Comment by anonym29
21 hours ago
The idea in industry that pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking. The reality is, people who can afford to pay for media/apps/programs/books can and do; the people who pirate such digital goods overwhelmingly either cannot afford to purchase a legitimate copy, or simply wouldn't be interested in paying for it without knowing whether they'd like what they were getting, were a pirated copy not be available.
Additionally, not all pirates are the selfish monsters that MPAA, RIAA, and friends would have you believe: many pirates, including several I know personally, use pirated media as a preview, and go on to pay for the content they actually enjoyed, yet wouldn't have done so without the option to pirate to know whether or not the media is worth the asking price to begin with.
An MBA could be coaxed into admitting that in those cases, piracy actually creates sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened.
There's a big difference between piracy as in free version vs parasitic piracy which is when you got someone selling the version that is pirated.
>The idea in industry that pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking.
The idea that _all_ pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking.
But the idea that without piracy sales would be greater, sometimes substantially, because some pirated copies do represent "lost sales" is much more realistic though.
The idea that piracy helps audiences find and then buy the stuff they like, is also, for the most part, wishful thinking. Even for stuff one likes, once they have it in pirated form, they have little to no incentive to buy it (except a small niche wanting to "own the physical product" like a collector, which can sometimes be the case for music and games, but not software in general).
> The idea that piracy helps audiences find and then buy the stuff they like, is also, for the most part, wishful thinking.
You are thinking logically. Humans are NOT logical.
In some other countries, Politicians hold huge banquets right before election day. Lots of people eat at these banquets. They could go vote for someone else after eating the free food because it is a secret ballot. However, overwhelmingly those who got to eat the free food will vote for the people who reliably show up to feed them every election. Why? Because humans are not logical.
Same applies here. You'd think people have already gotten free books or music or whatever. But if they like something, they want to be a part of it. Even if they don't personally pay for it, If they really like it, they will share it with others. Who in turn will likely pay for it.
Also I remember something profound I read when I was younger. The opposite of love isn't hate, it is apathy. The fear for anything that is worthy of copyright isn't piracy, it is being irrelevant and forgotten, out of the zeitgeist. If piracy can keep something relevant, it is worth the cost.
Anecdotally, a pro-audio software company I worked with had to fire 1/3 of the company when their copy-protection was cracked and sales tanked immediately afterwards, and recovered once a new copy-protection scheme was developed and applied. And just to be clear, software licenses in direct-to-user sales are not that company's only revenue stream (they sell hardware and software to OEMs).
This is to say, the evidence in this natural experiment points towards piracy reducing sales by a lot.
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EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings (thenextweb.com)
280 points by tchalla on Sept 21, 2017 | 59 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476
A few months ago there was a rather funny article in a French film magazine (cahier du cinéma). The director of a film school was complaining that his students obviously didn't know how to pirate films any more, so they couldn't get hold of classic films. So he found himself with a population of film students who had practically only seen blockbusters from the last ten years. They had tried to set up a media library with DVDs and Blu-ray discs, but with the disappearance of physical media and disc players, it was no longer working.
The director was quite bitter. The fight against piracy has therefore rendered auteur movies invisible and has only benefited Hollywood.
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In some cases it is actually beneficial (videogames) (I'm not gonna read the study, just trusting what I read online)
Study link https://felixreda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/displacement...
>EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings
Intentionally hiding stuff the taxpayers paid for should be illegal and sanctioned with jail time. I'm tired by the lack of accountability our elected leaders have.
"Oh shucks, seems like I accidentally and irrecoverably deleted all these emails between me and a CEO about a multi billion taxpayer funded contract; I'm such a klutz, hihi."
> The idea that _all_ pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking.
I think it is more often something people have to pretend to believe in order to maximise damages in breach of copyright cases.
For better or for worse, some people who can afford otherwise do piracy, out of protest. For example several people I know personally buy music exclusively on bandcamp. If it's not on there, they pirate it. No streaming, no iTunes etc.
Should Apple be the only ones allowed to make money? You can't pirate Apple News, iCloud Storage, all sorts of services and conventional media they provide. You can't pirate App Store IAP. You don't have to make a single value judgement to see that the status quo - the only permissible action to take against piracy is to make unassailable DRM - is really just conceding that the fully vertically integrated platforms ought to own anything. Surely it's not good that only Apple is allowed to make money.
That's certainly the status quo. One remedy that comes immediately to mind is to simply ban vertically integrated platforms like that and forcibly break them up.
People here don't like to hear this, but that's the only realistic solution to the current big tech monopolies sucking all the air in the room and spawn-camping small players before they take off.
Those are services that depend on Apple servers. If you also make a service, others can’t pirate it (they’ll have to set up their own server, which means it’s not really your service now).
Of course, this only works if you secure your server side properly. I remember using cracked versions of Wolfram Alpha for Android back in high school and those worked like a charm. I don’t think they lose a lot of revenue though.
It takes a lot of effort to build a system that is both user-friendly and does implement sophisticated mechanisms to prevent bypassing permissions controls. Apple has taken the pains to do that well and then to maintain it against an unending barrage of attacks. So they deserve to make money.
You can definitely pirate IAP. Back in the day it was as easy as using a proxy. Nowadays you need to inject 3rd party software into the app.
Wait, what? Apple is bad because they don’t provide a way for you to pirate content they sell?