thought of the day

[dilletante]

in the wake of the sopa/pipa fight and the takedown of megaupload, i've seen (finally!) occasional mentions of the fact that each instance of illegal file sharing represents a crime, but not every instance represents a loss to the copyright holder. which means that even if they were based on real data, industry estimates of losses due to piracy

Comments

[chienne_folle]

I've seen a lot of discussion of this on gaming sites, where people confess that they've pirated games in the past but would NOT have bought said game, either because they had no money or didn't think the game was worth that much. When the developers says that every pirated copy represents a lost sale, they're clearly talking through their hats. Piracy is still wrong, though -- wrong, wrong, wrong. Or at least, permanent piracy is; I have some sympathy for those who say they pirate games as an informal demo, then buy them if they like them.

Jeff Vogel had a column recently explaining why people who bought his games from his own site paid more than if they bought them from Steam, because different places had shoppers with different price points. I understood his reasoning, but I'd still be pissed if I'd bought a game directly from him for $20, then saw it on Steam for $10.

[chienne_folle]

P. S. -- Speaking of games, did you and Molly get the copy of The Witcher that I sent her at Christmastime? It's perfectly fine if you haven't downloaded it yet because you don't want to play it yet; I just wanted to make sure that you (or rather, Molly) had actually received the mail from GoG.com.

[moominmolly]

You know, I didn't! Can it be resent? I just rechecked my mail all around the time you left me the LJ comment that you had sent it (thank you!) and still can't find it!

[chienne_folle]

I've sent you a copy of the mail they sent me (sent to your LJ e-mail address), which should have everything you need in it.

[bloodstones]

I can't find it at the moment, but there was an article awhile ago about how a judge had ruled that the music industry could not sue for damages equivalent to more money that had been made in the entire history of the music industry in the US, which I though was a hilarious reality check.

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that the way to stop this problem is to make it easy for people to obtain things over the internet. There is so much instantly available to us that it is naive of these corporations to think that we will see the lack of availability as our problem, rather than theirs.

[ukelele]

As you might imagine given my industry and my job, I have a whole rant queued up on the lost sale issue. But I'll spare you the trouble.

I do want to point out that price discrimination is already a going feature of the traditional book industry, with a price/time tradeoff. Hardback sales capture the people who are relatively price-insensitive; paperback sales allow people who are willing to wait in order to pay a lower price to enter the market; and library circulation allows rights holders to recapture a small amount of income from end users who aren't willing to pay anything at all (but, again, may have waiting-time tradeoffs).

This is among the numerous elements of publishing that ebooks have set on fire. (Book publishing is not super-good at change.)

[danceboy]

I dunno. I maintain that the lawsuits are not actually about piracy. I mean, sure, they'd love it if you bought at full price directly from them the moment it was available, but really, most people are willing to pay a reasonable price for content that hasn't been mangled, and I think *AA know that.

I really think that people are getting sued for piracy because you can't sue for "creating a business model that will gradually destroy our business model". MegaUpload didn't get arrested/sued until after they A) demonstrated that the artists like them, and B) announced that they would be putting out a system that allows the artists to sell directly to the customer, bypassing the labels. Napster got killed shortly after it's pattern matching algorithm started causing large numbers of people to discover music that didn't make money for the MPAA (e.g. Dispatch).

The internet is good at disintermediation. The *AAs are intermediaries. I don't think that they're wrong to be scared.

[dilletante]

i basically agree with you, except for the "I think *AA know that" part. :) they've certainly done plenty of clueless things in the past (like trying to destroy videotapes, which went on to make them huge piles of money). but i think you're right that the lawsuits against businesses (as opposed to the ones against individual customers) are an attempt to kill a threatening business model.

i just get the impression that the business models of very large companies are generally all about control-- not so much "we have reason to think this will make us x amount of money" as "this will let us keep control of the market/the technology/the customer base and in the long run that will make us the most money." in a way that seems forward-thinking, to me. but it often seems to be a big loss when the company in question fails to kill a new technological development that threatens that control; and then it winds up making them look foolish when it's clear that getting out in front of the new change would have been a big win