

First study of piracy in emerging economies - gee_totes
http://piracy.ssrc.org/about-the-report/

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alaaibrahim
Also, one major issue is the lack of legal resources even if you don't want
pirated media. For example, If I want to buy a song, I would go to most of the
sites that sell that song (itunes, amazon, ... etc.), and it just tells me
that I cannot buy it because I don't live in the US (or one of their supported
countries). Thus I cannot buy it, but if I look to any piracy site, I would
find it easily and download it right away. Also the same applies for books,
movies, software ... etc.

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MetallicCloud
I had the same experience the other day. I wanted to legally buy 1984 on
amazon as an ebook, but it says I wasn't allowed due to not living in the US.

They make it too hard to give them money

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AnthonyMouse
The report is actually from more than a year ago and is more than four hundred
pages long. One of my favorite parts is the section on industry research,
which begins as follows: "At the risk of over generalizing, we see a serious
and increasingly sophisticated industry research enterprise embedded in a
lobbying effort with a historically very loose relationship to evidence."

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suhastech
Here in India, if I buy legal software, I'm usually ridiculed by my supposedly
"well-off" peers.

This is when I buy a $2 iPhone app. :/

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tmh88j
Have any companies played around with the idea of re-selling or trading
digital licenses? For example, say a website has a bunch of music to download.
If you get sick of one song, you can trade that license to another user for a
song that they're willing to give up. This is probably the closest thing
you'll have to "owning" it. You can sell a DVD to someone else, but as far as
I know you can't do that with digital copies. I know licensing is an extremely
complex field, I'm just curious if anything like this exists.

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rickmb
Not going to work for a very simple reason, regardless of the complexity of
licensing: making a copy is easier. No registration, no licensing, no DRM, no
intermediate, just you and the person that has a copy of the other song. The
very essence of P2P.

Yes, it's "illegal", but that's the whole point: it's only illegal because
people thought that a model based on making copying illegal would work. It
doesn't, at least not in the 21st century.

No business model is going to fix that, "illegal" copying is here to stay. All
we can do now is remove the "illegal" part and start finding entirely new
business models that don't depend on such restrictions.

~~~
tmh88j
>Not going to work for a very simple reason, regardless of the complexity of
licensing: making a copy is easier.

Itunes and Amazon Marketplace work so I don't see any reason why this
couldn't. I'm not claiming it's pure gold (I agree that there are absurdly
large barriers to cross), just arguing your reasoning as to why it won't work.

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marquis
Itunes and Amazon work as long as you are the kind of person who deals with
restrictions ok. How many times have I had non-technical friends come to me
with their iPod and ask me how they can share music with another friend and be
frustrated that it's not possible, I've lost count.

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rollypolly
"Prices are too high" -- How do you fix this one?

It's a lot easier to adapt prices of physical goods. It's not trivial to make
a profit by buying a physical good in a low-price market and reselling it in a
higher price market.

There's no such difficulty with digital goods.

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gee_totes
Maybe you could fix it by cutting into studio's profit margins?

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cageface
These are already a lot tighter than you might think. Films are getting more
and more expensive to make and the hits have to make up for the duds.

~~~
rickmb
Bullshit.

Films are expensive to make because the costs are driven up to insane levels
(who decided actors, producers and studio-execs should make millions on just
one movie?), and because the huge profit margins encourage gambling rather
than investing.

Most of the "duds" are movies that shouldn't have been made in the first
place. Hollywood has been in a continuous bubble state for decades.

~~~
rollypolly
It's very difficult to judge what will be a hit or a dud.

I don't know much about movies, but I know many games which were terrible
until the last few months of development, who then went on to become a
success.

It's possible that some movies are made or broken at the editing stage.

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eof
Traveling through latin america the last 4 months or so, DVDs selling for the
equivalent of .50 - 2.00 USD are ubiquitous. Less so software than movies
(sometimes with 4 movies to a dvd); but everything is available.

It's completely open in the midst of working-class markets. In lots of these
places $10/usd a day give or take a few dollars is a normal wage; which makes
legal media purchases basically impossible; let alone something like a Windows
or Photoshop license.

