The problem is that when you talk about "piracy" it's already a totally forgone conclusion that you are biased.
People compose music. Should they be compensated every time the music is played? There's no clear "yes" answer here--the counterpoint being that otherwise no one would compose music is disproven by hundreds of years of wonderful music still performed today.
People record music and codify this in a big number (a wav file). Should they be paid every time such a number is put in a particular software? Should the number be kept secret so they can be paid by people that want to know it? Of course not, and this is ridiculous. When there were actual (plastic) records, there was an industry whose job was to produce this special plastic. Their business was plastic. They got a license to print special plastic and then sell it. Of course the "designer" of the special plastic wanted a bit of the sale. But now, this industry is only in the business of keeping numbers secret. And this is not a viable business, and we should not support them.
There's an obviously failing business with little to no added value: that of big record companies and rock stars. They were viable propositions when printing records was expensive (high marginal cost business). Now the cost of music distribution is effectively zero (zero marginal cost business). Why should they insist they are allowed to maintain their business model?
If making pizza becomes essentially free, why would we pass laws that prevent people from getting free pizzas? It's absurd.
Say I buy the music for $.99, and then put it on my own service where I sell copies for $.09. And say people use my service because I've made it very simple or that I'm using a business model that people prefer to either freely downloading it or paying full price. Should this be allowed?
I do not consider piracy theft, but I do consider there to be economic issues that must be handled. If the creators aren't compensated, there are limits that wind up occurring. For music, because of factors such as the ability to be compensated through concerts and through fame (fame can't directly pay your rent, but I think it still counts as compensation because of the impact of having high fame), it is possible for people to still make money. But in other medias this may not be possible. Look at movies, if we allowed infinite copying how would we get the budget to create the expensive movies currently created? Imagine if a theater only had to make a copy and could continue to show the movie and make profits without giving any back to the creator.
If you look at indie video games, you see a truce of sorts. Most indie games have little protection, but many people still buy them even though they could copy them. Some do this because they want to support people who aren't developing game with always online DRM or similar techniques. But is this model sustainable? What happens if people begin feeling entitled to such an extent that the producers aren't able to sustain their livelihoods?
And I'm not sure my personal experiences are relevant or not, but I'm someone who use to pirate computer games back when I was a broken college student but who started buying all my games once I had a steady income.
In a world where copying music is essentially free (not 0.99$ as you say), you are free to sell copies for whatever amount. Good luck with that. Perhaps by adding side value it'll work.
Video games are a good example of something that works: the marginal cost, and actual copy-proof value of many games are updates and content. See World of Warcraft. Pay to play.
At least you are paying for something that actually costs money (again: a download is essentially free to the seller).
While I understand your metaphor, I don't understand your position. Are you against copyrights entirely? If you want to reform it, how so?
For example: if my friend who works on self-driving software for Google is at my house, should I just be able to download the source code from his work laptop onto a USB drive? The software distribution cost, like music, is near zero, so is this ok? If not, how is this example different than music?
I, for one, don't believe it is "absurd" that creators like musicians or Google be able to exert some control over how their creations are copied for a limited period of time. Currently the copyright system has run amuck and become far too creator-centric, but I think the basic idea is sound and makes a nice set of tradeoffs.
I also disagree that history somehow makes it obvious that incentives are not needed to make music. When the printing press came along and drastically reduced that cost of distributing music, copyright systems followed almost immediately thereafter. What historical precedent of an environment with low cost distribution but without copyright systems makes it obvious that the copyright part is unnecessary?
When one produces goods (e.g. pizza) there are two costs:
- pay-once costs (the cost of the oven)
- pay-per costs (the cost of the dough)
Competition and economic law tells us that the price of a pizza will drop to the pay-per (marginal) cost once the pay-once (fixed) cost is repaid.
Copyright law was introduced to let companies recover fixed costs by giving them a monopoly and preventing competition. The problem is that this law failed on many levels:
* the length of the monopoly far exceeds its needs: recording an album does not need millions as 50 years ago. It needs thousands.
* there is no real incentive to cut down fixed costs. The reason the prices of production dropped is simply the advent of digital recording. Pro audio analog tools are still incredibly expensive.
* it set up a specific, adapted business model which is not necessarily a good one, the one of rock stars, which privileges few "winners" giving them huge resources and exploits the majority of other artists by giving them essentially nothing.
If you want to know what would happen to software if getting a copy is free, well, essentially we are very close to it. Google is not really protected by copyright law when thinking about its search engine business. They are protected by the control of deep know how and the cost of building such a system. Google's search engine is its team, not its source code.
> Currently the copyright system has run amuck and become far too creator-centric
That’s not even quite the case. The current system is strongly in favour of the middleman — publishers, music labels and the like. Whether this is a better or worse state of affairs than being biased towards the authors themselves is unclear, but it’s a sufficiently sourced different problem that the solution must also differ
The question of if they should be compensated each time it's played seems easy to me. Let the people who create the content decide how they want to monetize it. Unless I already had a contact with someone, if they told me I wasn't allowed to decide how my code got monetized I would be dumbfounded
Making music isn't virtually free though. It's just the copying of music that has already been made that's basically free. Plenty of labor still goes into the production process. Copyright has plenty of flaws, but is there a better alternative to incentivize the creation of music and art?
Just because we want some copyright, doesn't mean we want the current system. There's lots of room to have mixed strategies, eg personal use copying of music is free but public performance requires a license. (Basically, the de facto state now.) And there's lots of reason to believe we should adjust the current system (and business models built around it) somehow, because it's clear that what we have legislated isn't optimal... or in some ways even workable.
Secondly, why not Kickstarter it? (or Patreon? or sell merchandise? etc.) There's no reason not to collect a pool of money, escrow it (with some payments to live on during), and hand it over when they release an album. They get paid for certain and the public can listen to the album as much as they want. This seriously hurts the machine that is pop music, but is that really a bad thing? I think we can do better as a culture than what we presently have (in the form of big, centrally controlled companies/networks).
There are lots of ways to fund music and musicians without the current paradigm. People like art and want to support art they enjoy. (And for that matter, music managed to get funded for all of human history without the present system... So I suspect the concern is overstated.)
I know it's somewhat beside your point, but production has also become a great deal cheaper. An entry-level external audio interface and DAW package will set you back a couple hundred dollars or euros at most, and will basically give you all the tools to do professional quality recording, mixing and mastering.
It's a pretty big change too, considering that just a couple decades ago the only feasible way to make recordings of any kind at home was cassette tapes.
The cost of making music is nowadays the cost of the time of the artists.
Recording can be done essentially for free (less than 10,000$). In fact many artists chose to have a studio at home and do away with that cost entirely.
As a lot of artists effectively work for free: the cost is zero.
In fact, the expectation nowadays, in many cases I've personally heard from them, is that new artists proposing themselves to a label are expected to come with a full master of their debut, self paid.
Another interesting question, what is the role of libraries in all of this? If I check out a book I want to read and read it, my likelihood of buying the book drops significantly. Some libraries even allow this for movies and games.
> People record music and codify this in a big number (a wav file). Should they be paid every time such a number is put in a particular software?
Are you actually questioning the whole concept of paying for digital goods?
Do you really think you only paid for a jewel case and logistics when you bought your CDs or packaged software back in the 90s? No, you obviously paid for the work that went into the product. And that should still apply, even if you buy the content from Bandcamp's digital shelves. Or the App Store.
> There's an obviously failing business with little to no added value: that of big record companies and rock stars.
The piracy discussion always seems to be limited to big major labels. I agree that we don't need more of those, but they are really just the surface of the industry. There are countless small and niche labels that do honest and important work, acting as curator, supporting their artists and gathering a significant and loyal following among avid listeners.
"the counterpoint being that otherwise no one would compose music is disproven by hundreds of years of wonderful music still performed today."
Do you mean the music that was created by musicians paid by the aristocracy for their work or the music created for fun by the already wealthy using their expensive pianos and strings instruments?
The problem is that when you talk only about "distribution is effectively zero" it's already a totally forgone conclusion that you are biased. It's getting worse when you imply all data is just numbers and regulating numbers is silly and stupid. Those numbers have context, that's why they are not just numbers.
Labels are not only distributers, not all artists are interested in marketing, distribution, mixing, etc. And at some point you need to get those investments back.
If you remove payments or restrict it to special ways like patreon people will still produce music, that's obvious. But it's not clear that it's the same music we get today.
Art will not vanish, but it will change the arts, probably in a major way. But what it will be like is up for discussion.
> But it's not clear that it's the same music we get today.
So what? We're just trending back towards the long-tail. The whole "super star" phenomenon only exists because producing/distributing music was expensive and so corporations were able to exert control over music consumption and (more importantly) music discovery. Most of my favorite bands fund their albums via Kickstarter/Patreon/etc, I listen to it on Spotify, and I drop $20-$40 on tickets when they come to town. My money is still there, I just spend it on the services that provide the most value to me.
"Art will not vanish, but it will change the arts, probably in a major way. But what it will be like is up for discussion."
I believe that current situation favors indie artists as anybody can form a band, record an album in their basement, upload it to Basecamp, Youtube etc. and if they are really good, expect a success. That's how an open system should work imho. In an old system, you would have to pass that middleman (and agree to pay huge part of money made from your music) before somebody even hears you. The difference is that it is hard/impossible to strike super-rich now as a musician, "success" often means taking donations for song/albums downloads and getting paid for live concerts to make a living. That makes musicians much like any other profession, and that's how it should be; we had super-rich musicians only because there were bubble in music industry in the past century (other comments have written more detailed on this topic). If all pop-stars would disappears overnight, I wouldn't mind either as there's probably enough indie music to discover than I have enough time in my whole life.
This title is wrong and makes the problem worse. If we want people to believe the European Commission is acting corrupt by selectively hiding reports, we have to start by not twisting the conclusions of said reports, eg in headlines or on social media.
The report said that there was not sufficient evidence to conclude that piracy is harmful. The article gets this right but then still somehow manages to screw it up in the headline. I can't imagine that's an honest mistake, so it must be a lie.
Well, at least now we know that TNW can't be trusted any more than the EC.
There's a statistics problem here. Firstly, by Bayes's rule, absence of evidence is evidence of absence: if you didn't find any evidence of harm from piracy when you looked for it, that increases your posterior probability that there isn't any harm from piracy.
Secondly, this isn't just a case of insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is the most pro-piracy conclusion that could ever come from a study framed as "let's see if there are harmful effects from piracy" — and let's face it, that's the only framing of the study that's going to get funding. The only stronger result possible would be a larger study with the same conclusion.
The quoted blurb (I haven't checked if this checks out in the study proper) does seem to suggest that at least in some cases, the report found the positive result that it isn't harmful:
> On the contrary, in the case of video games, the study found the opposite link, indicating a positive influence of illegal game downloads on legal sales.
Sounds like a case of "correlation implying causation". If a game is famous ie downloaded a lot from legal sales then it does stand to reason that there will be a huge number of people trying to illegally download it too.
Piracy is part of the classic "there are no problems so let's create some" response that has fueled such wonderful human endeavors like US wars since WWII, the drug war, and now information copying. The racket goes something like this: some people are happy and content so we must create some chaos and problems for them which will allow us to go in and 'solve' these fake problems in exchange for taking their money or other valuables. Who cares if people die, get tortured, or thrown in jail as a side effect? Fuck those people, fake problem X is so much more important we can tolerate those lives being ended or ruined. Substitute whatever you want that people are scared of for problem X and you got a modern day economy. By reinvesting some of that money into problem X, one can keep a racket like this going for decades, maybe centuries.
That's, unfortunately, sales&marketing 101. Whether you go by the old school ("people buy by needs and wants") or new school ("people buy by fears and passions") - we've mostly run out of easy and genuine needs/fears to solve and wants/passions to satisfy. So what's the strategy with the best ROI? Solve hard problems? Provide for sophisticated passions? No. It's to manufacture fake needs and brainwash people into wanting useless stuff.
That's why I hate sales&marketing as an industry. It's a thin layer of actual social good covered by meters of dishonesty and malice.
If you commissioned a study for 420K, got it, ignored it cause you didn't like the results, and then refused to honor freedom of information requests by ignoring them, too, I'd be trying to find a way to put you in prison.
It's really no different than just stealing the 420K directly, unless you had cohorts at the company doing the study and it was just plain corruption, which is no better.
The entrenched interests complaining about piracy need to realise it is a symptom that their pricing or product isn't good enough.
For instance, I would be lying if I said I've never pirated music in my life. My total lifetime spending on music in physical form is probably only around £100. My spending on live music in the past 2 years probably exceeds £1000 though.
What's changed? I have a Spotify subscription. Spotify has made music discovery far easier (than even tracking down torrents) and is something I gladly pay for without a second doubt. A secondary effect is I now see far more live music as I have discovered artists I actually care about supporting.
To quote Jeff Bezos: your margin is my opportunity.
In Australia, we have a 'Productivity Commission' that investigates and produces reports on things impacting the country. One of these was recently produced on Intellectual Property arrangements [1].
While the findings didn't state that piracy wasn't harmful, they certainly did find that current the intellectual property situation (including local laws and international laws and trade) was harmful in some ways.
I'm yet to hear or see any movement resulting from the report, but part of the findings were how hard it is to make informed changes to the current system, because of so many international and complicated legal requirements.
That report also highlighted that piracy is in many cases a service problem - the legal means are slow, awkward, or unreasonably expensive, so people pirate because it's just easier.
"Timely and cost effective access to copyright content is the best way to reduce infringement."
Gee if you want music and don’t want to pay for it, learn how to play the guitar. But if you think someone else is better than you and you want to listen to their music, what do you have against them being compensated?
Copyright is different than patents because it’s not ever going to prevent you from making something you would have come up with by yourself like patents do.
I wouldn't have a problem, compensating an artist a reasonable amount for his songs. The problem is that most of my money goes to an (for me) unneccessary distribution channel (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music,...), when there are superior ones for free (torrent).
All I got from that comment is that you prefer not to pay for an artist's work.
> I wouldn't have a problem, compensating an artist a reasonable amount for his songs.
You can. Buy the album. Don't stream it on Spotify, Apple Music or Google Play, which are very different distribution channels that are closer to renting than buying.
Honestly I often feel the whole piracy problem is less a problem then more a symptom for a discrepancy between how
"classical" content providers want us to consume the content
and how everyone else want to consume the content.
Without questions there are some areas where piracy is a real problem like:
- "free" (ad income) content of small content creators
pirated on youtube and reuploaded on facebook (or one of
the many other variations of this problem)
- maybe very good blockbuster movies most people would
actually have buyed even if slightly expensive
- movies released _before_ there official release (through
this is more a cybersecurity problem then a piracy one)
But at last for all people in my environment the coming of services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll, Spotify, and well regular Steam Sales and Humble Bundle cured them from any intend of illegal downloading content.
The problem is that when you talk about "piracy" it's already a totally forgone conclusion that you are biased.
People compose music. Should they be compensated every time the music is played? There's no clear "yes" answer here--the counterpoint being that otherwise no one would compose music is disproven by hundreds of years of wonderful music still performed today.
People record music and codify this in a big number (a wav file). Should they be paid every time such a number is put in a particular software? Should the number be kept secret so they can be paid by people that want to know it? Of course not, and this is ridiculous. When there were actual (plastic) records, there was an industry whose job was to produce this special plastic. Their business was plastic. They got a license to print special plastic and then sell it. Of course the "designer" of the special plastic wanted a bit of the sale. But now, this industry is only in the business of keeping numbers secret. And this is not a viable business, and we should not support them.
There's an obviously failing business with little to no added value: that of big record companies and rock stars. They were viable propositions when printing records was expensive (high marginal cost business). Now the cost of music distribution is effectively zero (zero marginal cost business). Why should they insist they are allowed to maintain their business model?
If making pizza becomes essentially free, why would we pass laws that prevent people from getting free pizzas? It's absurd.
Say I buy the music for $.99, and then put it on my own service where I sell copies for $.09. And say people use my service because I've made it very simple or that I'm using a business model that people prefer to either freely downloading it or paying full price. Should this be allowed?
I do not consider piracy theft, but I do consider there to be economic issues that must be handled. If the creators aren't compensated, there are limits that wind up occurring. For music, because of factors such as the ability to be compensated through concerts and through fame (fame can't directly pay your rent, but I think it still counts as compensation because of the impact of having high fame), it is possible for people to still make money. But in other medias this may not be possible. Look at movies, if we allowed infinite copying how would we get the budget to create the expensive movies currently created? Imagine if a theater only had to make a copy and could continue to show the movie and make profits without giving any back to the creator.
If you look at indie video games, you see a truce of sorts. Most indie games have little protection, but many people still buy them even though they could copy them. Some do this because they want to support people who aren't developing game with always online DRM or similar techniques. But is this model sustainable? What happens if people begin feeling entitled to such an extent that the producers aren't able to sustain their livelihoods?
And I'm not sure my personal experiences are relevant or not, but I'm someone who use to pirate computer games back when I was a broken college student but who started buying all my games once I had a steady income.
In a world where copying music is essentially free (not 0.99$ as you say), you are free to sell copies for whatever amount. Good luck with that. Perhaps by adding side value it'll work.
Video games are a good example of something that works: the marginal cost, and actual copy-proof value of many games are updates and content. See World of Warcraft. Pay to play.
At least you are paying for something that actually costs money (again: a download is essentially free to the seller).
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In what world is piracy not theft? That is the literal definition of the word.
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While I understand your metaphor, I don't understand your position. Are you against copyrights entirely? If you want to reform it, how so?
For example: if my friend who works on self-driving software for Google is at my house, should I just be able to download the source code from his work laptop onto a USB drive? The software distribution cost, like music, is near zero, so is this ok? If not, how is this example different than music?
I, for one, don't believe it is "absurd" that creators like musicians or Google be able to exert some control over how their creations are copied for a limited period of time. Currently the copyright system has run amuck and become far too creator-centric, but I think the basic idea is sound and makes a nice set of tradeoffs.
I also disagree that history somehow makes it obvious that incentives are not needed to make music. When the printing press came along and drastically reduced that cost of distributing music, copyright systems followed almost immediately thereafter. What historical precedent of an environment with low cost distribution but without copyright systems makes it obvious that the copyright part is unnecessary?
When one produces goods (e.g. pizza) there are two costs:
- pay-once costs (the cost of the oven)
- pay-per costs (the cost of the dough)
Competition and economic law tells us that the price of a pizza will drop to the pay-per (marginal) cost once the pay-once (fixed) cost is repaid.
Copyright law was introduced to let companies recover fixed costs by giving them a monopoly and preventing competition. The problem is that this law failed on many levels:
* the length of the monopoly far exceeds its needs: recording an album does not need millions as 50 years ago. It needs thousands.
* there is no real incentive to cut down fixed costs. The reason the prices of production dropped is simply the advent of digital recording. Pro audio analog tools are still incredibly expensive.
* it set up a specific, adapted business model which is not necessarily a good one, the one of rock stars, which privileges few "winners" giving them huge resources and exploits the majority of other artists by giving them essentially nothing.
If you want to know what would happen to software if getting a copy is free, well, essentially we are very close to it. Google is not really protected by copyright law when thinking about its search engine business. They are protected by the control of deep know how and the cost of building such a system. Google's search engine is its team, not its source code.
1 reply →
> Currently the copyright system has run amuck and become far too creator-centric
That’s not even quite the case. The current system is strongly in favour of the middleman — publishers, music labels and the like. Whether this is a better or worse state of affairs than being biased towards the authors themselves is unclear, but it’s a sufficiently sourced different problem that the solution must also differ
The question of if they should be compensated each time it's played seems easy to me. Let the people who create the content decide how they want to monetize it. Unless I already had a contact with someone, if they told me I wasn't allowed to decide how my code got monetized I would be dumbfounded
Making music isn't virtually free though. It's just the copying of music that has already been made that's basically free. Plenty of labor still goes into the production process. Copyright has plenty of flaws, but is there a better alternative to incentivize the creation of music and art?
There's two points --
Just because we want some copyright, doesn't mean we want the current system. There's lots of room to have mixed strategies, eg personal use copying of music is free but public performance requires a license. (Basically, the de facto state now.) And there's lots of reason to believe we should adjust the current system (and business models built around it) somehow, because it's clear that what we have legislated isn't optimal... or in some ways even workable.
Secondly, why not Kickstarter it? (or Patreon? or sell merchandise? etc.) There's no reason not to collect a pool of money, escrow it (with some payments to live on during), and hand it over when they release an album. They get paid for certain and the public can listen to the album as much as they want. This seriously hurts the machine that is pop music, but is that really a bad thing? I think we can do better as a culture than what we presently have (in the form of big, centrally controlled companies/networks).
There are lots of ways to fund music and musicians without the current paradigm. People like art and want to support art they enjoy. (And for that matter, music managed to get funded for all of human history without the present system... So I suspect the concern is overstated.)
I know it's somewhat beside your point, but production has also become a great deal cheaper. An entry-level external audio interface and DAW package will set you back a couple hundred dollars or euros at most, and will basically give you all the tools to do professional quality recording, mixing and mastering.
It's a pretty big change too, considering that just a couple decades ago the only feasible way to make recordings of any kind at home was cassette tapes.
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The cost of making music is nowadays the cost of the time of the artists.
Recording can be done essentially for free (less than 10,000$). In fact many artists chose to have a studio at home and do away with that cost entirely.
As a lot of artists effectively work for free: the cost is zero.
In fact, the expectation nowadays, in many cases I've personally heard from them, is that new artists proposing themselves to a label are expected to come with a full master of their debut, self paid.
I guess this quickly becomes a very broad topic with many many sides and nuances, but I'd like to add another question that bothers me:
Why are creators of popular public statues or significant landmarks treated differently than, for instance, music composers or book authors?
They get a one time fee for their creation and, with some exceptions (e.g. no unauthorized pictures of Brussels' Atomium), that's it?
Another interesting question, what is the role of libraries in all of this? If I check out a book I want to read and read it, my likelihood of buying the book drops significantly. Some libraries even allow this for movies and games.
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You could apply this exact argument to software. Would you?
I don't know about that commenter, but there's an entire free software movement that applies this argument to software.
Are you talking about software parents or software in general? Because the internet is full of free code
Yes I would.
> People record music and codify this in a big number (a wav file). Should they be paid every time such a number is put in a particular software?
Are you actually questioning the whole concept of paying for digital goods?
Do you really think you only paid for a jewel case and logistics when you bought your CDs or packaged software back in the 90s? No, you obviously paid for the work that went into the product. And that should still apply, even if you buy the content from Bandcamp's digital shelves. Or the App Store.
> There's an obviously failing business with little to no added value: that of big record companies and rock stars.
The piracy discussion always seems to be limited to big major labels. I agree that we don't need more of those, but they are really just the surface of the industry. There are countless small and niche labels that do honest and important work, acting as curator, supporting their artists and gathering a significant and loyal following among avid listeners.
"the counterpoint being that otherwise no one would compose music is disproven by hundreds of years of wonderful music still performed today."
Do you mean the music that was created by musicians paid by the aristocracy for their work or the music created for fun by the already wealthy using their expensive pianos and strings instruments?
But what about them movies?
There are no record companies there.
The problem is that when you talk only about "distribution is effectively zero" it's already a totally forgone conclusion that you are biased. It's getting worse when you imply all data is just numbers and regulating numbers is silly and stupid. Those numbers have context, that's why they are not just numbers.
Labels are not only distributers, not all artists are interested in marketing, distribution, mixing, etc. And at some point you need to get those investments back.
If you remove payments or restrict it to special ways like patreon people will still produce music, that's obvious. But it's not clear that it's the same music we get today.
Art will not vanish, but it will change the arts, probably in a major way. But what it will be like is up for discussion.
> But it's not clear that it's the same music we get today.
So what? We're just trending back towards the long-tail. The whole "super star" phenomenon only exists because producing/distributing music was expensive and so corporations were able to exert control over music consumption and (more importantly) music discovery. Most of my favorite bands fund their albums via Kickstarter/Patreon/etc, I listen to it on Spotify, and I drop $20-$40 on tickets when they come to town. My money is still there, I just spend it on the services that provide the most value to me.
"Art will not vanish, but it will change the arts, probably in a major way. But what it will be like is up for discussion."
I believe that current situation favors indie artists as anybody can form a band, record an album in their basement, upload it to Basecamp, Youtube etc. and if they are really good, expect a success. That's how an open system should work imho. In an old system, you would have to pass that middleman (and agree to pay huge part of money made from your music) before somebody even hears you. The difference is that it is hard/impossible to strike super-rich now as a musician, "success" often means taking donations for song/albums downloads and getting paid for live concerts to make a living. That makes musicians much like any other profession, and that's how it should be; we had super-rich musicians only because there were bubble in music industry in the past century (other comments have written more detailed on this topic). If all pop-stars would disappears overnight, I wouldn't mind either as there's probably enough indie music to discover than I have enough time in my whole life.
This title is wrong and makes the problem worse. If we want people to believe the European Commission is acting corrupt by selectively hiding reports, we have to start by not twisting the conclusions of said reports, eg in headlines or on social media.
The report said that there was not sufficient evidence to conclude that piracy is harmful. The article gets this right but then still somehow manages to screw it up in the headline. I can't imagine that's an honest mistake, so it must be a lie.
Well, at least now we know that TNW can't be trusted any more than the EC.
There's a statistics problem here. Firstly, by Bayes's rule, absence of evidence is evidence of absence: if you didn't find any evidence of harm from piracy when you looked for it, that increases your posterior probability that there isn't any harm from piracy.
Secondly, this isn't just a case of insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is the most pro-piracy conclusion that could ever come from a study framed as "let's see if there are harmful effects from piracy" — and let's face it, that's the only framing of the study that's going to get funding. The only stronger result possible would be a larger study with the same conclusion.
The quoted blurb (I haven't checked if this checks out in the study proper) does seem to suggest that at least in some cases, the report found the positive result that it isn't harmful:
> On the contrary, in the case of video games, the study found the opposite link, indicating a positive influence of illegal game downloads on legal sales.
Sounds like a case of "correlation implying causation". If a game is famous ie downloaded a lot from legal sales then it does stand to reason that there will be a huge number of people trying to illegally download it too.
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Getting the feeling almost every news site does not accurately report on this for the sake of click bait.
I doubt "Report finds no conclusive results for pirated digital goods" would raise that much attention.
Yes and and IMO that's OK when it's about iPhone X's cost but not OK when breaking news about policy maker corruption.
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Piracy is part of the classic "there are no problems so let's create some" response that has fueled such wonderful human endeavors like US wars since WWII, the drug war, and now information copying. The racket goes something like this: some people are happy and content so we must create some chaos and problems for them which will allow us to go in and 'solve' these fake problems in exchange for taking their money or other valuables. Who cares if people die, get tortured, or thrown in jail as a side effect? Fuck those people, fake problem X is so much more important we can tolerate those lives being ended or ruined. Substitute whatever you want that people are scared of for problem X and you got a modern day economy. By reinvesting some of that money into problem X, one can keep a racket like this going for decades, maybe centuries.
That's, unfortunately, sales&marketing 101. Whether you go by the old school ("people buy by needs and wants") or new school ("people buy by fears and passions") - we've mostly run out of easy and genuine needs/fears to solve and wants/passions to satisfy. So what's the strategy with the best ROI? Solve hard problems? Provide for sophisticated passions? No. It's to manufacture fake needs and brainwash people into wanting useless stuff.
That's why I hate sales&marketing as an industry. It's a thin layer of actual social good covered by meters of dishonesty and malice.
So sell a real product that people honestly need and want, that can't get outsourced to another country, and cannot be copied cheaply.
I sell large portable wooden sheds. Very profitable.
If you commissioned a study for 420K, got it, ignored it cause you didn't like the results, and then refused to honor freedom of information requests by ignoring them, too, I'd be trying to find a way to put you in prison.
It's really no different than just stealing the 420K directly, unless you had cohorts at the company doing the study and it was just plain corruption, which is no better.
The entrenched interests complaining about piracy need to realise it is a symptom that their pricing or product isn't good enough.
For instance, I would be lying if I said I've never pirated music in my life. My total lifetime spending on music in physical form is probably only around £100. My spending on live music in the past 2 years probably exceeds £1000 though.
What's changed? I have a Spotify subscription. Spotify has made music discovery far easier (than even tracking down torrents) and is something I gladly pay for without a second doubt. A secondary effect is I now see far more live music as I have discovered artists I actually care about supporting.
To quote Jeff Bezos: your margin is my opportunity.
In Australia, we have a 'Productivity Commission' that investigates and produces reports on things impacting the country. One of these was recently produced on Intellectual Property arrangements [1].
While the findings didn't state that piracy wasn't harmful, they certainly did find that current the intellectual property situation (including local laws and international laws and trade) was harmful in some ways.
I'm yet to hear or see any movement resulting from the report, but part of the findings were how hard it is to make informed changes to the current system, because of so many international and complicated legal requirements.
[1] https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/intellectual-prope...
That report also highlighted that piracy is in many cases a service problem - the legal means are slow, awkward, or unreasonably expensive, so people pirate because it's just easier.
"Timely and cost effective access to copyright content is the best way to reduce infringement."
Normally we would have changed the url to https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s..., the original source (which is what the HN guidelines ask for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). But this article contains follow-up information, so we'll leave it as is.
In the end artists might just stop making records, and will just keep performing until they are sure their listeners will buy their albums.
Gee if you want music and don’t want to pay for it, learn how to play the guitar. But if you think someone else is better than you and you want to listen to their music, what do you have against them being compensated?
Copyright is different than patents because it’s not ever going to prevent you from making something you would have come up with by yourself like patents do.
I wouldn't have a problem, compensating an artist a reasonable amount for his songs. The problem is that most of my money goes to an (for me) unneccessary distribution channel (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music,...), when there are superior ones for free (torrent).
All I got from that comment is that you prefer not to pay for an artist's work.
> I wouldn't have a problem, compensating an artist a reasonable amount for his songs.
You can. Buy the album. Don't stream it on Spotify, Apple Music or Google Play, which are very different distribution channels that are closer to renting than buying.
Honestly I often feel the whole piracy problem is less a problem then more a symptom for a discrepancy between how "classical" content providers want us to consume the content and how everyone else want to consume the content.
Without questions there are some areas where piracy is a real problem like:
- "free" (ad income) content of small content creators pirated on youtube and reuploaded on facebook (or one of the many other variations of this problem)
- maybe very good blockbuster movies most people would actually have buyed even if slightly expensive
- movies released _before_ there official release (through this is more a cybersecurity problem then a piracy one)
But at last for all people in my environment the coming of services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll, Spotify, and well regular Steam Sales and Humble Bundle cured them from any intend of illegal downloading content.