









Piracy percentages
Piracy tends to be remote and pervasive, but mostly casual.








Americans tend to have larger music and DVD collections.
Music and DVD collection sizes

Source: American Assembly [PDF]

Comments     Threshold


Private home copying is often legal.
By CZroe on 1/22/2013 12:38:07 AM , Rating: 4

Give me a break. Look up the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 or Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. ("the BETAMAX case").

While you're at it, look up "Fair Use" and "First Sale Doctrine."

RE: Private home copying is often legal.





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RE: Private home copying is often legal.
If you are, there are precedents to back you up.


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RE: Private home copying is often legal.
By Donovan on 1/22/2013 12:52:33 PM , Rating: 2
"Private" copying in the context of the article also includes giving copies to family and friends. Note the line immediately before the one you quoted (emphasis added):


They are distinguishing this small-scale personal sharing from the large-scale anonymous sharing online.

By CZroe on 1/24/2013 2:03:13 PM , Rating: 2
In case you missed it, I was specifically saying that your scenarios is ALSO allowed by law as long as no profit was made and no copy protections were circumvented. These laws were tried and tested back when the earliest bootleg concert recordings were getting passed around.

I buy it then download it
By fiskov on 1/21/2013 7:47:49 PM , Rating: 5
I bought 27 movies last year, 19 of which I then downloaded.. Why?
I have to get the disc out, put it in the machine, sit through 5 minutes of un-skippable content followed by pressing the "go to menu" button repeatedly until finally searching around "interactive menus" for the "start movie" button.
While when i download it, I just press "play" and it begins.

For the love of God fix this; I know it says "ultimate cinema experience" on the BluRay box but i didn't want this part.

RE: I buy it then download it
By seamonkey79 on 1/22/2013 7:33:14 AM , Rating: 5
Same... also the same reason I really have to talk myself into going to a theater to see a movie. I just want to watch the movie. The number of times I've been convinced to see a movie based on a trailer I saw before the movie would be zero.

Let me skip right past the trash and watch the movie. Make me watch those stupid 'don't steal this' things when I've got the purchased disc in, and you're making me want it in a format that doesn't have that, and the easiest way (not arguing right/wrong here) is to torrent a pre-ripped copy.

RE: I buy it then download it
RE: I buy it then download it
By chris2618 on 1/22/2013 4:00:28 PM , Rating: 2
I've done the same with software . One program i got just would not activate rung them emailed them etc and got no where so now i just buy it then get pirate copy that actually lets me use it

Hooray for broadband fees
By ShieTar on 1/22/2013 7:38:32 AM , Rating: 2

Which is a rather stupid opinion, since we (I am german) already pay a significant fee on each smartphone (36€), video camera (10€), hard-drive (up to 34€), DVD writer (11€), blank DVD (0.30€) and thumb drive/flash card (2€) we buy. This was introduced with the express justification by the recording industries that piracy can't be surpressed, so it should be compensated by such fees. Of course, the introduction of this fee did not stop the recording industries from trying to sue every single teenager they can identify trying to copy the music he/she can't afford.

But yeah, of course we need an additional fee on our broadband connections. Especially after they defined "flat-rate" to mean "less than the data required to watch a single HD-Movie per month" : German Telekom just started rolling out Fibre-to-the-Home in a few cities. 100 Gbit/s, but only up to 200GB; i.e. 60 minutes full speed per month.

Because, you know. Somebody has to pay those 8-digit movie star salaries.

RE: Hooray for broadband fees
By freedom4556 on 1/22/2013 3:33:09 PM , Rating: 2

Yeah, data caps are false advertising, no doubt about it. I personally belevie that you should be entitled to 100% of advertised throughput for the whole billing period. Of course then the advertised numbers would tank, but at least people would know what they're actually getting. So many take the claims of " up to blah-blah mbps" as meaning that's what they get all the time.


This explains a lot.
By LastDance on 1/24/2013 10:57:32 AM , Rating: 1
This is why we need copyright reform. We are creating a nation of takers through piracy, and hurting industry that normally does well regardless of economic conditions. People act as though legislation on copyright is out of the blue. It's not. Copyright has been around since the US was created. In fact updates to copyright, such as the when VHS recorders came out are common. We need to fix copyright now, so that we as, Americans do not lose our creative edge.

I call B.S.
By Beenthere on 1/21/13, Rating: -1
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Fully agree.


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Infact, other shows I've also bought after watching them.

I'm sure this isn't isolated..

RE: I call B.S.

worth and punishment
By daboom06 on 1/21/13, Rating: -1
RE: worth and punishment
By rpsgc on 1/21/2013 7:12:17 PM , Rating: 2
And the follow-up to that is educating people on the difference between "stealing" and "copyright infringement".

RE: worth and punishment
By tayb on 1/21/2013 7:25:03 PM , Rating: 3
And after that we'll discuss why treating "piracy" as theft would actually benefit downloaders and make it impossible for the MPAA/RIAA to continue their anti-piracy legal crusades.

RE: worth and punishment
By arazok on 1/21/2013 8:59:46 PM , Rating: 2
No, the answer is to accept reality and view digital content as free. It has zero value, and should be legally shared, copied, or distributed, for free.

The content producers can make their money by making it easy to obtain that content in an easy way. iTunes, Netflix, etc are providing free content in a simple way that people will pay for. That’s where the value is, and is what people pay for. Personally, I rip lots of media via torrents, but I still have Netflix and iTunes because for some things, they are just easier to deal with. I don’t see why everyone can’t be happy with that arrangement.

Content providers should also be free to implement DRM or any other technologies they want to use, but the market should determine which of those technologies succeed or fail. The government and the courts have no place in creating or enforcing any laws around digital files because it simply isn’t needed, and is unenforceable anyways. If you can't produce a product that sells how you want it to, change the product or adapt to how it sells. It's as simple as that.

RE: worth and punishment
By tayb on 1/21/2013 9:34:50 PM , Rating: 5
What a crock. If digital content has zero value why do you bother downloading it?

RE: worth and punishment
By TSS on 1/22/2013 11:45:18 AM , Rating: 4
That's about the only part of his post that makes sense though. It can be replicated infinitly, without loss of quality. Anything digital is no longer scarce, and thus no longer has any value.

Gold wouldn't have any value either if we could make more by running it through a computer and hitting ctrl+c, ctrl+v.

Now you could use labor as a definition of value and it definitly would count for the first copy, AKA the masterfile of a movie with a budget of $100 million is worth $100 million. But pressing ctrl+c, ctrl+v doesn't cost any labor at all, infact you can have a script make copies automatically. So by that definition as well, none of the copies have value and the copies are exactly the same as the original, thus that has no value as well.

So you're left with emotional value for digital media. But even there, the content doesn't have value. First off it's highly subjective, what you like might not be what i like and thus it might not have any value to me, or even less then nothing as i might feel the effort might've been wasted on a paticular piece of content.

But even if you like a piece of digital content, how you procure it doesn't change anything about your emotional state while consuming it. Meaning if Gone with the wind means alot to you, wether you watch a legal or illigal version (which you couldn't tell apart if somebody didn't tell you anyway) has no impact on the actual value of the content.

Thus the only conclusion you can make is that it doesn't have value. The fact that we're willing to spend $200 million making a movie which in the end has no actual value, is insane, but no less true.

So in the end people will have to gate content in order to make money off it, in areas where that's impossible like movies we'll simply have to settle for less. Meaning movie budgets of $50 million instead of upwards of $100 million for example. But in areas like games where you can lock off acces to multiplayer via a account based gateway, money can still be made, which companies have realised thus the rise of the free to play model. Singleplayer games are still screwed though.... i haven't seen any big single player productions without atleast co-op in a couple of years, atleast not at the rate they used to be released.

I agree with the OP, the keyword there is Service. People will pay for service, rather then the actual content.

The rest of his post doesn't make sense though. You can't argue digital content should be free, then argue DRM should be allowed. Free also means free of rights.

RE: worth and punishment
By arazok on 1/22/2013 2:43:48 PM , Rating: 3
You don’t understand. The file, and the contents within them are worthless. I understand how people have a hard time seeing it that way – I’m downloading it for a reason – but the reality is that once created, the cost to increase supply (infinitely) is zero. To deny this is to deny how the market works, and the fundamental idea behind free markets is that the market self regulates. It is doing this now – despite piracy, content producers, distributors, are seeing massive growth in digital sales. The market has found a way to be profitable by offering services like iTunes which serve no purpose but to make it easy to obtain music. People don’t pay for things they can get for free, but they do pay for convenience.

Simple supply and demand dictate that the value of something in infinite supply is likely to be zero. If I invented a replicator from star-trek tomorrow, the value of everything in the world would instantly plummet to nothing as we would have in infinite supply of everything (except energy to power it). I can replicate digital content. By it’s very nature, the moment it was created, it’s value drops to zero.

Laugh all you want, but we should treat digital content the same way we treat fruits and vegetables. Farmers make money growing tomatoes (creating content), which we can all go and purchase from the store (iTunes), or grow ourselves (copy/pirate). Why do most of us pay for something we can get for free? We do it because the convenience of purchasing it is worth saving the effort of obtaining it for free. Pirating is a pain in the ass for most people – as is growing a tomato. People pay for the convenience, not the product.

The government doesn’t allow farmers to copyright tomato’s and punish those caught growing them. They don’t need to. The market has found a solution that works for everyone. We should allow the same for digital media.

RE: worth and punishment
By tayb on 1/22/2013 5:11:15 PM , Rating: 2
No, you don't understand. What you're doing is ignoring most of the definition of the word value and focusing on the monetary aspect only. I value my wife. That does not mean I am pricing my wife no matter how amusing that may be. Value, by definition, also includes the regard you hold for something.

Value creates demand. You value music so you download music. You like listening to it. You like singing or dancing to it. You value these things and if you didn't you wouldn't be downloading. You don't value the artist so you don't compensate the artist. You've acquired value but you've paid nothing to acquire it.

You're other examples are ridiculous. Farmers don't create fruits and vegetables... those things naturally occur on this planet. Without artists music would not continue creating itself. Without farmers apples would continue to grow just fine.

RE: worth and punishment
By arazok on 1/23/2013 9:54:41 AM , Rating: 2
And without record companies, music would still be created. It just wouldn’t be distributed as effectively.

Perhaps my analogy is not perfect, but it gets the point I’m trying to make across. The nature of digital content makes it inherently worthless. It’s the distribution of it that has always made money. You are not required to charge your friends to come over and listen to a song. You can play it as many times as you like for no additional charge. The music is free, the medium is not.

Anyways, I’m just trying to present a different way of looking at it. Music, the internet, and everything around it is entirely a human construct. We can choose to look at “what” it is in anyways we choose. I’m just trying to present a view that I think is fair to everybody. The record companies would still make LOTS of money by focusing on distribution and services, we wouldn’t need lawyers or police to enforce any laws, and individuals would be free to access it in any way they choose. The hard way for free, or the easy way for a fee. This is exactly the setup the market is trying to create, and the only thing holding it back is companies with dated business models and the politicians they have in their pockets.

