US commissions Swedish IP law (WikiLeaks/Pirate Party)

[Thanas]

Several studies would disagree with you.

[Moby Halcyon]

Out of curiosity, could you link to some of those studies?

[loomer]

I know I've done the same. Found something I like, uh, floating out there, so to speak, and then went and bought the real thing. King of Dragon Pass is my big example. I found a copy, and liked it so much I contacted the company direct to buy it.

I don't know where the notion that artists will only create art if they can get paid comes from, Broomstick. Have you ever met non-commercial artists? They aren't actually that big on money. It's nice, but it's second place compared to the thrill of creation and the passion of imagination. The only way it helps the process is by letting the artist do it full time, without worrying about that nasty business of starving to death in the street.

[Thanas]

Out of curiosity, could you link to some of those studies?

Internet piracy increases sale of anime DVDs
Piracy boosts book sales
Best-selling author Neil Gaiman on how piracy boosted his sales
Norwegian Institutes of Business says that people downloading infringing music also buy about 10 times more music than their law-abiding counterparts.

EDIT:

A new Canadian study by academians Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz found that online piracy has no impact on CD purchases. (Download a PDF of the report here.) However, in the subset of Canadians who do use P2P services, file-sharing was found to increase CD purchasing (by 0.44 CDs per album download). The study assumes 29% of Canadians are P2P downloaders.

link

[Broomstick]

I don't know where the notion that artists will only create art if they can get paid comes from, Broomstick. Have you ever met non-commercial artists?

Hey, I've done some things myself where money wasn't involved, for one reason or another. Of course I've heard of them, but that doesn't mean that should be the ONLY mode available, or that all artists should create just for the joy of it. There is nothing wrong with earning money from one's art.

I know people who do construction work for free - Habitat for Humanity relies on such folks, as just one example. Does that mean you shouldn't pay someone to re-do your roof or put an addition on your house? Is it OK to accept such labor and then decide not to pay for it?

The difference is choice - you can choose to trade something you own (your time, your resources, your creativity) for money, or you can choose to give it away for free. The key word is choice. What the internet pirates are doing is taking away a form of choice.

They aren't actually that big on money. It's nice, but it's second place compared to the thrill of creation and the passion of imagination. The only way it helps the process is by letting the artist do it full time, without worrying about that nasty business of starving to death in the street.

That "starving to death" thing really sucks - why shouldn't artists seek to avoid it? If you value art, why do you deprive the artists of compensation that would allow him/her to make more art instead of dumpster diving for discarded food in order to eat?

And, to be honest, certain types of creation will not be made without money. If you like your big, blockbuster action movies, well, somebody has to pay for those, and with the cost running into the nine digits holding a bake sale to fund it won't work. Video games likewise are group efforts requiring the full time efforts of a group of people - people who have to eat and pay for housing while working on such things. Why shouldn't the people "consuming" such productions pay for them? If they aren't willing, who would be?

Like I said - I'd be happy to discuss how copyright law could be more sensible, but this notion that everything should be free is bullshit. Yes, there are people out there who will, for example, write stuff whether they get paid or not, or paint whether they get paid or not... but they also don't have to show it to you, nor are they obligated to share it. That's part of where the whole "but I copied it but didn't make money on it, so it's OK!" breaks down. It's not yours. You didn't make it, you don't own it. It's nice if those people give stuff away, but that's voluntary, their choice. Not yours.

Yes, there is a difference between a creator/owner sitting on something, and corporation buying the rights to something and sitting on it.... but whether you like it or not, as things currently stand that IS the prerogative of the copyright owner.

If, as it is claimed, piracy somehow boosts sales and you think that it should be legal based on that then change the goddamned law. A bad law should be repealed or changed, not repeatedly broken. But please explain what safeguards will be in place to ensure that the new law will not be abused and artists/creators/owners will still see a profit from those works they do, in fact, do for money as well as love.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Its frightfully easy to find cases of copyright violation harming an artist.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... atmeal.ars

And interestingly enough it shows how hard it is to defend copyright when you are a lone artist.

Did you read the article? He wasn't harmed by copyright violation, rather he was heavily flamed and attacked after trying to get credit for his own work. He states flat out in the article that he didn't care about them posting his stuff, he just wanted his name and maybe a link back to him attached to it. Plagiarism and copyright infringement aren't the same things.

Broomstick's own story is in many ways the same: Someone else took credit for her work. Again that goes a number of steps beyond mere copyright infringement (though in Broomstick's case, since the magazine in question made a profit from copying her work, it's also the type of infringement I'm against, regardless of the plagiarism).

Quite often? If I want to support the producer of the item, I go out of my way to pay for it.

Then you're a decent human being. Most people are just selfish bastards.

Let's ease up on the misanthropy here. Yeah, people can be assholes, but obviously a critical amount aren't otherwise society simply wouldn't function. I like to be an elitist prick as much as the next person, but I'm willing to admit that, overall, people aren't as bad as they're sometimes painted. Case in point: A number of my friends are busking performers, who work their asses off providing effectively free entertainment and relying solely on people willing to voluntarily donate money for a show they just received for free... and they manage to make a decent living out of it. While people can be assholes, obviously there's enough who aren't to make this sort of thing possible, and Thanas' links on the studies of how file-sharing has helped others out merely backs that point up.

[bilateralrope]

Since the MPAA is one of the groups pushing for these laws, I think it would be relevant to show just how much they are willing to lie to push them. Here is an info-graphic they recently put out about what they claim piracy is costing them.

And here is an article debunking it.

Piracy is bad mmmkay. We’re more or less agreed on that. Don’t do it. Even if you’ve got a carefully prepared moral rant, consider a simple cost benefit. Is watching Pirates of the Caribbean 7 RIGHT NOW so important that you want to take the chance of getting dragged into court? Lawyers are expensive, even the incompetent ones will take your liver just for a retainer. That said, the MPAA has a special gift for being such enormous twat waffles about the topic that it makes you just want to go download movies, delete them, and then download them again.

Despite the worst economic climate since we had a President who pulled wheelies, the movie industry just had its largest summer take of all time, with three different films topping the billion dollar mark world wide. The MPAA has celebrated by releasing a fancy little infographic (in irritating Scribd format just so that no one downloads and pirates a PNG file that they’re giving away for free).

So according to the MPAA, piracy cost them $58 billion last year, making movie piracy a bigger industry than the GDPs of 10 American states. To put it even starker perspective, look at it this way. The film industry gets about $10 billion from the box office, and about $30 billion from the after market of DVDs, streaming, etc. So they’re claiming that piracy costs them almost two-thirds of their business. At $10 per DVD, every household in the United States would be buying an additional 50 DVDs per year if they weren’t so busy downloading. The technical term for a statistic like that is “fictional.”

See, they also claim that 29 million adults have ever illegally downloaded a film. But since that’s only 13% of the adult population, it makes the figure even more absurd. By their own estimate, those adults in question would have on average purchased an additional 200 DVDs each year if only they were still on dial-up. The problem with these absurd figures pulled out of the air, is that even if they are an accurate measure of how many movies are being illegally downloaded, it is not a measure of loss. As has been argued countless times, a bunch of zeros and ones do not cost the industry a dime unless they actually represent something that would have been bought otherwise. Anyone think the average downloader would actually have bought 200 more DVDs? Hell, are there even 200 new DVDs released per year?

The industry is no stranger to hyperbole, Jack Valenti famously told Congress back in the eighties: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” This sort of hyperbole is entirely counterproductive.

There are a couple numbers on that infographic though that do matter, the figures about employment and jobs. Sure, they’re victim to hyperbole as well, seeming to count every one who ever sold a cup of coffee to an actor, but there’s a hint of truth in there. The film industry is one of the rock solid cornerstones of the American economy. 96% of tickets sold in America are for American films, and even more tickets are sold overseas. Industries have faded, factories have closed, but movies still get made here. That’s the angle the MPAA should take instead of this exhausting and alienating shame show. Play to the pride and patriotism of being the place that makes the world’s dreams.

Any laws covering piracy need to weigh up how much piracy hurts the economy against the civil liberties the anti-piracy laws take away. Problem is proving the harm. One on side we have studies like the ones Thanas posted, showing that piracy helps sales. On the other hand, we have groups who don't even try to make their lies convincing.

Since there is no proof of harm, I can't see how laws aimed at reducing piracy can justify the costs involved in enforcing them.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

The difference is choice - you can choose to trade something you own (your time, your resources, your creativity) for money, or you can choose to give it away for free. The key word is choice. What the internet pirates are doing is taking away a form of choice.

You're missing over half the equation here: In order for this whole thing to work out, lots of other people also have to choose to spend money on your work, or else all the choices you make don't amount to squat. Now, it's amusing to see you make that claim about internet pirates somehow magically taking that away just after Thanas helpfully posted links showing that, if anything, they are doing the opposite. Back in the day, anyone with a VCR and a few blank tapes could also, apparently, take away a movie-maker's 'choice' to make money. Someone with a copy-machine and a single Escher print could 'choose' to ruin him financially... yet none of this ever seemed to occur. Weird thing that.

That "starving to death" thing really sucks - why shouldn't artists seek to avoid it? If you value art, why do you deprive the artists of compensation that would allow him/her to make more art instead of dumpster diving for discarded food in order to eat?

Why do you still cling to the black/white view that people who file-share *never* support the works they like despite both studies posted by Thanas and multiple personal testimonies in this very thread stating the exact opposite? Are you just incapable of reading or are you willfully ignoring anything which doesn't match your established worldview, because I'm having a hard time coming up with any other reasons why you're failing to see what's been helpfully put right in front of you multiple times.

And, to be honest, certain types of creation will not be made without money. If you like your big, blockbuster action movies, well, somebody has to pay for those, and with the cost running into the nine digits holding a bake sale to fund it won't work.

Video games likewise are group efforts requiring the full time efforts of a group of people - people who have to eat and pay for housing while working on such things. Why shouldn't the people "consuming" such productions pay for them? If they aren't willing, who would be?

Bullshit on both accounts. Now while I could point to any number of threads in GnC and OT where people share quite high quality movies, shorts, games and mods people have made on their own time and money, I can immediately think of a very specific example which handily disproves your claim:

Ink, a film made on a 250kUSD budget, with no big studio support, no mass-media advertising campaign and no major theatrical release, turned out to be an incredible, high-quality movie (one of my personal favourites, actually). A few weeks after release, the Ink was downloaded from torrentfreak over 400,000 times, pushing it into the top ten most pirated movies on that site, and soon after DVD sales spiked. The creators of the movie wholeheartedly embraced this and are on record of fully-supporting file-sharing.

This is likely one of the most, if not the most pirated movies in existence relative to the size/cost behind it, so therefore it should be the best example for whether or not file-sharing hurts things. Going by all the evidence available: File-sharing is at worst neutral to creators, at best capable of saving them up to millions they would otherwise have to spend on advertising and marketing campaigns while at the same time boosting their sales.

And again, this is just one example. A huge chunk of the costs of any blockbuster movie, hit game, or whatever, is the advertising and marketing campaigns behind it. One of the most obvious things that mass file-sharing does is act as its own free marketing/advertisements for heavily downloaded items. Now if the assertion that everyone who downloads a work would never purchase or support it were true, then even that wouldn't lead to profit. Yet, as Thanas' links, Ink, and any number of other projects show, this is blatantly false.

Like I said - I'd be happy to discuss how copyright law could be more sensible, but this notion that everything should be free is bullshit. Yes, there are people out there who will, for example, write stuff whether they get paid or not, or paint whether they get paid or not... but they also don't have to show it to you, nor are they obligated to share it. That's part of where the whole "but I copied it but didn't make money on it, so it's OK!" breaks down. It's not yours. You didn't make it, you don't own it. It's nice if those people give stuff away, but that's voluntary, their choice. Not yours.

Hello goldfish-memory.

If you don't want to share it, don't put it online. No one is forcing you to, you have only yourself to blame if you place it on an unsecured location on the internet and people start copying it. If, however, you to sell it to anyone, if you want anyone to see it, you *have* to take the risk that someone's going to copy it, present it to someone else, and you won't get money for it. There is never any getting around that no matter how much you stomp your feet. If Red Imperator were still posting here, he could give you a very thorough explanation on how 'First Rights' work, and exactly what you're giving up as soon as you put something up for public consumption.

But hey, that's already been explained in this very thread, yet here you are acting as if you're bringing forward some novel, devastating point. Quick, swim around the fishbowl again and be just as surprised to see a little plastic castle as you were the last time.

<snipped the legalism argument because... well, it's a legalism argument>

If, as it is claimed, piracy somehow boosts sales and you think that it should be legal based on that then change the goddamned law. A bad law should be repealed or changed, not repeatedly broken. But please explain what safeguards will be in place to ensure that the new law will not be abused and artists/creators/owners will still see a profit from those works they do, in fact, do for money as well as love.

Umm... how about the fact that there are no legal safeguards in place now regarding unregulated piracy, yet not only has creativity not suddenly dried up and died with the advent of file-sharing, but it actually seems to have largely received a very welcome shot in the arm thanks to it?

[Broomstick]

The difference is choice - you can choose to trade something you own (your time, your resources, your creativity) for money, or you can choose to give it away for free. The key word is choice. What the internet pirates are doing is taking away a form of choice.

You're missing over half the equation here: In order for this whole thing to work out, lots of other people also have to choose to spend money on your work, or else all the choices you make don't amount to squat.

Yes, that's always been the case in the arts. You can offer up your work, and maybe no one wants it. But that's different from offering up your work, no one wants to buy it, and suddenly someone is copying and distributing it all over. There's a notion, prevalent among kids but not confined to them, that somehow folks are entitled to something for nothing in return. Among kids, this tends to last until they have to go out in the real world and find out they can't pay the mortgage merely with good ideas, it actually requires money.

Back in the day, anyone with a VCR and a few blank tapes could also, apparently, take away a movie-maker's 'choice' to make money.

I'm old enough to remember the dust-up between the movie industry and the VCR, thank you very much.

What worked out in the end was the movie and TV industry finding a way to make money off the VCR. You see, initially, they weren't offering movies and TV shows on tape, the only way you got those was illegal copies and the only legit home video was stuff you made yourself. Once the movie/TV guys figured out they could package and sell that old stuff suddenly a new industry sprang up, people got legal copies, and other people made money.

But you know what? It's still illegal make unauthorized copies and sell them. You're allowed to make a back up copy for your own use (that comes under fair use). It's legal to have your friends over to watch one of your tapes/DVD's (I remember when the industry was opposed to that, essentially saying if anyone other than the owner of the tape saw it, it was illegal showing). Every couple of months there's a big bust down at the local flea market where they arrest people for bootleg copies of movies, TV, and music. Sure, there's a bit of copying/trading/exchanging going on in the background but it's tolerated, and it probably does act as free advertising to the industry but while it's different than the guys selling illegal copies the division between the two isn't a sharp line.

You think those guys making those copies aren't using bit-torrent? You fail to grasp that the same technology that allows you and your buddies to watch the latest shows an hour after they're broadcast is also allowing the illegal, for-profit counterfeiting you claim to object to. If was just geeks passing out a copy to one or two friends I'd doubt they'd bother but it's not just about that.

Personally, I think the solution is for the industry to find a way to embrace such technology, as they did the VCR. The VCR didn't kill the movie or TV industry, it wound up enhancing it... but that doesn't mean there aren't rules.

Someone with a copy-machine and a single Escher print could 'choose' to ruin him financially... yet none of this ever seemed to occur. Weird thing that.

Two points one that: Escher mostly pre-dated copy machines being common, and most copy machines (actually, all of them I've seen) don't have the resolution/contrast/copy quality to match the original artwork. In that case, an original, or a professionally produced art-quality reproduction, was ALWAYS much better than a copy.

Digital copying of audiovisual material is different - a perfect copy, every time, is achievable with a box that sits on a table and is accessible to virtually everyone in the industrial first world, and most of the "second world".

That "starving to death" thing really sucks - why shouldn't artists seek to avoid it? If you value art, why do you deprive the artists of compensation that would allow him/her to make more art instead of dumpster diving for discarded food in order to eat?

Why do you still cling to the black/white view that people who file-share *never* support the works they like despite both studies posted by Thanas and multiple personal testimonies in this very thread stating the exact opposite?

Why do you insist on distorting my position? Do you actually read what I write? I don't deny it occurs, but you seem to discount and downplay that for-profit piracy also occurs. The fact that 100,000 fans of something make copies and use them as a form of word-of-mouth advertising to the benefit of the artist/creator does not magically make the skanky guys down the street who bit-torrent movies and burn hundreds of DVD's for their own personal profit with not a cent going to the creators/owners go away. Just as the industry focuses solely on the profiteering bad guys and refuses to see the beneficial aspects of file-sharing, YOU focus solely on the beneficial aspects and ignore that yes, some bad things do occur and there really is a concern about pirates profiting from the hard work of other people.

And, to be honest, certain types of creation will not be made without money. If you like your big, blockbuster action movies, well, somebody has to pay for those, and with the cost running into the nine digits holding a bake sale to fund it won't work.

Video games likewise are group efforts requiring the full time efforts of a group of people - people who have to eat and pay for housing while working on such things. Why shouldn't the people "consuming" such productions pay for them? If they aren't willing, who would be?

Bullshit on both accounts. Now while I could point to any number of threads in GnC and OT where people share quite high quality movies, shorts, games and mods people have made on their own time and money, I can immediately think of a very specific example which handily disproves your claim:

Ink, a film made on a 250kUSD budget, with no big studio support, no mass-media advertising campaign and no major theatrical release, turned out to be an incredible, high-quality movie (one of my personal favourites, actually). A few weeks after release, the Ink was downloaded from torrentfreak over 400,000 times, pushing it into the top ten most pirated movies on that site, and soon after DVD sales spiked. The creators of the movie wholeheartedly embraced this and are on record of fully-supporting file-sharing.

This is likely one of the most, if not the most pirated movies in existence relative to the size/cost behind it, so therefore it should be the best example for whether or not file-sharing hurts things.

So an indie movie got great publicity, wonderful. Tell me, how would that have worked for Avatar? Would it have paid for even a fraction of just the special effects budget?

Clearly there is a market for multi-million dollar blockbusters. Do you honestly think bit-torrent distribution and a few bucks kicked in by the decent fans are going to pay for them?

And I'll point out that anecdote is not evidence - sure it worked for Ink (although I have never heard of that movie until now, so I guess the advertising campaign still isn't as penetrating as the Hollywood ad machine). Is that an exception or a rule? How many other movies achieve file-sharing success? How many are passed around the peer-to-peer networks (implying there is a demand for them) but don't make any money?

Is it possible that for films in a certain range (genre, budget, whatever) the peer-to-peer system works wonderfully but for others (massive budget blockbusters) it's not so ideal?

If you don't want to share it, don't put it online.

That's a great notion, except in this day and age scanners mean someone else can put it on line for you, without your knowledge or consent. I've run across easily a dozen written works where exactly that was done (or someone actually entirely retyped the things) and I'm not even looking for them. So... the author doesn't put it on-line, goes through print media... and suddenly it's on-line everywhere.

You can't keep anything off the internet these days unless you hide it under your bed and don't attempt to sell it at all.

If, however, you to sell it to anyone, if you want anyone to see it, you *have* to take the risk that someone's going to copy it, present it to someone else, and you won't get money for it. There is never any getting around that no matter how much you stomp your feet.

And if you own a car you have to take the risk that someone might steal it one day. There is never getting around that no matter how much you stomp your feet. But that theft is still wrong.

If Red Imperator were still posting here, he could give you a very thorough explanation on how 'First Rights' work, and exactly what you're giving up as soon as you put something up for public consumption.

Hey, shithead - what part of "I'm a published author" are you having trouble with? You think I somehow don't understand "first rights"? I likely learned about "first publication rights" when your parents were still in grade school, assuming you're around the average age for this board.

Apparently you are having trouble with the idea that I have read your posts and understood them but I still disagree with you.

<snipped the legalism argument because... well, it's a legalism argument>

And like I said - if you don't like the law change it. "It's a bad law" is no excuse for breaking it if you find your ass hauled into court one day.

Umm... how about the fact that there are no legal safeguards in place now regarding unregulated piracy, yet not only has creativity not suddenly dried up and died with the advent of file-sharing, but it actually seems to have largely received a very welcome shot in the arm thanks to it?

Yeah, same shit as when the VCR came out. But you might have noticed that wholesale copying and distribution even for free is still illegal on VCR and DVD. As much as you want it, the media industry is NOT going to simply roll over and say "go ahead, file share all you want, we don't care!". I don't think making all on-line distribution and peer-to-peer completely illegal is the solution, either. I do think the current DRM stuff actually causes more harm than good, and probably encourages a certain amount of piracy, but that doesn't mean I favor abolishing all copyright and notion of intellectual property, either.

[NoXion]

That was the whole point of my example, you retarded asshole.

Wouldn't they be in breach of contract? If you wanted to get paid for your work, wouldn't you refuse to sign a contract that did not stipulate payment on the part of the client, right?

[Thanas]

Why do you still cling to the black/white view that people who file-share *never* support the works they like despite both studies posted by Thanas and multiple personal testimonies in this very thread stating the exact opposite?

Why do you insist on distorting my position? Do you actually read what I write? I don't deny it occurs, but you seem to discount and downplay that for-profit piracy also occurs. The fact that 100,000 fans of something make copies and use them as a form of word-of-mouth advertising to the benefit of the artist/creator does not magically make the skanky guys down the street who bit-torrent movies and burn hundreds of DVD's for their own personal profit with not a cent going to the creators/owners go away. Just as the industry focuses solely on the profiteering bad guys and refuses to see the beneficial aspects of file-sharing, YOU focus solely on the beneficial aspects and ignore that yes, some bad things do occur and there really is a concern about pirates profiting from the hard work of other people.

Nobody is arguing against that or that "professional" pirates should go to jail and be damned. Get your head around this please and stop arguing as if Oni and my position is "ALL FILESHARING IS GOOD AND THERE SHOULD BE NO COPYRIGHT AT ALL 111!!1"

Please establish how your position is in any way consistent with the studies posted, and please establish how you plan to argue that on average, filesharing tends to do more bad than good when the very same studies quoted in this thread seem to suggest otherwise.

Because that is really the crux of the matter right here.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Not in the mood to spread this out over yet another wall of quotes and split-apart posts. Doubly so since they contain nothing but tangents having nothing to do with the debate (the best one being "Raar, those durned whippersnappers and their sense of entitlement!"), repetitions of earlier debunked points and lies (file-sharing is theft! I'll repeat it until it's true!), and more general goldfishing. However, something did stick out to me that I feel is worth quoting:

But you know what? It's still illegal make unauthorized copies and sell them. You're allowed to make a back up copy for your own use (that comes under fair use). It's legal to have your friends over to watch one of your tapes/DVD's (I remember when the industry was opposed to that, essentially saying if anyone other than the owner of the tape saw it, it was illegal showing). Every couple of months there's a big bust down at the local flea market where they arrest people for bootleg copies of movies, TV, and music. Sure, there's a bit of copying/trading/exchanging going on in the background but it's tolerated, and it probably does act as free advertising to the industry but while it's different than the guys selling illegal copies the division between the two isn't a sharp line.

...

Now maybe I could be accused of not being clear enough, but I really hope that others are perceptive enough, or at least willing to grant that someone of even basic intelligence knows the difference between 'piracy' on an individual scale for personal enjoyment and the 'piracy' that involves massive illegal production of someone else's work for profit. Amazingly enough, people *are* capable of supporting the former and not the latter, and there's an even more mind-blowing revelation that the two are not actually the same thing! So please, for the sake of everyone with basic intelligence and a desire for honesty in debate: Quit trying to equivocate the two.

Seriously, this bullshit cycle gets repeated in every thread about file-sharing: People claim file-sharing is stealing, they get shot down. People then try to equivocate file-sharing with mass-piracy, they get shot down.

Broomstick's own story is in many ways the same: Someone else took credit for her work. Again that goes a number of steps beyond mere copyright infringement (though in Broomstick's case, since the magazine in question made a profit from copying her work, it's also the type of infringement I'm against, regardless of the plagiarism).

1)
Stop strawmanning my position.

2) The division is a goddamn sharp line. If you make money off of unauthorized copying and selling of someone else's work, it's bad, you should be punished, they should be compensated. If your copying nets you no money, and cannot be reasonably shown to impact their sales, then it isn't bad and hurts no one. This isn't fucking rocket science.

[Simon_Jester]

Oni, a few questions.

How many copies of someone's work do you have to give away at no profit to yourself before you are materially impacting their sales?

One? Five? Ten? A hundred? A thousand? A million?

If there's no specific number, and there probably isn't, then what guidelines should we use to judge how many is "too many?" If a million people download illegal copies of a major motion picture, then hell yes that hurts sales, to the tune of ten million dollars or more. Can I reasonably be upset if someone does that with the movie I made, even if the person(s) who made the copies available didn't earn any money themselves?

On a side note, what if you individually help yourself to one copy of ten works by the same author? Is this as bad as distributing a ten free copies of one work? Less bad? More bad?

[Vendetta]

If a million people download illegal copies of a major motion picture, then hell yes that hurts sales, to the tune of ten million dollars or more

And I guess the world is only 6000 years old and there are no such things as transitional fossils?

Your position is in direct contradiction to and wilful ignorance of actual evidence which has already been provided for you in this thread.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

That guidelines should we use to judge how many is "too many?" If a million people download illegal copies of a major motion picture, then hell yes that hurts sales, to the tune of ten million dollars or more. Can I reasonably be upset if someone does that with the movie I made, even if the person(s) who made the copies available didn't earn any money themselves?

So... do you actually have any evidence to back this assertion up? Or is this one of those 'common sense' things that we should just take as true despite the actual studies (like what Thanas posted which, apparently, everybody seems to have a blind-spot for) indicating otherwise?

[Xon]

I don't have time to reply to the rest of the points raised against my posts till sometime later tomorrow.

But I see Broomstick is still trying to push the idea that p2p file copying is exactly same a actual physically stealing and commiting fraud/plagiarism or funding a actual criminal enterprise who have a real presense and cause a host of non-IP related crimes.

Xon, your position seems to be that copyright infringement is easy, and is therefore moral. Is that correct?

This is a strawman of my position. I'm arguing laws need to match physical reality or the laws are not going to work as expected. Digital copying, and the prevalence of bandwidth and storage to enable it to happen, is such a radical game changer that laws designed to govern hand-copied works are not effective. This isn't "low" cost copying we are talking about, it's functionally zero-cost copying.

Give me a $15 per month virtual box with a couple terabytes of bandwidth per month (10^12 bytes, or about ~232 4gb movies or ~190734 5mb music tracks, or 1.6*10^6 600kb compressed ebooks[with images] ), and I can rig a torrent client to automatically pull from about a dozen sources for 'stuff' to download and automatically download whatever the hell I want. Between clicking the "buy" button on the hosting package to indiscriminate downloading would be no longer than 30 minutes or less. It takes dramatically more time to pick what I want than to set the entire thing up!

Tell me; what is the difference between my consuming the content and having a script delete it as soon as it downloads. With statutory fines, at $750 per infringement, it would range from $174000 to $1.2 billion. At $30000 per infringment, that ranges from $6.9 million to $48 billion. With a "budget" of $1000 per month and assuming the courts would count downloading the same thing to multiple locations at different times, you could rachet those mandatory statutory fines up by 66 fold, so from $11.48 million to a staggering $3.8 trillion on the most extreme high end. Thats between 15312 infringements per month to 105.6 million infringments per month.

At that stage you would need quite sizable hardware to run it all and finding enough content to download would be a serious logistical challenge, and frankly the hardest part would be finding anyone stupid enough to pull that many seperate copyright infringements through the court system.

[Ryan Thunder]

[...] Thats between 15312 infringements per month to 105.6 million infringments per month.

So... don't do that? I think I understand your point, but I don't see how your example relates to it, so I may be completely confused...

[Simon_Jester]

That guidelines should we use to judge how many is "too many?" If a million people download illegal copies of a major motion picture, then hell yes that hurts sales, to the tune of ten million dollars or more. Can I reasonably be upset if someone does that with the movie I made, even if the person(s) who made the copies available didn't earn any money themselves?

So... do you actually have any evidence to back this assertion up? Or is this one of those 'common sense' things that we should just take as true despite the actual studies (like what Thanas posted which, apparently, everybody seems to have a blind-spot for) indicating otherwise?

If a million people download illegal copies of a major motion picture, then hell yes that hurts sales, to the tune of ten million dollars or more

And I guess the world is only 6000 years old and there are no such things as transitional fossils?

Your position is in direct contradiction to and wilful ignorance of actual evidence which has already been provided for you in this thread.

I'm sorry, I spoke hastily- it was late at night, and I actually did overlook that post of Thanas's with the links. The ignorance wasn't willful, it was just me having forgotten to go over the thread with a careful eye.

Reckless, perhaps. I wouldn't call it willful.

Looking at it- well, there's this new study in Canada. And one question that pops very quickly into my mind is "which way does the correlation uncovered in the study run?" If I'm the sort of person who never buys music albums (which I am), then I feel no temptation to download free copies of something I never wanted in the first place. If I'm the sort of person who buys one new album a week, the temptation gets a good deal stronger, because I could save hundreds of dollars a year by downloading some of that material for free.

We learn that A, who downloads music from peer-to-peer networks, buys 44% more CDs than B, an identical person who doesn't download but is otherwise identical. But do they buy more CDs because they download, and find out about things they like? Or do they download because they would otherwise buy more CDs, but want to save money? How do you control for that?

I'm not denying the result, but I'd honestly like to hear someone suggest a way to do that, because this is a common problem when studying social systems where you can't make carefully gauged manipulations of your subjects to see what will happen.

[Incidentally, that same question is raised here, in another thing Thanas linked to, about a Norwegian study which came to similar conclusions- that avid downloaders also buy ten times more music than the average person]

We see another problem if we run further down the page from the passage Thanas quoted:

Professor Stanley Liebowitz, who has studied the relationship between file-sharing and CD sales, commented on the Canadian study at his website (he refers to the authors as A/F):

"With these seemingly innocuous assumptions, the results of A/F imply that obtaining music illicitly should have increased record sales by 50% (since each illicit album increases sales by half a unit and there are as many illicit albums as legitimate sales). Contrary to the large increase in album sales predicted by A/F, album sales in Canada have fallen considerably since 1999. According to IFPI statistics unit sales were down 30% by 2005 whereas CRIA statistics indicate that unit sales were down by 20%. ...

To believe the results of A/F you must accept that sales have dropped by half in 6 years, due to some factor that no one can identify. Does this seem even remotely plausible? This would be such a steep decline in such a short period of time that it would seem impossible to not have a clearly identified cause. And A/F’s results rule out the possibility of other entertainment activities siphoning off record listeners."

Is he missing something important here?


Then we have this study on anime DVD sales. This one seems to be less ambiguous; I hope it's not just because the (blog? site?) Thanas linked to, and the site it linked to, both appear rather dedicated to the free-content side of the dispute. Unfortunately, the paper itself (linked to by the second site, torrentfreak.com) is in Japanese, so I'm force to work from the abstract and what (hopefully) the pro-free-content people who actually read the paper in the original Japanese said.

I can certainly believe that in some cases, availability on Youtube and the like helps sales rather than hurts them. This is especially true for anime, and doubly so for anime sales in English. Most anime isn't popularized outside Japan until someone takes the trouble to translate it into English, and doesn't get all that much airing on non-Japanese media. Pretty much every piece of anime I've ever even heard of, aside from a few which were on Cartoon Network in English when I was a child, I heard of by word of mouth from other people who are bigger fans of the community than I. In an environment like that, the English translations would get almost no sales were it not for the network of free content.

But I'm not sure that generalizes very well to other media that don't have to deal with the language gap and the difficulty of diffusing the material into popular awareness.


Then we have the book market- as described here. This could easily be another place where the dynamics of the medium change things... but it's a bit tricky in my eyes, because it reads:

The multi-million selling author Paulo Coelho has demonstrated that online book piracy has increased sales of his books in hard copy.

One of Coelho's fans posted a Russian translation of one of his novels online and sales of his books increased from 3,000 to 100,000 to 1m in three years, claims a report in The Guardian.

"This happened in English, in Norwegian, in Japanese and Serbian," Coelho said. "Now when the book is released in hard copy, the sales are spectacular."

So, did his sales increase by a factor of thirty because of pirated copies? Or for some other reason? How long has he been writing novels, anyway? Perhaps his sales skyrocketed for other reasons, and he's crediting the wrong factors?

I am very uncertain about this, because it seems too anecdotal for my liking. I can actually see this working both ways- I can think of at least a few specific novels I would never consider buying had I not heard about them online, and read good-sized chunks of them online... but on the other hand, I haven't actually bought any of those novels, and I'm not at all sure I ever will.

We also have Gaiman's interview. This points back to an issue raised in the context of anime sales: when a work has to be translated before it's accessible to a new market, an illegal fan translation can do good things for the popularity of the work. Even where it's not applicable, you get book sales by way of second-order (I see a free copy, I buy a copy to give to a friend, which has actually happened to me), or by people discovering a favorite author by way of having books effectively "lent" to others... this does happen and does have an effect that can easily offset any margin of lost sales.

But can we apply that to all media? Books, yes, products that have to be translated and desperately need someone to popularize them in the country where they're translated, yes. But movies? Music? TV series not in need of translation? I don't know. I simply don't see a unified pattern here strong enough to make the question of "is this denting sales in certain markets?" go away easily.

Maybe I'm flat wrong after all, but... I'm not convinced.


This circles back to my original question: how many free copies do I have to give away to materially impact someone's sales? If the answer is "infinity" or at least "enough for every conceivable buyer on Earth to get a copy," then there's no problem.

But it's very counterintuitive to me to think that this is true- that market saturation won't happen sooner or later, depending on the market. It's equally counterintuitive for me to think that this is a serious problem when the cheap copies are being sold for a marginal profit by the supplier, but not serious when they're being passed out for free.

Perhaps this is me adopting outmoded thinking. It is not, however, willful ignorance; at most it's the loud groans of protest from my mental transmission as I try to shift paradigms without engaging the clutch.

[Xon]

[...] Thats between 15312 infringements per month to 105.6 million infringments per month.

So... don't do that? I think I understand your point, but I don't see how your example relates to it, so I may be completely confused...

The actual point is I can cause more demonstrable harm to society by bogging the court system down with utter worthless crap than to any one else. It's actually worse if copyright infringement was a criminal act which the government was compelled to prosecute. I'm not going to be enriched/entertained by the stuff, since the concept is to just download the crap to incur the infringment and there would rapidly be too much stuff content to consume within a human lifetime dedicated to doing so.

The copies of stuff downloaded in such hypothetical situation already exist so it's not new demand being created for the content. It's just making an effectively zero-cost copy which only impacts the endpoints providing the chunks and the box where they are being stored, and only in terms of Input/output operations per seconds. Bandwidth wise, more than enough exists at evrey stage. Power and storage?, it's covered in the monthly rental cost.

[Molyneux]

But it's very counterintuitive to me to think that this is true- that market saturation won't happen sooner or later, depending on the market. It's equally counterintuitive for me to think that this is a serious problem when the cheap copies are being sold for a marginal profit by the supplier, but not serious when they're being passed out for free.

Let me put it this way - at least, as far as I've worked it out myself. This is the rationale by which I operate, I think.
If I see something new and cool-looking is out, I try to avoid buying a pirated copy, because that copy will give no profit to the person who made the cool thing.
If I did buy a pirated copy, I would be less likely to buy a real copy, because I would have already spent money for the product once, and only have so much money to spend.
If I download a pirated copy for free:
If it's awful, then I sure as hell will not buy a legitimate copy.
If it's good, on the other hand, I usually go out of my way to try to get some money to those responsible - whether buying a legit copy, or donating, or what have you. If I like someone's work, then it only stands to reason that paying them for it is the best way to get them to produce more.

[Simon_Jester]

The actual point is I can cause more demonstrable harm to society by bogging the court system down with utter worthless crap than to any one else. It's actually worse if copyright infringement was a criminal act which the government was compelled to prosecute. I'm not going to be enriched/entertained by the stuff, since the concept is to just download the crap to incur the infringment and there would rapidly be too much stuff content to consume within a human lifetime dedicated to doing so.

You can also create a similar situation by committing shoplifting in each of several jurisdictions- if you have to be tried for each instance of breaking a law, it's not that hard to commit so many petty crimes that it becomes cost-ineffective to try you.

Does that mean we should abolish all petty crimes, not just copyright infringement?

But it's very counterintuitive to me to think that this is true- that market saturation won't happen sooner or later, depending on the market. It's equally counterintuitive for me to think that this is a serious problem when the cheap copies are being sold for a marginal profit by the supplier, but not serious when they're being passed out for free.

Let me put it this way - at least, as far as I've worked it out myself. This is the rationale by which I operate, I think.
If I see something new and cool-looking is out, I try to avoid buying a pirated copy, because that copy will give no profit to the person who made the cool thing.
If I did buy a pirated copy, I would be less likely to buy a real copy, because I would have already spent money for the product once, and only have so much money to spend.
If I download a pirated copy for free:
If it's awful, then I sure as hell will not buy a legitimate copy.
If it's good, on the other hand, I usually go out of my way to try to get some money to those responsible - whether buying a legit copy, or donating, or what have you. If I like someone's work, then it only stands to reason that paying them for it is the best way to get them to produce more.

That's a reasonable model of how some people will behave. But I'm far from certain that you can rely on 'second-order' sales to make up for the lost up-front sales from having free copies floating around. Some artists, in some media, under some circumstances, can. That doesn't mean everyone can.

And then there are entire markets where the technology of cheap copying is used to mass-produce and sell "bootleg" copies of the product- where bootleg DVDs of a movie are all too likely to crowd out purchases of the real thing. For that matter, the free copies made available may well themselves be 'bootlegs of the bootlegs.'

Also, some people will treat it as their right to have access to the free content, without making any effort to pay people for the content afterwards. Sometimes this is harmless, sometimes it isn't. You may be a 'good citizen' when it comes to making sure to eventually pay for something you got for free, but not everyone is. Consider Broomstick's experience with the creative writing posted on her website: available for free with a request for donations, and she gets very few donations per person who just happens to wander through the site checking things out. This is bad for her incentive to add new high-quality material to the site when she has other things to do with her time, as she is in bad enough financial straits as it is.

Because of all this, I don't think we can draw such a sharp line between "I distribute free copies of your work" and "I charge a small fee for copies of your work which I can produce for free."

[Terralthra]

It doesn't help that many places which sell CDs and such have restocking fees or even straight up "no cash returns" policies on any CD or DVD that's been opened. If you buy something you think you'll like, watch it once, and think it's awful, you can't get your money back (or at least, not all of it).

If I want to spend my entertainment dollars wisely (and I do, and so should everyone else), have I any choice but to find a way to preview entertainment before purchasing it?

This segues into a long rant about the intended role of the music studios in curating music quality sold through them, but I'd rather not get into it unless people are really interested.

[ThomasP]

]That's a reasonable model of how some people will behave. But I'm far from certain that you can rely on 'second-order' sales to make up for the lost up-front sales from having free copies floating around. Some artists, in some media, under some circumstances, can. That doesn't mean everyone can.

The studies already referenced in this thread (reinforced by the revenues of the industries in question, which have only been on the increase in the last decade) indicate that most likely there are no lost sales to piracy per se. Yes, some people will undoubtedly "consume" the product without paying for it; but it's not clear that this unpaid consumption results in any net loss to the creator. Anyone who will download and not purchase is probably not your customer in the first place, and secondly, what is the unseen benefit of that wider distribution? If you lose 10 sales to free copies, but generate another 1000 because that many more people saw your work and liked it, are the lost sales really your concern?

There's a larger dynamic at work here than a simple storefront analogy.

Consider Broomstick's experience with the creative writing posted on her website: available for free with a request for donations, and she gets very few donations per person who just happens to wander through the site checking things out. This is bad for her incentive to add new high-quality material to the site when she has other things to do with her time, as she is in bad enough financial straits as it is.

This is a very bad example. I don't think anyone would suggest that you're going to make a living by posting fan fiction on a website with a Paypal button. If you want to make money, you still have to market, build a fan base, and give them a reason to purchase your work. If you aren't actively working to make money from your work, of course you can't expect to make a living from it no matter how you distribute it.

To flip the question: would she make any more money by putting up the same work as a 39.99 ebook with DRM? If not, is piracy the real problem?

As for incentive: I'd suggest reading Daniel Pink's Drive for a good summary of research into incentives and motivations for creative work. Pink's case is that once basic financial needs are met, financial incentives actually lead to worse performance in creative fields. Artistic types have to be intrinsically motivated, which only makes sense -- there was art and music and literature long before the advent of copyright laws and a mass-media industry to convince everyone they needed a lifetime monopoly to get paid.

[Wing Commander MAD]

It doesn't help that many places which sell CDs and such have restocking fees or even straight up "no cash returns" policies on any CD or DVD that's been opened. If you buy something you think you'll like, watch it once, and think it's awful, you can't get your money back (or at least, not all of it).

If I want to spend my entertainment dollars wisely (and I do, and so should everyone else), have I any choice but to find a way to preview entertainment before purchasing it?

This segues into a long rant about the intended role of the music studios in curating music quality sold through them, but I'd rather not get into it unless people are really interested.

I'll agree that such policies are problems with software, which often require agreeing to a EULA that you can't see until you've opened the software to use, but why should you be able to get any of your money back just because you didn't like the product? I can see if there was blatantly false advertising involved, but not liking a product that you've purchased is simply a risk you accept as a consumer.

[TheHammer]

I'd argue that this exception is so rare as to be irrelevent. Incidentally, why would you buy a game multiple times? Did you lose your previous copies, or were you simply that impressed that you felt the game was worth two to three time the asking price?

I first bought Oblivion in every seperate piece. Then I bought the GOTY version. Then I bought the slim-DVD case GOTY version. I bought GTA 3. Then I bought the GTA Collection.

Well, the question was why? The GTA collection no doubt added other games. Was it a similar situation with Oblivion? Just trying to figure out your motivation.