not, but I'm someone who use to pirate computer games back when I was a broken college student but who started buying all my games once I had a steady income.
"A thousand candles can be lighted from the flame of one candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened."
The question now is if modern day software piracy and similar intellectual property copying is theft. If it isn't then perhaps "piracy" is a bad term for it?
I'd prefer we call them huggers, not pirates, and that they are hugging content rather than pirating content.
You'll notice that if the word has positive connotations, then if you commission a study on the effects of hugging on the music industry, you'd probably be expecting to finding positive net benefits to the activity.
Other synonyms for theft (larceny, burglary, robbery, etc) are too tied to the physical world to work for their purposes. The goal was to frame the conversation away from more accurate words like copying or infringement since those have more ambiguous moral connotations. Looking at the thesaurus entry for theft, I struggle to find a better alternative to piracy if the goal is to shape the way people think about the issue in your favor.
Video games are a good example of something that works: the marginal cost, and actual copy-proof value of many games are updates and content. See World of Warcraft. Pay to play.
At least you are paying for something that actually costs money (again: a download is essentially free to the seller).
The issue is why do I get to sell someone else's work? And even if we did allow it, this would quickly lead to content producers not being able to continue to produce.
Imagine for a second if Steam could just take any video games and sell them keeping 100% of the profit. How would that impact production of video games?
>See World of Warcraft. Pay to play.
So create a market where only always online games are ever made? That doesn't seem a step backwards?
Labels are not only distributers, not all artists are interested in marketing, distribution, mixing, etc. And at some point you need to get those investments back.
If you remove payments or restrict it to special ways like patreon people will still produce music, that's obvious. But it's not clear that it's the same music we get today.
Art will not vanish, but it will change the arts, probably in a major way. But what it will be like is up for discussion.
So what? We're just trending back towards the long-tail. The whole "super star" phenomenon only exists because producing/distributing music was expensive and so corporations were able to exert control over music consumption and (more importantly) music discovery. Most of my favorite bands fund their albums via Kickstarter/Patreon/etc, I listen to it on Spotify, and I drop $20-$40 on tickets when they come to town. My money is still there, I just spend it on the services that provide the most value to me.
I believe that current situation favors indie artists as anybody can form a band, record an album in their basement, upload it to Basecamp, Youtube etc. and if they are really good, expect a success. That's how an open system should work imho. In an old system, you would have to pass that middleman (and agree to pay huge part of money made from your music) before somebody even hears you. The difference is that it is hard/impossible to strike super-rich now as a musician, "success" often means taking donations for song/albums downloads and getting paid for live concerts to make a living. That makes musicians much like any other profession, and that's how it should be; we had super-rich musicians only because there were bubble in music industry in the past century (other comments have written more detailed on this topic). If all pop-stars would disappears overnight, I wouldn't mind either as there's probably enough indie music to discover than I have enough time in my whole life.
Do you mean the music that was created by musicians paid by the aristocracy for their work or the music created for fun by the already wealthy using their expensive pianos and strings instruments?
For example: if my friend who works on self-driving software for Google is at my house, should I just be able to download the source code from his work laptop onto a USB drive? The software distribution cost, like music, is near zero, so is this ok? If not, how is this example different than music?
I, for one, don't believe it is "absurd" that creators like musicians or Google be able to exert some control over how their creations are copied for a limited period of time. Currently the copyright system has run amuck and become far too creator-centric, but I think the basic idea is sound and makes a nice set of tradeoffs.
I also disagree that history somehow makes it obvious that incentives are not needed to make music. When the printing press came along and drastically reduced that cost of distributing music, copyright systems followed almost immediately thereafter. What historical precedent of an environment with low cost distribution but without copyright systems makes it obvious that the copyright part is unnecessary?
That’s not even quite the case. The current system is strongly in favour of the middleman — publishers, music labels and the like. Whether this is a better or worse state of affairs than being biased towards the authors themselves is unclear, but it’s a sufficiently sourced different problem that the solution must also differ
- pay-once costs (the cost of the oven)
- pay-per costs (the cost of the dough)
Competition and economic law tells us that the price of a pizza will drop to the pay-per (marginal) cost once the pay-once (fixed) cost is repaid.
Copyright law was introduced to let companies recover fixed costs by giving them a monopoly and preventing competition. The problem is that this law failed on many levels:
* the length of the monopoly far exceeds its needs: recording an album does not need millions as 50 years ago. It needs thousands.
* there is no real incentive to cut down fixed costs. The reason the prices of production dropped is simply the advent of digital recording. Pro audio analog tools are still incredibly expensive.
* it set up a specific, adapted business model which is not necessarily a good one, the one of rock stars, which privileges few "winners" giving them huge resources and exploits the majority of other artists by giving them essentially nothing.
If you want to know what would happen to software if getting a copy is free, well, essentially we are very close to it. Google is not really protected by copyright law when thinking about its search engine business. They are protected by the control of deep know how and the cost of building such a system. Google's search engine is its team, not its source code.
Are you actually questioning the whole concept of paying for digital goods?
Do you really think you only paid for a jewel case and logistics when you bought your CDs or packaged software back in the 90s? No, you obviously paid for the work that went into the product. And that should still apply, even if you buy the content from Bandcamp's digital shelves. Or the App Store.
> There's an obviously failing business with little to no added value: that of big record companies and rock stars.
The piracy discussion always seems to be limited to big major labels. I agree that we don't need more of those, but they are really just the surface of the industry. There are countless small and niche labels that do honest and important work, acting as curator, supporting their artists and gathering a significant and loyal following among avid listeners.
The report said that there was not sufficient evidence to conclude that piracy is harmful. The article gets this right but then still somehow manages to screw it up in the headline. I can't imagine that's an honest mistake, so it must be a lie.
Well, at least now we know that TNW can't be trusted any more than the EC.
> On the contrary, in the case of video games, the study found the opposite link, indicating a positive influence of illegal game downloads on legal sales.
That said a lot of studies are crap, maybe the conceptual framework is sound, but they botched the mathematical parts (the stats handwaving), or the sample size is too small, so even if the math is beautiful, the study is meaningless.
Now, for these data from the real world studies the controls are the differences between individual games/movies/albums. Because there are games that take more time to upload (because they take more time to crack, or the game publisher aggressively started to shut down torrent trackers). For movies and albums I don't know what kind of controls they came up with, but they can look at IP addresses of big torrent swarms and asking film studios for marketing spending data and then later cinemas for seats sold data, and try to look at the signals. (Did downloads with a lot of IP addresses from a state had an affect on cinema tickets sold in that state? Is there a per movie difference? Is there a common cause variable - they can try to control with DVD/Blueray/video-on-demand sales.)
There's little difference between piracy and the demo/shareware model that is common in gaming, the pirated version often lacks updates and online play leading a fan to buy the game.
I doubt "Report finds no conclusive results for pirated digital goods" would raise that much attention.
Secondly, this isn't just a case of insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is the most pro-piracy conclusion that could ever come from a study framed as "let's see if there are harmful effects from piracy" — and let's face it, that's the only framing of the study that's going to get funding. The only stronger result possible would be a larger study with the same conclusion.
That's why I hate sales&marketing as an industry. It's a thin layer of actual social good covered by meters of dishonesty and malice.
I sell large portable wooden sheds. Very profitable.
It's really no different than just stealing the 420K directly, unless you had cohorts at the company doing the study and it was just plain corruption, which is no better.
For instance, I would be lying if I said I've never pirated music in my life. My total lifetime spending on music in physical form is probably only around £100. My spending on live music in the past 2 years probably exceeds £1000 though.
What's changed? I have a Spotify subscription. Spotify has made music discovery far easier (than even tracking down torrents) and is something I gladly pay for without a second doubt. A secondary effect is I now see far more live music as I have discovered artists I actually care about supporting.
To quote Jeff Bezos: your margin is my opportunity.
While the findings didn't state that piracy wasn't harmful, they certainly did find that current the intellectual property situation (including local laws and international laws and trade) was harmful in some ways.
I'm yet to hear or see any movement resulting from the report, but part of the findings were how hard it is to make informed changes to the current system, because of so many international and complicated legal requirements.
[1] https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/intellectual-prope...
"Timely and cost effective access to copyright content is the best way to reduce infringement."
Copyright is different than patents because it’s not ever going to prevent you from making something you would have come up with by yourself like patents do.
> I wouldn't have a problem, compensating an artist a reasonable amount for his songs.
You can. Buy the album. Don't stream it on Spotify, Apple Music or Google Play, which are very different distribution channels that are closer to renting than buying.
Without questions there are some areas where piracy is a real problem like:
- "free" (ad income) content of small content creators pirated on youtube and reuploaded on facebook (or one of the many other variations of this problem)
- maybe very good blockbuster movies most people would actually have buyed even if slightly expensive
- movies released _before_ there official release (through this is more a cybersecurity problem then a piracy one)
But at last for all people in my environment the coming of services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll, Spotify, and well regular Steam Sales and Humble Bundle cured them from any intend of illegal downloading content.