
EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings - denzil_correa
https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/09/21/eu-paid-report-concluded-piracy-isnt-harmful-tried-hide-findings/
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sklivvz1971
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.

~~~
namlem
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?

~~~
Lorkki
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.

~~~
alkonaut
So have the hardware and software required to write software. It still takes
time though. I couldn't write software for a living if people didn't pay for
it, even if I used free tools and free computers. The most expensive thing is
my time. The same would be true if I wrote music.

------
skrebbel
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.

~~~
4bpp
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.

~~~
thisisit
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.

~~~
4bpp
Surely this is an obvious thing to control for; if they didn't, it would
conversely be extremely implausible that they would find any sort of "piracy
is harmful" effect for any other category, which the article seems to say they
did for "recent top films".

~~~
KekDemaga
How would you control for that in a real sense? Often "we controlled for"
means we made some pretty big logical leaps that we justified with statistical
handwaving in my experience.

~~~
pas
These considerations are usually elaborated at length in the studies. And
usually take more things into account that what people think about in the
first 5-50 minutes after hearing about the study.

That said a lot of studies are crap, maybe the conceptual framework is sound,
but they botched the mathematical parts (the stats handwaving), or the sample
size is too small, so even if the math is beautiful, the study is meaningless.

Now, for these data from the real world studies the controls are the
differences between individual games/movies/albums. Because there are games
that take more time to upload (because they take more time to crack, or the
game publisher aggressively started to shut down torrent trackers). For movies
and albums I don't know what kind of controls they came up with, but they can
look at IP addresses of big torrent swarms and asking film studios for
marketing spending data and then later cinemas for seats sold data, and try to
look at the signals. (Did downloads with a lot of IP addresses from a state
had an affect on cinema tickets sold in that state? Is there a per movie
difference? Is there a common cause variable - they can try to control with
DVD/Blueray/video-on-demand sales.)

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mnm1
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

~~~
Fjolsvith
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.

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redleggedfrog
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.

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yomly
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.

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hiisukun
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...](https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/intellectual-
property/report)

~~~
ruytlm
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."

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jokoon
In the end artists might just stop making records, and will just keep
performing until they are sure their listeners will buy their albums.

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newsmania
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.

~~~
KitDuncan
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).

~~~
thirdsun
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.

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dathinab
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.

