
Piracy: are we being conned? - MetallicCloud
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/piracy-are-we-being-conned-20110322-1c4cs.html
======
ryan-allen
As an Australian, hypothetically our US counterparts are often viewing and
discussing brand new popular television as it comes out in America.

In Australia, hypothetically said episodes tend to come out a number of days
later for very popular shows and often weeks or months later for less popular
shows.

This is due to hypothetical dinosaur age licensing of said programs from
hypothetical Australian media companies.

I have heard hypothetically on a number of occasions, hypothetical Australians
downloading hypothetical series only hours later than they were literally
aired in America.

The exact same things happens (hypothetically) with DVDs and whatnot.
Contextual shows like South Park make less sense when aired in countries like
Australia many months after they were aired in the US.

What do these companies expect is going to happen?

\---

On a side note, a television series that portrayed the story of a number of
gangland murders was produced, and was to be aired WHILST THE TRIAL WAS STILL
ONGOING. Now the magistrate in their epic wisdom decreed that the show was not
to be shown in the state that the crimes were committed, as it may contribute
to biasing the jury of the case (there's a correct legal term, which I
forget).

What happened was that the show was aired in all other states except
Melbourne, as ordered by the judge, and the very next day there were people
STANDING ON STREET CORNERS IN THE MELBOURNE CBD selling DVDs of the episode to
people as they were stopped at red lights. I kid you not, this actually
happened.

Anyway, long story short the main man was convicted and later murdered in
prison, but I hope this illustrates the utter lack of understanding and wisdom
of Australia in these matters. Hypothetically no wisdom at all.

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
As an Australian, most of that is true. Not hypothetical at all.

~~~
ryan-allen
Ssssh, they recently outlawed swearing in Melbourne, Australia. It's all f
__*ing hypothetical!

------
scythe
>claimed piracy was costing Australian content industries $900 million a year
and 8000 jobs.

Is it just me or does even this clearly inflated figure seem like pocket
change? The economy of Australia is some $900 billion a year and counting. The
costs of enforcing such legislation and the impact on people's freedom and
privacy is surely not worth a mere 0.1% of the overall economy even in the
best case.

<http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/>

~~~
tobylane
Yep. Lobbying is generally ridicolous, spend $10m to get the law changed to
keep $100m of 'lost' sales, costing the country as a whole $1000m in
limitations, which is also what the labels said they were losing to pirating.
Made up numbers, but it is something close.

------
systemizer
I agree: piracy is a problem. But here's an even bigger problem to worry
about: the government believes statisticians. I have come by so many stats
that are clearly wrong, and no one (sometimes not even the government) will
question the math behind it. It is just believed that the source is valid and
everything makes sense; especially in a case like piracy that people are aware
of its effect (but not the magnitude of that effect).

My heart sank when I read this: "Ferrer said that, even if the numbers were
not completely correct, there was no denying that piracy was a significant
issue for the industry that was only expected to increase with the arrival of
the National Broadband Network."

~~~
enko
> here's an even bigger problem to worry about: the government believes
> statisticians

I think this is an oversimplification, and a dangerous one. These statistics
are biased, one-sided and misleading. That is indeed a property of some or
even most statistics, just as "being wrong" is a property of some or even most
information. Yet no-one would think to proclaim that the problem with
government is that it believes information.

Real statistics, like real science, is a force for good. Bad statistics, like
pseudoscience, is a force for bad - but it can only fool the ignorant. The
solution isn't to ban statistics. It's to educate decision makers so they can
tell the difference.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Agreed. I see lots of people arguing that statistics is a lie, a bad thing, a
tool of evil, etc. Statistics is a tool - just like English language. I don't
see people condemning English as a tool of evil because you can lie in it.

~~~
eru
About English: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime>

------
paul9290
Piracy would not be an issue in other countries if these countries too had
access to Netflix, Hulu, Crackle (Sony stuff), TV.com, CBSnews.com/video and
the others. Though there is justin.tv and youtube, but both are not marketed
and cant be marketed as a place to watch copyrighted material.

~~~
watty
It may not be as large of an issue but it would still be an issue. I know
several people who no longer rent movies due to how easy it is to pirate and
watch (before it even comes out on DVD).

~~~
choko
I know a ton of people that used to pirate, but since netflix and hulu became
fairly decent, do not anymore. Most people don't want to pirate, but do so
when there is no reasonable alternative. Yes, you will always have people that
pirate. A lot of them do it for no good reason too. I know one such person
that has gigs and gigs of movies he has never watched and will never watch. I
think a lot of those people wouldn't have paid even if there were no
alternative.

~~~
cabalamat
> Yes, you will always have people that pirate. A lot of them do it for no
> good reason too. I know one such person that has gigs and gigs of movies he
> has never watched and will never watch.

Sounds like that person was motivated by as compulsive desire to collect
things rather than a desire to watch movies.

~~~
JonnieCache
Progress bars are a cheap dopamine hit.

~~~
Blarat
<http://progressquest.com/>

maybe this should be a better "hit" than pirating then :P

------
cletus
The entertainment industry--music, television and movies--is living in the
past. Content is distributed through physical media and balkanized
distribution deals. Movie and TV studios cannot envision a world without
traditional cable distribution.

Pretty much everyone who reads HN knows this.

The gaming industry has largely ditched these old world models. Titles are
generally available worldwide within days of initial release. Games are AFAIK
not region-protected (they could be on at least console platforms). Digital
distribution, at least for PC games, is widespread (ie Steam). What's more
that distribution is awesome. Delete a title? Want to re-download it? Not a
problem! Not so with iTunes.

Take Game of Thrones, a series produced by HBO with immense worldwide
interest. I imagine piracy of this is enormous. Unfortunately, HBO, which
seems stuck in the premium cable model, will look at this of evidence that we
need more regulation and prosecutions.

What it actually means is there is unsatisfied demand. If people could buy it
on iTunes or buy an HBO subscription on their PC on iPad without having to
have a cable subscription (which HBO Go requires) then there would be a lot
less piracy IMHO. Of course international distribution would also interfere
with HBO's traditional distribution deals.

Basically, HBO is just leaving money on the table when I'm sure people would
pay $3-5 per episode of GoT as long as they could watch it when they wanted
and re-download or re-stream it as desired.

Most, if not all, US networks distribute their content via the Web, either
directly or via Hulu (or both). Some place further restrictions like a window
in which you can watch the content or a one week delay (as Fox does).

I like this model. I have no TV. I don't want a TV. I don't want a cable
subscription (other than for internet).

The problem is that the experience is so awful the choice becomes either
pirating it or not watching it. The ads break, they will switch you out of
full screen mode, if you have to go back to the content (because it breaks,
which it does) you will have to endure a half dozen ads to find the spot you
were at and the inventory is repetitive and pointless (1 in 3 online ads are
for Geico I swear, and I live in NYC and have no car so why am I being
tortured with them?).

Part of the problem there is that advertisers are also stuck in traditional
media. I wonder why this is. My best theory is that there are no accurate
metrics on audience or conversion with, say, TV advertising so advertisers are
basically buying into the lie that networks sell them.

Another theory is that traditional media reach audiences that online media
don't.

But why can't I pay for a Hulu with no ads? I would. I have two theories about
this too:

1\. Hulu likes having a relationship with advertisers; and

2\. The people most likely to pay not to see ads are the ones of most value to
the advertisers.

So instead Hulu tries pointless differentiators to get me to buy Hulu Plus,
like being able to watch it on my iPad. That would actually be nice but if I
have to watch it on my laptop instead so be it.

The one company that seems to get online distribution is, of course, Netflix.
Watch as much as you want, whenever you want, on whatever device you want for
a flat fee. They've obviously solved the problem of distributing royalties and
so forth to content owners. Why can't anyone else?

That'll probably change today with iCloud. Ironically, the record companies
don't like how powerful Apple is but they've created the monster that is
iTunes by first insisting on DRM and then shutting out other players. They
wanted Amazon and Google to pay for playing music you own when it comes from a
hard drive in the cloud rather than one you own. Neither did.

The result seems to be that they've turned to Apple as their saviour, which
will probably make Apple even more powerful.

The whole situation--music, movies and TV--is utterly stupid.

~~~
pathjumper
That is because, right at its heart, the _universe_ does not respect owning
information. Therefore it makes no sense that some subcomponent of the
universe, say a person, or other entity could either. Sure, you can own a book
on which information is printed, or multiple "copies"; that is, multiple
physical books. But to the universe they are not copies, they are discrete
physical entities. But when you are only splitting energy streams, that is
making electronic copies; those are true copies. And this is where the lie
that is "copyright" steps in. Literally, "the right to copy". As in, some
entities, typically people, have it, and some do not. The fact that a new term
had to be made up to give this fictitious idea a reality illuminates how
baseless it is in the actual universe outside human society. Since the entire
thing is predicated on a lie - the lie that the act of copying electronically
can truly be controlled - it is intrinsic that it cannot last, since it has no
basis in reality outside our minds. The would-be copyright owners sort of
admit this when they try and use scare tactics to keep people from infringing
on their so-called copyright. They do this with big FBI warnings (which the
FBI had no hand whatsoever in creating), and those stupid "you wouldn't steal
a car, would you?" ads. It sounds almost like someone is trying to convince
_themselves_ of the veracity of owning information and the right to copy it.
I, for one, think that the sooner the human race gets the hell over the idea
that information can be owned, the better. There are other, better ways to
make money through entertainment, and the entertainment industry is sooner or
later going to have no choice but to face the music. It has been happening for
decades, and the ubiquity of computers is making it worse for them, and better
for everyone else, at last.

~~~
Produce
The universe also doesn't respect owning property. Saying that an arbitrary
collection of atoms (a chair) belongs to another arbitrary collection of atoms
(a human) is delusion pure and simple. It's just a delusion that a lot of
arbitrary collections of atoms (humans) share.

~~~
Helianthus
Which, of course, is the whole point: property is an illusion with utility.
For physical things like chairs, the concept 'makes sense.' What OP meant by
invoking the universe was really to say that _people_ don't respect
intellectual property.

And if you look closely, people don't respect physical property to an exact
degree. We share, we borrow, we lend, we lease, we sometimes treat human work
as property, we're generally just lazy with our accounting of ownership.
Which, you know, is kinda cool.

Anyway, you use the word arbitrary as if the arbitrary nature of the line
makes the line meaningless.

~~~
natural219
I think what Produce means to say is that many of our institutions and
cultural facets are made up. There is very little natural backing for many of
the laws and customs of human society (human rights? ha.) Invoking natural law
to make a point about the utility of an abstraction makes no sense in context
of all of the other abstractions that we use frequently in our lives (eg,
property).

~~~
Produce
Actually, I was making the opposite side of the same point. Personally, I
consider the existing abstractions to be as irrational as these new ones. It
seems, to me, that people are hugely over-complicating life while arguing that
survival is not possible any other way (or that the current way is the best
we've got). The simple fact is that we fall prey to fear very often and
construct these elaborate schemes to make us feel more secure. It would be
more efficient to, as a species, at least make an attempt to face our fears.
The issue is that we're biologically wired to survive in an environment of
scarcity. We go kind of crazy (in the sense that our ideas do not match
reality) when things are abundant.

------
nhangen
The war on piracy is like the war on drugs. Giant waste of time and resources,
will never end, and no gets out without losing an arm.

~~~
rick888
The problem is that piracy destabilizes the price of whatever is being
pirated. Digital goods are only worth what people are willing to pay and if
everyone knows they can go to thepiratebay and get it ford free, it will be
$0.

So even though companies know they will never win the piracy fight, it sends a
message that it's not okay to download it for free (as opposed to doing
nothing).

~~~
eftpotrm
No.

I don't deny there is a demographic that will always obtain for free what it
can but it's a lot below 100%. Witness the documented effect of services like
NetFlix on piracy levels or the warnings in software such as PDFCreator or
Paint.Net that if you paid money you were conned. For whatever reason, some
people will pay for the freely available.

Not to mention that, very often, material via sources such as TPB is of lower
quality - inexpertly cut off at the start or finish, periodic glitches,
whatever. Plus it's hardly got high availability and consistent cataloguing.
People will pay for a reliable, quality service.

~~~
rick888
yes.

"For whatever reason, some people will pay for the freely available."

If piracy wasn't stopped and it was advertised everywhere that in all the
search engines that you could get commercial software for free, these numbers
would be very close to 100%.

"Not to mention that, very often, material via sources such as TPB is of lower
quality - inexpertly cut off at the start or finish, periodic glitches,
whatever. Plus it's hardly got high availability and consistent cataloguing.
People will pay for a reliable, quality service."

TPB has a search box. software is a perfect copy, music is usually near
perfect, and many times the movies (not always), are ripped right from the
studio or DVD.

~~~
cookiecaper
I disagree strongly. The Pirate Bay is infested with malware, fake torrents,
media monitoring companies, and lots of other undesirable stuff. It is
difficult to navigate and use.

Here's the way that record companies should make money: $20/mo for access to
that company's entire catalog, unlimited download, well-organized, high-
quality rips, vetted torrents (i.e., uploaded by the company itself, malware
free), etc. If you've ever used one of the big private music trackers they
make an excellent prototype for a for-pay service that would allow the rights
holders to rake in even more money than they currently make. They were
eventually able to figure it out with VHS, I don't know why it takes them so
long with the internet.

~~~
rick888
"I disagree strongly. The Pirate Bay is infested with malware, fake torrents,
media monitoring companies, and lots of other undesirable stuff. It is
difficult to navigate and use."

There is a rating system. If there is a virus, someone will complain. How is
it difficult to use? looking for Photoshop? put it in the search box and click
"search".

"Here's the way that record companies should make money: $20/mo for access to
that company's entire catalog, unlimited download, well-organized, high-
quality rips, vetted torrents (i.e., uploaded by the company itself, malware
free), etc. If you've ever used one of the big private music trackers they
make an excellent prototype for a for-pay service that would allow the rights
holders to rake in even more money than they currently make. They were
eventually able to figure it out with VHS, I don't know why it takes them so
long with the internet."

The record companies already negotiated with terrorists and lost, why would
they believe that this time will be any different. You can get songs for 99
cents, Netflix tons of movies, preview music through Grooveshark, Last.fm, and
Pandora. Yet, it's still not "enough". Piracy is worse than never and there
are a new set of excuses as to why you have a need (and a right) to
downloading someone else's hard work for free.

The beginning of the entitlement generation.

~~~
guard-of-terra
"Piracy is worse than never" Is it? Something to back this claim up?

~~~
rick888
haha,

There is a pirate party in Sweden and sites like thepiratebay get millions of
visitors per day.

~~~
rick888
Love the down voting too. Proves to me once again about the political nature
of HN and why a pure democracy doesn't work.

------
pflats
I think one of the best ways to at least look at why the music industry is
really reeling is to take a look at album sales and singles sales.

When CDs hit the market, there was no compelling way to get singles. CD
singles were relatively rare, and few people wanted to buy cassingles instead
of CDs. This is at odds with the the music industry existed up until that
point.

Take a look at the list of best-selling albums and best-selling singles on
Wikipedia. Sort the categories by year. There's fewer than 10 high-selling
singles there from 1992-2004, while there are dozens of multiplatinum albums
from the same era.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
selling_albums_in_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
selling_albums_in_the_United_States#10.E2.80.9314.C3.97_platinum)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_singles>

~~~
eftpotrm
Only to some degree; single sales have also partially dropped off because the
relative cost of albums has decreased. I bought my first album in 1987-8ish
for about £8.50 - the same purchase today would most likely be £10 and back
catalogue releases are very frequently on sale for about £5-7. Factor in 24
years of inflation and....

tl;dr - albums now cost much the same as singles used to in real terms, but
have more music. Why shouldn't people buy them in preference?

------
modernerd
The Internet, like DVD, VHS, cable, radio, and sheet music, is just the latest
in a long line of transmission mediums.

Use of each medium to transmit work that was once locked down and overseen by
a controlling influence has always been considered piracy when that medium was
in its infancy -- right back to sheet music -- as Cory Doctorow notes in a
video interview with the Guardian[1]:

"The copyright wars aren't new, of course. In the first part of the 20th
century you had sheet music composers who represented the only real 'music
industry'. They were an industry as a pose to a trade because they had an
industrial apparatus; a copying machine that made sheet music. And so they
could sell it even when they weren't there.

"Then you had performers who weren't really an industry; they were just a
trade, because you could only make money as a performer if you were actually
performing; there was no industrial component. And then someone invented
recorded music, and the performers who were buying their sheet music down at
Tin Pan Alley and performing it all these years started performing it into
recording devices.

"And the composers said, 'What are you doing? You're selling our compositions
without our permission! You must stop this -- it's an act of piracy!' And the
performers said, somewhat understandably, 'You sold us the sheet music, didn't
you? Didn't you think we'd perform it?' And different states came up with
different answers, but at the end of the day, all the countries that made the
transition to having a successful recorded music industry said that composers
actually don't get a say in whether or not their music is recorded. They may
get some money from an automatic royalty system, but you don't get to say
'this can only be performed here' or 'only that guy can perform it'. Once it's
been performed once, everyone can perform it and everyone can record it,
because that's how music is.

"So here you have the great pirates of the first decade of the 20th century:
the music performers; the record labels. And the record labels turned around,
not that long afterwards, and pointed at the radio stations and said, 'What
are you doing playing our records on the radio? You have no business doing it!
What we did when we took those compositions without permission, that was
progress! What you jerks are doing... that's just piracy!' And, of course, the
broadcasters went out and they said, 'no, you should let us broadcast' and
they eventually won that fight and then _they_ were the brave pirates who
became the main stream.

"And so when cable channels started taking broadcast signals and pumping them
over cable wires, the broadcasters said, 'Well, you know, when we took that
music from the record labels that was progress, but when you take our radio
diffusion and pump it down over a cable that's just piracy'. And the cable
operators fought that fight.

"Then along came the VCR, which could record programmes off the cable, and the
cable operators, having won the fight with the broadcasters, said, 'You know,
when we took the broadcasts that was progress! When you take our cable
transmissions and record them on a VHS cassette, that's piracy!"

"And then, the company that invented the VCR, Sony, joined with the major
studios in suing the Internet for taking movies that had been diffused on DVD
or VHS cassette or over the air and said, "You know, when we put your cable
diffusion on a VHS cassette, that was progress, but when you take it and put
it on the Internet, that's just piracy."

"The biggest difference now, I think, is the extent to which they're being
taken seriously. I think it used to be true that no lawmaker believed he could
be re-elected by breaking the thing that his constituents use to entertain
themselves. And now there seems to be an awful willingness to go to Corfu with
a music composer and come back and propose that the Internet should be
censored and that people who are accused of file sharing should be locked out
of it and so on. And I guess that's the major difference and the thing that
gives me anxiety about the future of the Internet.

[1]:
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/may/30/in...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/may/30/internet-
piracy-cory-doctorow)

~~~
ajtaylor
Thank you for this - I had never heard it before. What struck me was how every
successive new distribution method was first called piracy. What comes after
the Internet?

~~~
sdrinf
Why, realtime performance distribution, of course.

Think about it, with state-of-the-art piracy, currently you 1, can listen to
2, any music 3, anytime, 4, anywhere. So the only thing that's really a
competitive advantage to channels is time between performance originally
recorded, and general availability.

Not sure how this could be really "liberated" with the performance business
still remaining profitable -a moneypooling service maybe? But there's
definitely room for improvement on the current distribution model.

------
te_chris
Is it just me, or has iTunes Match finally made this whole world a slightly
better place?

I mean of course, in terms of actually finding a way to monetise content
acquired through any means - i.e. I download album over BT, pay itunes match
sub, sync lib, then artist gets royalty. It seems like we're finally
approaching a sensible business model.

------
jneal
I love music - but I'll be honest, I rarely buy my new music. However, the
music industry still gets my money, and here's how.

If I had to spend let's say $10 per CD, and on average I get a new CD every
week (I do) that's over $40 per month. Instead, I get my music for free, and I
spend the $40 going to a concert almost every month. So far this year, I've
been to 4-5 concerts.

Now, I'm not saying this is legal or this is even "right" but it's just what I
do. Besides, bands don't see much money from CD sales, they get money from
touring, so I much more prefer to spend my money in the way that more directly
affect's the band's paycheck.

I do still occasionally buy CD's. For example, Linkin Park's new album "A
Thousand Suns" I downloaded before it was even released so I could listen to
it, although I had already pre-ordered it and received it a few days after it
was released (it's still unopened)

------
goodspeed
Another view would be to look up publicly available company revenues and see
that their annual revenues are totally not affected at all. You can see an
increase in year on year. No were are those figures dipping or near bankruptcy
like what they claim.

I'd love to see these revenue

------
Natsu
Yes, we're being conned by lobbyist-written "research" that contains wild (but
always bad) guesses about the piracy impact but which has nothing to do with
the real world.

It's been going on for a long time now. Remember how they compared the VCR to
the Boston Strangler? Yeah, only to go on and make billions of dollars off of
it.

If they really want to investigate something that's hurting the industry,
maybe they should look into that Hollywood accounting thing.

------
fleitz
The best way to reduce piracy is to shorten copyright. Lets give the industry
what they want, 6 month copyright length. This would vastly reduce piracy, by
the time the DVD comes out it's legal to copy. I think after that they'll be
begging for the return of piracy.

