EU Buried $400k Study Showing Piracy Have Almost No Effect on Sales (2017)
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When I was a kid I pirated music like it was no ones business. I didn't really stop until Spotify came to the US and signed up. For the price of $10/month, I could listen to all the music I ever wanted. Even though at that point I had a good system for pirating music, I pretty much gave up pirating music because Spotify was just so damn good.
Spotify in my eyes, rather than trying to stop music piracy, just started to compete with it.
Between Netflix and Prime, you're not spending that much and you sure as hell don't need a dozen subscriptions to watch every good show.
The more salient comparison is between piracy and spotify (with or without ads)
It's not illegal to mute or look away when an ad is playing; delegating the task to a machine is the same thing, just more efficient.
As mentioned in the sibling comment, this argument-by-example is trivially extensible to piracy. "It's not unethical to watch media at a friend's house. Piracy is just using a machine to do this via a digital encoding instead of an analog one"
BTW, I never really bothered with adblockers until I started getting random malware infections from ads (I'd google search for some info, land on a random discussion forum, and a couple times a month my computer would immediately get infected from ads that had 0-day javascript sandbox escape exploits -- hasn't happened since I started using an adblocker) Oh, and a couple times that I left my web browser open on a page, and sometime in the middle of the night a video ad would start up blasting through the speakers. Yeah, that there drove me to using an ad blocker too.
Sure, but this type of argument-by-example is an easy way to hide both t holes in one's argument[1] and the similarities to piracy. It's also trivially extensible: "Piracy is not much different from streaming a show at a friend's house", in that somebody who had access to the media is sharing it with you.
To be clear, I've heard the principled theoretical argument for adblocking being ethical, and think it has at least some merit. I just don't understand the claim that piracy is meaningfully different. The assumptions required to consider adblocking ethical provide the same shield to piracy.
I'm not making this claim.
I'm saying that in the context of this thread, saying "I wouldn't be pirating in that case, I'd be using YT with adblock" isn't very meaningful because using YT with adblock is equivalent to piracy from multiple relevant perspectives, including ethically[1] and economically. The legal perspective is not an especially relevant one to this thread, since the baseline was already being comfortable enough with the level of legal threat to pirate regularly.
[1] including the belief that both are ethically acceptable. Just clarifying again, because people seem to be reading a lot of implicit claims/value judgments into my comments that are not in there
>Likely [I wouldn't pirate]. Probably I'd use YT with adblock or stream on bandcamp.
You assumed they wouldn't pirate because it's unethical, and I assumed they wouldn't do it because it's illegal. The actual reason could be entirely different.
There’s also plenty of YouTube videos that are basically entire albums in one. One can listen to that copyright infringing content too without even bothering to enable AdBlock. Really for all of your considerations on the legal implications, UX is king and the really the only major factor after the economic, for the end-user.
Also consider that this is riskier than it used to be in the 90s: plenty of kids would pirate but they know their parents’ ISP would cut them off.
I can technically add overwatch as a game in steam but if there's ever an update for overwatch it silently breaks (spins on login) until I realize I have to open battle.net to update the game.
Microsoft (Xbox app) doesn't even allow you to access raw game files and executables without a lot of work and I don't even know a good solution today. You can make a launcher shortcut but it's just to the Xbox app with a parameter selecting the game. This does not work to add a custom game in steam. I do know they just changed functionality in this area so may be different now.
I remember a young boy, around age 10, who would go around the neighborhood offering to take people's trash to the road on Sunday for disposal on Monday mornings. All he asked was that you open your garage door by 6 p.m. so he could come around and pull your bins to the curb. He charged $5 a month.
Some of you may be thinking, "Wow, you're so lazy you can't even take your own trash to the road?"
Well I could... but for less per day than I spend on Diet Coke, I can get it done for me every month without having to worry about it and all I had to do was program my garage door to open at 6 p.m. on Sunday and close at 9 p.m.
About half the people in our neighborhood took up this lad on his offer, so he had to have been making around $200 a month or so. Not too shabby for a 10 year old boy.
It's not difficult to make money. You just offer a service doing things most people don't want to do.
As a kid I didn't pay for stuff mostly because it didn't have a payment method that I'd be able to use
I used premium SMS (which were something like 3 times more expensive than direct transfer)
and later I used paysafe cards that you could purchase in local shops or I started using "forms" and sending them via post office or bank branches IIRC
This is my guess of what will happen...
$10 is a paltry sum in the US. But it is really high in third world countries.
$10 can give you one healthy meal each day for half a month in suburban Indian subcontinent. The price in rural areas is lesser.
Some companies get purchase power parity and can reflect it in their pricing, and some companies either can't or don't want to do this. Some companies don't even get it.
I know of Spotify Premium modded APKs being super famous in Eastern Europe, LatAm, and South Asia. I have no hard data, but people are so annoyed with Spotify ads, and as the price is too high for them, many choose to pirate the app instead.
From the study
People felt that piracy in movies and TV is justified because the price is too high.
That's why people outside the industry often think game copy protection doesn't work. They judge it by a standard of "it is never ever cracked" which games companies don't care about. Most sales are within the first 3 months or so. After that it dwindles and after 6 months it's become long tail; the studio has moved on unless it's an indie shop that plans to work on the same game for years. If a copy protection lasts 3-4 months it's ideal, if it lasts a year it means they put too much effort into it and could have made more money by making a faster but weaker protection. The resulting equilibrium is thus frequently mis-understood as "failure" by armchair studio executives.
A) the effect is so small, that it's invisible to the study
B) the study is so small, that even large effects are invisible
Wow, that is pretty substantial.
Piracy is mostly conducted by teens and young adults who don't have the captial to buy whatever they are pirating.
After people grow up a bit and start making money they usually also pick up other hobbies (which they couldn't participate for lack of funding previously) which cuts into their pirated media consumption and on top of that now they can afford to buy said media and now with streaming platforms it is easier than ever just to pay a small monthy fee and get access to quite large pool of media (even though video streaming services are doing their best to ruin this).
For me now days there aren't many reasons to pirate stuff because everything is available from streaming services, I just subscribe for a month to watch whatever movie/series I'm after. With games, most new titles are single player games which I don't care at all about and multiplayer games are either cheap or free. And Spotify handles music very well.
I hypothese there would be two reasons:
- because piracy enables more consumption of some media than the person otherwise would have done, it means they have less leisure time available to spend on other media which they would have spent money on. E.g. instead of buying a book and reading it, they would watch a low-value movie they pirated, affecting book sales but not movie sales
- because piracy decreases the perceived value of an hour of entertainment, the person would be less willing to spend money in other categories as well and would rather fall back to cheaper options
The result would be that the amount a person spends on _total_ entertainment drops, but the drop would be in other categories than the category that is piratable.
My hypothesis is the exact opposite. I think that piracy increases total spend in dollars.
With piracy, people get to experience things for free that they otherwise wouldn't have. This opens individuals to newer media, newer niches, newer genres, and so on.
I have known a few people who spent their money for the first time on video games after playing the pirated version of GTA V. They wouldn't have spent a dime on games if they hadn't played pirated GTA V.
I turned into a subscriber after watching The Wire, The Sporanos, and Breaking Bad with a shared password (also a kind of piracy). I would have never even thought of paying for TV if I could not watch The Wire for free.
I believe that pirated content "converts" people into web series watchers, gamers, and more.
Microsoft is fully aware of Windows piracy. Had Microsoft cracked down, then they would have lost tens of millions of future paying customers.
Many people pay for Office for their business because that is what they have used since their childhood- in a legal way or not.
Over simplified, but I think an important point, that entertainment fits into the budget of 'disposable' income rather than essential.
I had an iOS product that was doing well, and it had some DRM to prevent jailbreakers.
I had a legitimate buyer complain and after soul-searching I removed the DRM.
Sales immediately dropped to near zero and never recovered.
So at least in my experience, piracy affected sales.
> Overall,the analysis indicates that for films and TV-series current prices are higher than 80 per cent of the illegal downloaders and streamers are willing to pay. For books, music and games prices are at a level broadly corresponding to the willingness to pay of illegal downloaders and streamers.
It would be interesting to know to what degree price is a factor in app piracy.
The important thing even more so than what price would have inspired the 1000 to pay you is the 10,000 who didn't even consider your product and what price would have changed that decision.
I've also released software which was good enough that people wanted to pirate it. I think it's a lesson you don't have to learn once on your own: it's enough to hear other people's accounts.
In my view we don't talk about product protection enough, and instead resort to dunking on DRM all the time. Instead of talking about DRM and how it is legitimately problematic I'd like to highlight that we can protect products without DRM and still sell them - it's why products have gone to online accounts for seemingly offline software.
Of course this can be broken, the same as DRM, but done right online features can become a core part of a software and make it so offline patches remove a significant enough amount of feature that it's not worth it.
It is sadly a natural order of things. In my experience when I was younger I legitimately could not have gotten into graphic design and learned enough about it without the big name products. The pricing for something like adobe has become so far outside of reason that people will pay for the crack rather than the subscription as an example.
Very interesting theory. My theory so far has been that it's been because:
1. Data mining/data accumulation/data reselling
2. For so many devs web is what they know, so they naturally think in those terms
3. You can release updates/new versions way, way faster if much of the app is on your server
4. Future flexibility
I definitely think your theory belongs on the list. I'm wondering how impactful that is. Could be pretty big.
I think they also realize that whilst geeks will kick up a stink about "DRM" when it's done client side, the exact same thing implemented by a firewall and server rules draws no attention. So it's seen as more socially respectable, although in reality of course, software+DRM gives much better privacy than a cloud service ever can.
In reality of course, lots of very rich companies make offline or mostly offline software. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP etc. But they're unfashionable.
But once it backfired and affected a single paying customer, I decided to change my course.
All the date means is that when the iPhone platform had poorly implemented DRM, piracy rates could approach nearly 100% for some types of app. Since then Apple improved their DRM and nowadays iOS devs don't worry about piracy so much. Seems like a disproof of TechDirt's thesis.
What you are describing is aprox 500x the effect. Your hypothesis is fantastic let me propose some alternatives.
- The same release that removed the DRM also introduced changes in the application which you didn't regard as in any way negative but which turned off users.
- You introduced changes in your price structure to account for the rampant piracy you expected and killed your sales.
- You in some way offended people and they decided to stop buying from you.
- You serve a niche and either saturated that niche, the portion of the niche that was interested in your solution, or the portion of the second group your advertising was reaching and sales dropped off
- You have an exposure problem. You experienced a positive but not permanent bounce that only coincided incidentally with removal of DRM
- Other players entered the same space diluting your market
Any of the above are more reasonable than supposing that all your users are jailbreakers.
https://www.tivocommunity.com/threads/iphone-app-dvr-remote....
User has understandably negative feelings about piracy and retroactive explains his misfortune based on it.
It's pretty obvious that well implemented DRM works. If it didn't then it would have died out a long time ago. See how much effort the games console makers put in, despite it being a highly competitive market with extreme pricing pressure. Yet, they do compete on the quality of their DRM because game studies are responsive to it.
1 out of 250 iphones is jailbroken and can even install pirated apps directly. On balance which is more likely that piracy killed his app overnight or netflix, competitors, and cable co DVRs did?
The alternative is to have us believe that nearly all his prospective users were in the 0.4% and instantly heard it on the grape vine that his app was fair game "overnight" instead of buying a $3 remote app. Does that seem even slightly credible?
It makes a better narrative than I bet my livelihood on a excellent entrant to a market that became crowded then went away.
If you do a search restricted to the time frame his product died you will note there were multiple competitors including a mobile interface m.tivo.com launched.
I will say it certainly -felt- like removing the DRM was a mistake at the time, because the cliff was dramatic and immediate.
As others have pointed out this was a product in the 2009 era, and it did eventually get replaced by a first-party app from TiVo at which point I just shut it down.
1. Their shareholders would be happy. And the CEO will get attaboys from board members. Taking a tough stance on Piracy costs a CEO nothing. Anecdotes matter little, but I have seen in many cases, when gaming companies adopted new DRMs, people actually bought their shares. And not dumb people, too.
2. There are some assholes who don't want poor people having their things. Some do it for the image purpose. Think of Apple hardware. Older models can easily be sold at a much lower price. Save some very old iPhone SEs, they don't do that. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry owns something, it dilutes a product's value to many people. People want to own rare and exotic things.
plus the commission doesn't gain control if it can't justify passing laws
No way I'm buying a video game that requires a constant internet connection, even to play solo.
No way I'm buying a movie, book or song that can only work on a specific device via a dumb app that I need to install.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_...
This is a bad example because Steam's DRM is notoriously terrible and even multiplayer games that use Steam's multiplayer services can be played entirely without Steam with a particular open-source emulator (granted they don't also have their own servers that you connect to, which is an entirely different issue).
Windows 11 and TPM are definitely points towards most computing moving in the direction that Mac OS has. The thing to remember, though, is that most users don't actually care. They only care if your bog standard apps run.
You don't grasp Valve and the industry has already won any game where the networking code has been pulled out already acts like DRM, any client-server app requiring username and login accounts, or has some piece of code living on some remote server, means you no longer own your own stuff.
Valve and the rest of the computing industry is boiling you all slowly. AKA look at this list of games from crackwatch.
https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa...
You'll notice more and more games are "online only". Diablo 3 is literally diablo 2 /w drm, they wanted to kill piracy.
Starcraft remastered, and reforged require internet to play, that means we've lost the battle. The public has eaten up client-server back ended games. You don't get that the whole point was to monopolize their own products and kill the local infinitely copyable binaries PC games used to be coded as, AKA PRe steam 99% of games were complete you got singleplayer+multiplayer inside the same game.
MMO's/F2P are literally just PC games with their multiplayer ripped out, don't think so? Listen to the ultima devs here, when Ultima online was successful, publishers and devs went over their entire PC game list to convert their local apps to client-server apps and stuck "MMO" on the front so they could steal PC games from the public.
https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0?t=1134
EA killed ultima 9 when the UO beta got massive interest, that lead to the death of PC games as local applications, the industry from then on there was a massive war to back end all PC games, they couldn't immediately do that to quake and urneal because we'd been treated too good with Warcraft 1-3, Descent 1-3, Quake 1-3, and build engine games like Duke 3d. The entire industry has always wanted to kill piracy and Ultima online gave the entire industry the go ahead once they realized that many of our fellow programmers and gamers were irrationally stupid beyond their wildest dreams.
Anyone playing quake and Descent at the time fear the loss of dedicated servers and level editors which used to come with the games, we knew if Ultima online was successful that Publishers would want to back end every fucking PC game and that's the end of the personal computer and the return of IBM and mainframe computing.
"Signed exe's" and trusted computing is the return of mainframe computing of the 60's in new bullshit language but I don't expect the mmo/steam generation to do anything but froth at the mouth. When they were the ones killing gaming and gave birth to microtransactions.
You can't put MTX in diablo 1, warcraft 1-3, or starcraft 1 because they are local applications that run entirely from your pc. None of the code has been stolen out of the game carved back behind a user account and login requirement. Like with most PC games these days.
We're losing gaming history and generation mmo is to blame for their general cluelessness of the evil of mainframe computing.
Moreover, MMOs in general necessitate a central server. They're a completely different genre that is isolated from the fears you're expressing and, more to the point, they're not a particularly popular genre when compared to session-oriented competitive multiplayer games, so they're not actually why those games are forcing you to connect to a central server.
The main thing you're missing when complaining about the "loss of dedicated servers" is that centralized services consolidate the userbase, allow them to programmatically split the userbase by region, and ensure that, as long as people are playing, they can always be found. But, more importantly, you're never locked out of the "populated" servers for an arbitrary amount of time because they're perpetually full, which has been a problem in a number of games with dedicated servers.
Also, you have to remember that the games industry is approximately 5x larger (by revenue, probably more by userbase, especially considering the rise of f2p games and increasing prevalence of deep discounts) now than it was in 2000. What the majority wants inevitably changed because "the majority" changed purely by virtue of there are 5x+ more people with their own opinions.
So, sure, things are changing and are moving away from self-hosting, but there are a lot of cultural factors (and undeniable conveniences) that have influenced it far more than "companies are evil and they just want to control us."
Useless jobs covers this quite well. But the tldr is that assuming the market runs in logical is a flawed assumption and that the market adds inefficiencies on its own.