Study Shows Anti-Piracy Ads Often Made People Pirate More | Hacker News Reader

Study Shows Anti-Piracy Ads Often Made People Pirate More

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35 pointselsewhen11 comments

Tangentially related: the German news portal kino.de which is run by a "real" publisher and has news all around cinema, movies, streaming, has this article[1] about illegal streaming services where they try to suggest legal alternatives that cost little money and sometimes even have an ad-supported limited free tier. The bizarre thing is that they go through great lengths in their first paragraph to list over a dozen of those illegal streaming sites as examples. It's like, every time your favorite illegal streaming site is down, just go to kino.de to get a list of available alternatives.

What the?

[1] https://www.kino.de/film/joker-2019/news/kinox.to-online-mov...

Once in a while
Maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright laws
By downloading mp3s
From filesharing sites

Like Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or Kazaa...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGM8PT1eAvY

Our music is for free
you can download .mp3
keep it playing on repeat
if you hate it - press delete
Click it, save it, seed it, share it, link it, stream it, we don’t pay

Click it, save it, seed it, share it, link it, stream it, Pirate Bay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOqxarVWKRs

There is always the option of stating it explicitly.

Maybe they list them to get Google hits when people search for them?

This is hilarious. The author even explains the law concerning such streams:

A private citizen can at most pay a 150€ fine as well as 10 to 15€ for the film itself.

Considering how unlikely you are to be found out this is as close to advertising illegal streams as you can get.

> Study Shows Anti-Piracy Ads Often Made People Pirate More

This is actually quite logical: if people pirated much less, these "anti-piracy" organizations would lose quite some funding from the movie and recording industries. So it is in their interest that the "piracy" problems never disappears or becomes even worse.

Incentives matter.

"You wouldn't download a car"

Trust me, I would if I could.

Could it be that these anti-piracy ads actually put into people's head that "pirating" is a possibility, constantly remind them so, and can be as mainstream as to put it at the beginning of every single DVD?

The forced "you wouldn't steal a car" ad that ran on almost all DVDs basically said to people: "If you had pirated this movie, instead of buying the DVD, you didn't have to waste time with this anti piracy ad"

Ah ah. Thanks VLC by the way, for skipping this bs directly to the DVD menu.

Ah, yes. It's been a few days since I thought about how much I hate RIAA.

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