

Canadian-backed report says piracy is a market failure, not a legal one - pwg
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/956637--geist-canadian-backed-report-says-music-movie-and-software-piracy-is-a-market-failure-not-a-legal-one

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FreeKill
It makes sense to me. I have a friend of mine that doesn't live in the US, and
she says some movies and tv shows are 6 months to a year late coming to her
country, even though they are advertised and hyped up all over the internet.
Before the internet, it wasn't as bad because if a movie was coming out in the
US, people in other countries didn't really hear about it much due to a
sandboxing of each market. Now, it's extremely difficult to avoid, and it
generates hype for content that may not be satisfied for months.

While obviously, that doesn't excuse piracy, it definitely plays havoc with
the marketplace. The rights holder desires to bring a product to that market
on their own timetable. Unfortunately, advances in technology and
globalization of the marketplace make it increasingly difficult for someone
who desires that product to wait for these arbitrary deadlines and legally
obtain it, especially when convenient, simple options to get it immediately
exist.

While it may not be the most profitable solution for a content creator to
focus on legally making their content as available as possible, it would seem
it is definitely the best way to combat piracy as many users would consume the
content "as intended" if only the option was available to them and affordable.

~~~
yason
_While obviously, that doesn't excuse piracy, it definitely plays havoc with
the marketplace._

What's there to excuse in piracy? Piracy isn't theft: theft implies somebody
being deprived of a copy¹. Piracy is making a copy against someone's wishes.
Often greedy wishes.

This is especially true when downloading content that has been released
overseas but not in your country. The production company _can't possibly_ lose
any money because they haven't released it yet in your country: you possibly
couldn't buy it and shove those shiny euros down their throats if you wanted
to.

There might be laws in effect that kind of try to incriminate and impose
penalties for pirating but a law doesn't equal ethics.

The copyright proponents want copying a movie to be illegal because it might
constitute a lost sale to someone who might try to sell that movie in the
future. However, if everything worked the way they propose, nobody could ever
do anything legally because it just might constitute a lost sale for someone
else who might try to sell the same thing in the future.

¹) It has also been established recently that depriving of a potential sale
doesn't have a correlation in reality: in one particular case the potential
lost sales were estimated to be more than there's money on the planet...

~~~
DanielStraight
"Piracy isn't theft" is not an argument for or against piracy. No one is
arguing that piracy is problematic because and only because it is theft.

Piracy is problematic because it is parasitic. Pirates derive value from a
system to which they contribute nothing.

Lost sales are not the point. Lost compensation for distribution is the point.
Piracy is not a lost sale, it's a forced sale at the forced price of $0.00.

The point about piracy not being theft deals only with the marginal cost of
copies, which is entirely irrelevant to the discussion. Somehow or another,
artists expect to be paid for what they do by those who derive value from
their art, whether that payment is based on distribution (like the music
industry) or prepayment (like Kickstarter).

If it's right for artists to expect, even demand, payment for the value they
provide, then piracy is wrong.

If it's alright to extract value from people's work without compensating them
as long as they aren't directly impacted, piracy is OK.

That is the debate in a nutshell.

~~~
flipbrad
Gee, is the nutshell really so small that it can only include your perspective
of the debate, rather than the other side's views, or those of moderates?

In fact, the piracy is theft misrepresentation is a core maxim of the pro-
industrial stance on copyright enforcement. it is precisely because people
view it as dishonest deprivation (theft) that people have a problem with
nonmarket, unlicensed sharing of cultural elements.

Yet such positions are rarely precisely defined (and this is true of the other
side as well, mind you) - if we accept lost sales as a valid consideration,
where does one stop? A slow browser in a newsagent's shop is chased out, and
puts down a potential purchase. or isn't chased out, and enjoys - but doesn't
pay for - several articles. An influential reviewer, having a bad day,
communicates his distaste for a work without tempering his words; at a stroke,
ten thousand potential sales are 'lost', the artist is deprived ten thousand
times over. Copyright on a work expires (75 years after the death of the
artist) - the artist is (sort of?) deprived (or rather, his estate is, or he
was, back in the day). People are being deprived of something totally
artificial which was granted to them and them unwaveringly, thanks to the
Disney lobby, enhanced. Copyright reform has always gone in one direction and
it remains illegal to format shift your own belongings in the UK. The debate
in a nutshell includes people who'd like to see things swing back in the other
direction, without necessarily eradicating copyright, simply because each
extension of copyright (a state-granted monopoly right over what you can
communicate and reproduce for the benefit of others) grants benefits to the
rightsholders at the sacrifice of the commons, and of my rights to use my
property (CD burners, CDs, books, etc) freely.

~~~
DanielStraight
You've explained exactly why I don't consider "lost sales" a valid argument.

In any event, the debate about copyright is indeed much larger than the debate
about piracy. I was restricting my thoughts to piracy (and really piracy for
the purpose of obtaining new media, not for doing things with paid-for media
that you should be allowed to do) and whether or not it is justified. I should
have made that more clear.

If you feel I am still missing something, considering my narrow focus, please
let me know. It was not my intention to exclude any reasonable perspectives or
bias my post to my own views.

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beloch
"Groups such as the Business Software Alliance have acknowledged that Canada
is a low-piracy country"

This statement is in stark contrast to the story the U.S. government tells.
They claim Canada is one of the five worst countries for piracy along with
China, Mexico, Russia, and Spain.

<http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=3047997>

Interestingly enough, Canada's status as a pirate country is usually upgraded
whenever copyright lobby groups are trying to get draconian updates to
Canada's copyright laws shoved through parliament. They were getting close
this year, but the election has thankfully nixed that. Again.

~~~
sp332
That's mainly because Canada never ratified some of the relevant WIPO
treaties. So even though there's not a lot of illegal infringing in Canada,
content makers don't have as much control as they would like, so it gets put
at the top of the "Special 301" survey every year.
[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/canada-
again...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/canada-again-tops-
special-us-piracy-watchlist.ars)

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jat850
I would highly recommend Michael Geist's blog and writing to anyone who
follows piracy issues.

<http://www.michaelgeist.ca/>

~~~
zackattack
Thanks. Why are you interested in the issues?

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rosenjon
I agree with this perspective. For example, I was interested in watching the
movie E-Dreams the other day. I would have been more than willing to rent it
on Amazon On-Demand, or iTunes, if it was available. However, it wasn't. And
then I realized that it was on YouTube. So I just watched it there.

I don't mind paying $5 to rent a movie that I want to see. The fact is I don't
have enough time in my life to watch all the stuff I want to watch, so when it
comes down to it, I simply want the most convenient method of watching
something. I'd prefer it not be shot with an unsteady handycam in a movie
theater in Brazil with subtitles; I will pay to make sure the version I watch
is of decent quality.

The fact is that the media industry is so busy trying to put out what it sees
as fires (and these piracy fires are endless, by the way), instead of giving
the consumer what they want. If they even had the smallest inkling of a brain,
they would have already put their entire catalog online for direct purchase.
No retarded DRM, or anything like that. Simply let people download the songs,
at high quality, and then go after the most egregious forms of piracy. This
would lead to higher margins (sales costs effectively go to 0), and they would
be able to chill out a bit as well. Instead, they seem to think that living in
their bunker somewhere is the way out of the situation, and are passing on
probably the greatest revenue opportunity of all time.

~~~
sudonim
Cool! I checked it out after your mention and found this playlist on youtube.
[http://www.youtube.com/user/DizzMoll#grid/user/D0E4471D25CD4...](http://www.youtube.com/user/DizzMoll#grid/user/D0E4471D25CD4C60)

~~~
rosenjon
It's worth watching. A good lesson that growth for its own sake is not
necessarily a good thing. Getting really big really fast is pointless unless
you have a revenue model that works.

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cicada
The report is _Media Piracy in Emerging Economies_ , website at
<http://piracy.ssrc.org/> where the pdf is available under a "Consumer’s
Dilemma" license.

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sudonim
Users take the path of least resistance. Piracy is appealing because it gives
users what they want, when they want it, at a low enough cost (both in time
and money) that they don't think about the transaction.

The content owners have taken a strategy of trying to make piracy less
appealing, rather than trying to make their offering more appealing.
Unfortunately for them, that's an uphill battle that funnels money to lawyers
and lobbyists that could otherwise be used for innovation. Dinosaurs will die.

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danilocampos
It's interesting — this study establishes what Apple guessed ten years ago:
the only way to win against piracy is to compete with it in ease of
acquisition.

I don't believe in the media industry enough to think this will have any
impact but I'm glad to see the details laid out.

Meanwhile, the world moves on. I watch Starcraft casts by two Canadian guys
recording in their bedrooms. I can watch their stuff instantly on my iPad when
they upload it, anywhere in the world. I'd happily pay for more. Let's hope
this leads the way to the future.

~~~
patio11
_the only way to win against piracy is to compete with it in ease of
acquisition._

Apple makes money selling high-margin complements to piracy, not competing
with it. iTunes is a low-margin (to Apple) strategic incentive to convince
labels not to look so closely at how many billions of dollars Apple makes
drizzling the magic margin-increasing white paint on top of commodity hard
drives sold, primarily, to pirates.

~~~
euroclydon
I think it's fair to say that Apple's renaissance is built on the back of
music piracy.

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lux
It's nice to see what's probably seen as a bit obvious by a lot of us who are
more intimate with technology being pushed into the general public discourse.
Much needed in order to move forward, and good on Canada to publish this!

