Piracy: are we being conned?
smh.com.au
smh.com.au
In Australia, hypothetically said episodes tend to come out a number of days later for very popular shows and often weeks or months later for less popular shows.
This is due to hypothetical dinosaur age licensing of said programs from hypothetical Australian media companies.
I have heard hypothetically on a number of occasions, hypothetical Australians downloading hypothetical series only hours later than they were literally aired in America.
The exact same things happens (hypothetically) with DVDs and whatnot. Contextual shows like South Park make less sense when aired in countries like Australia many months after they were aired in the US.
What do these companies expect is going to happen?
---
On a side note, a television series that portrayed the story of a number of gangland murders was produced, and was to be aired WHILST THE TRIAL WAS STILL ONGOING. Now the magistrate in their epic wisdom decreed that the show was not to be shown in the state that the crimes were committed, as it may contribute to biasing the jury of the case (there's a correct legal term, which I forget).
What happened was that the show was aired in all other states except Melbourne, as ordered by the judge, and the very next day there were people STANDING ON STREET CORNERS IN THE MELBOURNE CBD selling DVDs of the episode to people as they were stopped at red lights. I kid you not, this actually happened.
Anyway, long story short the main man was convicted and later murdered in prison, but I hope this illustrates the utter lack of understanding and wisdom of Australia in these matters. Hypothetically no wisdom at all.
Okay, I jest. But you're absolutely right anyway. It annoys me as an American, and I'm the one with all the good fortune in this case! That a TV show can air here, and not air for another week if not longer in Canada, a nation literally adjoined to mine (and quite possibly where that TV show was made!) highlights the insanity. And this is especially stupid in broadcast TV, which literally gives its signal away. They know that the more eyeballs it has the more they can charge for advertising. How have they not taken advantage of the Internet and p2p yet? It's just dumb.
Worth watching, an hour or so speech from Mark Pesce, an American in Australia, who spoke on the topic years ago. I highly recommend anyone who doesn't think this is about the assumption of easy money and people with power sticking their head in the sands.
By the time the show would be released on DVD, many people had nice-quality subtitled videos from an independent online group. Many of these "fan-subbing" teams said they were releasing the files as a service to the worldwide fans that wouldn't otherwise be able to watch.
These days, companies are doing a bunch of simultaneous releases on TV in Japan and online in the US (and probably some other countries?). I think that time will tell how big of an effect the time delay had.
I was honestly surprised "Dexter" was on regular German TV here rather soon - I was on season three when they started season one here. I cannot say "Breaking Bad" is being aired yet nor "The Shield", "The Wire" or any other of my favorite shows. Not even "Battlestar Galactica" or "South Park" made it to non-pay TV.
Well, at least "Two and a Half Men" is on if you are so inclined.
I have heard that this could also happen, hypothetically, in the reverse direction for popular BBC shows.
Is it just me or does even this clearly inflated figure seem like pocket change? The economy of Australia is some $900 billion a year and counting. The costs of enforcing such legislation and the impact on people's freedom and privacy is surely not worth a mere 0.1% of the overall economy even in the best case.
My heart sank when I read this: "Ferrer said that, even if the numbers were not completely correct, there was no denying that piracy was a significant issue for the industry that was only expected to increase with the arrival of the National Broadband Network."
I think this is an oversimplification, and a dangerous one. These statistics are biased, one-sided and misleading. That is indeed a property of some or even most statistics, just as "being wrong" is a property of some or even most information. Yet no-one would think to proclaim that the problem with government is that it believes information.
Real statistics, like real science, is a force for good. Bad statistics, like pseudoscience, is a force for bad - but it can only fool the ignorant. The solution isn't to ban statistics. It's to educate decision makers so they can tell the difference.
The problem is not so much a lack of education as it is an excess of corporate influence.
Any social program in the government uses stastical methods to determine utility, impact and ROI.
Why? It works. Would you prefer a more "faith-based" approach?
Perhaps in our day and age of more direct interactions (ie, email, SMS, twitter) it might be possible to augment statistical methods with direct feedback.
Sounds like that person was motivated by as compulsive desire to collect things rather than a desire to watch movies.
maybe this should be a better "hit" than pirating then :P
If we had access to these sites, and/or they brought shows out on TV here within a few days of the US release, then there would be a many times less unauthorised viewing. A good example of how bad it can be is NBC's Chuck, which is a great show. The fourth season just ended a couple of weeks ago in the US - but as far as I know not one episode has been on free-to-air here. They did start showing the first season of it on cable about when the third season aired in the US (about a year and a half late) if I remember correctly...
Pretty much everyone who reads HN knows this.
The gaming industry has largely ditched these old world models. Titles are generally available worldwide within days of initial release. Games are AFAIK not region-protected (they could be on at least console platforms). Digital distribution, at least for PC games, is widespread (ie Steam). What's more that distribution is awesome. Delete a title? Want to re-download it? Not a problem! Not so with iTunes.
Take Game of Thrones, a series produced by HBO with immense worldwide interest. I imagine piracy of this is enormous. Unfortunately, HBO, which seems stuck in the premium cable model, will look at this of evidence that we need more regulation and prosecutions.
What it actually means is there is unsatisfied demand. If people could buy it on iTunes or buy an HBO subscription on their PC on iPad without having to have a cable subscription (which HBO Go requires) then there would be a lot less piracy IMHO. Of course international distribution would also interfere with HBO's traditional distribution deals.
Basically, HBO is just leaving money on the table when I'm sure people would pay $3-5 per episode of GoT as long as they could watch it when they wanted and re-download or re-stream it as desired.
Most, if not all, US networks distribute their content via the Web, either directly or via Hulu (or both). Some place further restrictions like a window in which you can watch the content or a one week delay (as Fox does).
I like this model. I have no TV. I don't want a TV. I don't want a cable subscription (other than for internet).
The problem is that the experience is so awful the choice becomes either pirating it or not watching it. The ads break, they will switch you out of full screen mode, if you have to go back to the content (because it breaks, which it does) you will have to endure a half dozen ads to find the spot you were at and the inventory is repetitive and pointless (1 in 3 online ads are for Geico I swear, and I live in NYC and have no car so why am I being tortured with them?).
Part of the problem there is that advertisers are also stuck in traditional media. I wonder why this is. My best theory is that there are no accurate metrics on audience or conversion with, say, TV advertising so advertisers are basically buying into the lie that networks sell them.
Another theory is that traditional media reach audiences that online media don't.
But why can't I pay for a Hulu with no ads? I would. I have two theories about this too:
1. Hulu likes having a relationship with advertisers; and
2. The people most likely to pay not to see ads are the ones of most value to the advertisers.
So instead Hulu tries pointless differentiators to get me to buy Hulu Plus, like being able to watch it on my iPad. That would actually be nice but if I have to watch it on my laptop instead so be it.
The one company that seems to get online distribution is, of course, Netflix. Watch as much as you want, whenever you want, on whatever device you want for a flat fee. They've obviously solved the problem of distributing royalties and so forth to content owners. Why can't anyone else?
That'll probably change today with iCloud. Ironically, the record companies don't like how powerful Apple is but they've created the monster that is iTunes by first insisting on DRM and then shutting out other players. They wanted Amazon and Google to pay for playing music you own when it comes from a hard drive in the cloud rather than one you own. Neither did.
The result seems to be that they've turned to Apple as their saviour, which will probably make Apple even more powerful.
The whole situation--music, movies and TV--is utterly stupid.
Some software has been developed to prevent print screening. I've also seen the web variant of this, to prevent you from doing right click - Open image in new tab. Used on some of those funny images sharing sites.
Now there's a thought...
Spotify, like netflix, seem to 'get it'. They offer a 'listen to as much as you want' plan for a flat monthly fee.
I'm sure their biggest achievement to date is convincing the music labels that this is a good idea.
I can't see any other business model that can compete with this, and I fully expect it to become the dominant entertainment distribution model in the next 2-3 years.
I expect this is why Apple are launching icloud, even though it's going to cannibalise their existing itunes business.
Question is, I wonder if the same subscription model will eventually permeate to the app store?
And if you look closely, people don't respect physical property to an exact degree. We share, we borrow, we lend, we lease, we sometimes treat human work as property, we're generally just lazy with our accounting of ownership. Which, you know, is kinda cool.
Anyway, you use the word arbitrary as if the arbitrary nature of the line makes the line meaningless.
In other words, there is nothing to invoke but natural law; and there is nothing behind natural law. Invoking natural law is _itself_ the means by which natural law gains utility.
What laws do you think are real? The only 'real' law is the Sparrow Predicate: what a man can't do, and what a man can do. _Everything else is built upon this._
That is to say, it is distracting and adding nothing sensible to point out that physical property, too, is an abstraction--it is merely an extension of the original point, which is: people don't buy into the intellectual property concept nearly as much as the physical property concept.
Well worth a read for what I think is a good way to understand the legal vs technical perspective of copyright.
Duke Nukem Forever -- is on-sale for me in the Steam Store for $71.99USD. (Remember that the $AUD is higher than the USD at the moment). In the US -- $44.99
http://www.steamprices.com/au/app/57900/duke-nukem-forever
See also -- $1.29AUD iTunes apps/songs
For example, I mistakenly preordered Civ5 last year. It was like US$80 on Steam. A$50 locally (I still lived in Australia then) and I could buy it for like A$35-40 delivered from the UK.
What's weird is the physical media just installed the Steam game. So I don't get why it was so expensive on Steam.
It does seem Steam's content distribution is somewhat complicated. Like Telstra has their own Steam server so will distribute Steam content to BigPond customers and possibly broader than that. So they'll no doubt get a cut for that. Steam will take a cut. But for physical media the retailer takes a huge cut. So why so expensive digitally?
The short answer is a vpn into the US (or nearly anywhere). Prices become magically cheaper and hulu starts working.
They haven't quite solved it, as they get only a limited selection. Every week its coverage of the "B-list" is improved but they've had only limited penetration into the A-class stuff. Still, I would pay easily twice what I do now to get a better selection of updated stuff from them, on the condition that they continue to have no ads, which is rapidly becoming my line in the sand.
In the end I just skipped the movie because it really wasn't that important, but look at the effort I went through to try and hand over my money. Number one rule of business is to make it frictionless for your customers to give you money. Movie studios do the exact opposite and then wonder why movies are pirated.
Buying it has two problems:
- I don't want to spend $15-20 on something I'll see only once.
- I want to see it now. A lot of my movie viewing is spontaneous (e.g., "I'm tired and don't want to do anything tonight... what good movies haven't I seen?"), and I'm not a hardcore enough movie buff to maintain a physical backlog of movies I need to see.
- Reselling is a pain. How? Craigslist? For one thing, I'm not sure what the demand is for random obscure DVDs on it, and secondly, that's more time I burn meeting up with a buyer just to get $5 on a DVD.
I will buy physical copies of things that I truly love and intend to see over and over again (e.g., the Band of Brothers box set, or the Firefly box set...)
More expensive ($10-$20), and I'm already paying for other services to rent movies from. I also haven't bought a movie in years. The large majority of stuff simply isn't good enough to own, and even if it's good I rarely sit down to watch a movie again (if it's on TV, and I have time, and it was good I may watch it again).
I also don't want to deal with physical media at all. And selling it afterwards? So now to watch a movie that is supposedly out at retail I need to buy it (go to the store or wait for it to be delivered), watch it, and then resell it? Add to the fact that many DVDs still have unskippable previews and the entire process is very high on my personal friction scale. All this and I'm in the US. It's even worse if someone is in another country. And people wonder why so many people pirate movies...
There is DRM on DVDs. You used to need DeCSS to play them on Linux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
There also are no accurate metrics on audience or conversion with TV advertising. It is just that everyone in the industry has grown accustomed to using the Neilsen numbers, no matter how inaccurate, as "the one and only", and they don't yet have any comfort with the equivalent on a net based distribution system.
Consider the typical Neilsen ratings number. It estimates (because it is a sample set) that X number televisions were tuned to broadcast Y at time Z. And from that advertisers estimate that Q number of viewers watched the ads.
But in reality, all the Neilsen numbers report is that a certain number of Neilsen monitored TV's are tuned to broadcast Y at time Z. During the ads, they do not know what happened. The viewer might have hit the can (a common occurrence), or gone to get some munchies from the kitchen (another common occurrence) or checked HN while the ads were running. But because all the "users" of the numbers have grown accustomed to estimating from an estimate they believe they have something useful. In reality, the emperor has no clothes. But they ignore reality.
The article from David Byrne a few days ago made the point that the music industry is a very recent invention in the history of music as a part of human culture, and that things have changed drastically over the last 100 years. The recording industry of the 20th century will be nothing but a (influential) blip on the radar in the history of music.
The music industry seems to think that they have some fundamental right to exist. I can't blame them for not wanting to admit that things are changing again and they are on the way out.
(1) The reason HBO doesn't need to care about piracy as much as networks do is somewhat counterintuitive. You'd think that, since HBO monetizes viewers directly, it should be deeply concerned with losing viewers to piracy. But actually, there's a reasonable argument to be made that HBO gains more users from piracy than it loses. Piracy serves as a great marketing vehicle for HBO's content, while not really stealing away a significant number of current users. Net-net, HBO might actually be better off for the existence of piracy. But that's just a hypothesis.
(2) Eventually, HBO will need to adapt its subscription model, which is predicated on semi-indirectly monetizing users by way of monetizing cable providers based on size of user base (among other factors). What does the adaptation look like? I'd imagine it's a future in which all cloud-based curators of content (Apple, Netflix, etc.) are monetized by HBO and other providers in a similar fashion to how HBO currently monetizes cable networks. In this sense, I don't think a la carte is totally going to replace subscription models for HBO and its ilk. It might be a nice complement to, but certainly not an immediate replacement for, business as usual.
So even though companies know they will never win the piracy fight, it sends a message that it's not okay to download it for free (as opposed to doing nothing).
You are still assuming that all piracy (= unauthorized copying = disrespect of copyright) is wrong. While it is illegal, it doesn't automatically mean that it is also illegitimate. What if someone is too poor to spend money on legal music? Nobody loses anything by him pirating music, and he gains something (entertainment), so overall, the outcome is positive.
I don't deny there is a demographic that will always obtain for free what it can but it's a lot below 100%. Witness the documented effect of services like NetFlix on piracy levels or the warnings in software such as PDFCreator or Paint.Net that if you paid money you were conned. For whatever reason, some people will pay for the freely available.
Not to mention that, very often, material via sources such as TPB is of lower quality - inexpertly cut off at the start or finish, periodic glitches, whatever. Plus it's hardly got high availability and consistent cataloguing. People will pay for a reliable, quality service.
"For whatever reason, some people will pay for the freely available."
If piracy wasn't stopped and it was advertised everywhere that in all the search engines that you could get commercial software for free, these numbers would be very close to 100%.
"Not to mention that, very often, material via sources such as TPB is of lower quality - inexpertly cut off at the start or finish, periodic glitches, whatever. Plus it's hardly got high availability and consistent cataloguing. People will pay for a reliable, quality service."
TPB has a search box. software is a perfect copy, music is usually near perfect, and many times the movies (not always), are ripped right from the studio or DVD.
Here's the way that record companies should make money: $20/mo for access to that company's entire catalog, unlimited download, well-organized, high-quality rips, vetted torrents (i.e., uploaded by the company itself, malware free), etc. If you've ever used one of the big private music trackers they make an excellent prototype for a for-pay service that would allow the rights holders to rake in even more money than they currently make. They were eventually able to figure it out with VHS, I don't know why it takes them so long with the internet.
There is a rating system. If there is a virus, someone will complain. How is it difficult to use? looking for Photoshop? put it in the search box and click "search".
"Here's the way that record companies should make money: $20/mo for access to that company's entire catalog, unlimited download, well-organized, high-quality rips, vetted torrents (i.e., uploaded by the company itself, malware free), etc. If you've ever used one of the big private music trackers they make an excellent prototype for a for-pay service that would allow the rights holders to rake in even more money than they currently make. They were eventually able to figure it out with VHS, I don't know why it takes them so long with the internet."
The record companies already negotiated with terrorists and lost, why would they believe that this time will be any different. You can get songs for 99 cents, Netflix tons of movies, preview music through Grooveshark, Last.fm, and Pandora. Yet, it's still not "enough". Piracy is worse than never and there are a new set of excuses as to why you have a need (and a right) to downloading someone else's hard work for free.
The beginning of the entitlement generation.
There is a pirate party in Sweden and sites like thepiratebay get millions of visitors per day.
Pirating is a pain and I think most people would pay something to avoid having to do it. The question is just how much and how convenient it is to do so.
It was never about the reproduction, it's about the original and the "value" to the user. If they know they can get it for free, they will download it for free. How is this not destabilizing?
Currency is just ink and paper and pretty much costs nothing to reproduce, yet it has a value.
"Piracy is running rampant because the laws have been manipulated and skewed in favor of the content generators so their work get all the protections but no longer ever fall into the public domain."
Right, because people that are downloading the latest Lady Ga Ga album are doing so because of these laws. Why can't people admit that they are selfish and just don't want to spend their own money because they know they can get it for free?
"The collective public thus no longer have incentive to follow copyright laws and have quite a bit of incentive to violate and disregard them as totally and as quickly as possible."
Piracy is running rampant because:
1) The Internet is now mainstream and it's very easy to tell mass amounts of people how to download something for free. 2) The risk involved with being caught for pirated materials is almost non-existent.
It's funny because when the discussion is about open source and the GNU license, opinions quickly change. Using software against the spirit of the license is "theft" and shouldn't be allowed. Even though it does nothing to harm the original content creator (the original open source work is still there and open, you just don't get the changes).
Months ago when there were discussions about the Thesis wordpress theme, there was nearly a witch hunt on HN. This is why it's difficult to take any of these discussions seriously. It's all about politics and has nothing to do with freedom or rights.
In my opinion the only feasible way to fix the system is to bring copyright duration back to a reasonable time period, like maybe 10 years or so, with a way to extend that duration for high value properties. One way would be to declare value on that particular property, paying property tax on that value, and limiting the liability of infringement damages to that declared value.
I'm not saying that piracy would go away totally at that point, but certainly more legitimate business models would emerge and even illegitimate ones would make the transition to reduce risk. Cost of enforcement would also go down as the volume of infringements decreased and those resources could be concentrated and directed along with a greater public support and sympathy. If the public can actually see that they get value out of protecting copyrights they will. If not they wont. I have zero incentive to protect the latest pop artists music if it will never go out of copyright in my life time, but if see that I can do whatever I want with it in 10 years, then yeah, I'd stick up for them and so would a lot of others.
The big label/studio/publisher companies dug themselves into this mess with a money grab and pretty much lost all sympathy from everyone that they cant buy off. Their only way out of this is to either be more open with their content or go back to fair laws. Other wise, the rest of us will go on without them. It also comes down to culture. Like it or not, music, movies, books, games, software, or whatever are our culture. You just cant reasonably expect people to not not have access to their culture forever. Its fair to have to pay for the latest and greatest, but as it is now, there is pretty much zero free access to anything since 1927 and that system just doesn't work. Now with technology, people just circumvent the unfair system like they should.
When CDs hit the market, there was no compelling way to get singles. CD singles were relatively rare, and few people wanted to buy cassingles instead of CDs. This is at odds with the the music industry existed up until that point.
Take a look at the list of best-selling albums and best-selling singles on Wikipedia. Sort the categories by year. There's fewer than 10 high-selling singles there from 1992-2004, while there are dozens of multiplatinum albums from the same era.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_in_...
tl;dr - albums now cost much the same as singles used to in real terms, but have more music. Why shouldn't people buy them in preference?
Use of each medium to transmit work that was once locked down and overseen by a controlling influence has always been considered piracy when that medium was in its infancy -- right back to sheet music -- as Cory Doctorow notes in a video interview with the Guardian[1]:
"The copyright wars aren't new, of course. In the first part of the 20th century you had sheet music composers who represented the only real 'music industry'. They were an industry as a pose to a trade because they had an industrial apparatus; a copying machine that made sheet music. And so they could sell it even when they weren't there.
"Then you had performers who weren't really an industry; they were just a trade, because you could only make money as a performer if you were actually performing; there was no industrial component. And then someone invented recorded music, and the performers who were buying their sheet music down at Tin Pan Alley and performing it all these years started performing it into recording devices.
"And the composers said, 'What are you doing? You're selling our compositions without our permission! You must stop this -- it's an act of piracy!' And the performers said, somewhat understandably, 'You sold us the sheet music, didn't you? Didn't you think we'd perform it?' And different states came up with different answers, but at the end of the day, all the countries that made the transition to having a successful recorded music industry said that composers actually don't get a say in whether or not their music is recorded. They may get some money from an automatic royalty system, but you don't get to say 'this can only be performed here' or 'only that guy can perform it'. Once it's been performed once, everyone can perform it and everyone can record it, because that's how music is.
"So here you have the great pirates of the first decade of the 20th century: the music performers; the record labels. And the record labels turned around, not that long afterwards, and pointed at the radio stations and said, 'What are you doing playing our records on the radio? You have no business doing it! What we did when we took those compositions without permission, that was progress! What you jerks are doing... that's just piracy!' And, of course, the broadcasters went out and they said, 'no, you should let us broadcast' and they eventually won that fight and then they were the brave pirates who became the main stream.
"And so when cable channels started taking broadcast signals and pumping them over cable wires, the broadcasters said, 'Well, you know, when we took that music from the record labels that was progress, but when you take our radio diffusion and pump it down over a cable that's just piracy'. And the cable operators fought that fight.
"Then along came the VCR, which could record programmes off the cable, and the cable operators, having won the fight with the broadcasters, said, 'You know, when we took the broadcasts that was progress! When you take our cable transmissions and record them on a VHS cassette, that's piracy!"
"And then, the company that invented the VCR, Sony, joined with the major studios in suing the Internet for taking movies that had been diffused on DVD or VHS cassette or over the air and said, "You know, when we put your cable diffusion on a VHS cassette, that was progress, but when you take it and put it on the Internet, that's just piracy."
"The biggest difference now, I think, is the extent to which they're being taken seriously. I think it used to be true that no lawmaker believed he could be re-elected by breaking the thing that his constituents use to entertain themselves. And now there seems to be an awful willingness to go to Corfu with a music composer and come back and propose that the Internet should be censored and that people who are accused of file sharing should be locked out of it and so on. And I guess that's the major difference and the thing that gives me anxiety about the future of the Internet.
[1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/may/30/in...
Think about it, with state-of-the-art piracy, currently you 1, can listen to 2, any music 3, anytime, 4, anywhere. So the only thing that's really a competitive advantage to channels is time between performance originally recorded, and general availability.
Not sure how this could be really "liberated" with the performance business still remaining profitable -a moneypooling service maybe? But there's definitely room for improvement on the current distribution model.
I mean of course, in terms of actually finding a way to monetise content acquired through any means - i.e. I download album over BT, pay itunes match sub, sync lib, then artist gets royalty. It seems like we're finally approaching a sensible business model.
If I had to spend let's say $10 per CD, and on average I get a new CD every week (I do) that's over $40 per month. Instead, I get my music for free, and I spend the $40 going to a concert almost every month. So far this year, I've been to 4-5 concerts.
Now, I'm not saying this is legal or this is even "right" but it's just what I do. Besides, bands don't see much money from CD sales, they get money from touring, so I much more prefer to spend my money in the way that more directly affect's the band's paycheck.
I do still occasionally buy CD's. For example, Linkin Park's new album "A Thousand Suns" I downloaded before it was even released so I could listen to it, although I had already pre-ordered it and received it a few days after it was released (it's still unopened)
I'd love to see these revenue
It's been going on for a long time now. Remember how they compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler? Yeah, only to go on and make billions of dollars off of it.
If they really want to investigate something that's hurting the industry, maybe they should look into that Hollywood accounting thing.