Another thought on piracy…
The powers that be always seem to be looking for their lost revenue in the pockets of the music / movie fan (i.e. me and you). And our pockets are empty. Maybe if they checked the pockets of the people who we all are paying $50-$100 (or more) a month to access the internet at home and on our phones, they might find where all that ‘music/movie money’ of the past is going to now. By the time we pay for life’s necessities (like rent and food), if we have any money left over for spending on entertainment, of course we’re going to pay the $50-$100 a month for unlimited access to all forms of entertainment (albeit, not always legal access) instead of 1 DVD, 2 movie tickets and a couple CDs. And internet providers know what we can access on the web, so they charge us at a rate that is more or less equal to what might have been our ‘pocket money’ of the past. So we end up paying them to access content that they do not create, and not only do they get all of that money (and the content creators get none of it)… but we have no money left to directly support those things that we like (as we’ve already been tapped dry to have the access to find out about it).
Piracy is happening because we are all broke. And if they keep trying to fight piracy by shaking us upside down and hoping some money falls out, then it is going to go nowhere.
(Below is the original thread that I was reblogging / commenting on, before I got side tracked by the train of thought above)
One of the things that people get so wrong when it comes to talking about piracy is that every illegal download or free stream is a loss of a sale. It just doesn’t work like that (and besides the excerpt below, this Andrew Dubber post is another great read on that topic).
An expert in the GAO report asserts this in saying that the “effects of piracy within the United States are mainly redistributions within the economy for other purposes and that they should not be considered as a loss to the overall economy.”
But are they even quantifiable losses for the movie industry? Sanchez points to research dismissing all but a small fraction of these fantasy damages:
In many cases – I’ve seen research suggesting it’s about 80 percent for music – a US consumer would not have otherwise purchased an illicitly downloaded song or movie if piracy were not an option. Here, the result is actually pure consumer surplus: The downloader enjoys the benefit, and the producer loses nothing.
Sanchez doesn’t link to said research, and in fact it would be extremely difficult to ever accurately determine where illegal downloaders’ money would be going otherwise, but it was easy for us to find even more extreme estimates than Sanchez’ 80% spent elsewhere in the economy. Frances Moore of The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a non-profit advocacy group for the global recording industry, estimated that only one out of every ten downloads represents a lost sale. Even at that, this “loss” is not physical merchandise disappearing from a truck or warehouse. It’s simply money that the industry would have gotten, in a perfectly honest world.
This all makes total sense to me. Film profits are down because people are spending more money on phones or drugs or whatever this year. (Does piracy enable people to cut their film/music costs and distribute their funds elsewhere? Of course it does. But so does Netflix and Spotify and things people pay for. $18+ for a CD is a ludicrous rate, as is $12+ for a movie. Charge less, sell more.)
