Reality is not black and white: On one hand you have the extreme case of someone buying a CD made by a contemporay artist, making lots of copies and selling them - clearly i find that unacceptable, both on moral and (reasonable) legal grounds. On the other hand you have the extreme case of someone being sued for copyright infringement because she has incorporated a riff from a much older piece, whose creator is no longer alive, into her own song. If ind that kind of attack absurd and morally indefensible, and i have no respect for any law that supports it. In any case, my reality and my vocabulary are not defined by record companies or politicians - i can think for myself (and i am also, on a very small scale, a practicing artist myself, so i know what i am talking about from more than just one perspective: i never publish any of my work in a “copy-protected” format, since i have no objection to it being copied. And although i retain the legal copyright - essentially so that my own right to use and re-use my own work remains protected - i invariably grant other people the right to make copies of my work not only for their own amusement but even for profit, with the qualification that they clearly acknowledge that it is my work and not theirs).
Reality is not black an white: One one hand you have the extreme case of someone buying a CD made by a contemporay artist, making lots of copies and selling them - clearly I find that unacceptable, both on moral and (reasonable) legal grounds. On the other hand you have the extreme case of someone being sued for copyright infringement because she has incorporated a riff from a much older piece, whose creator is no longer alive, into her own song. If ind that kind of attack absurd and morally indefensible, and I have no respect for any law that supports it. In any case, my reality and my vocabulary are not defined by record companies or politicians - i can think for myself (and I am also, on a very small scale, a practicing artist myself, so I know what I am talking about from more than just one perspective: i never publish any of my work in a “copy-protected” format, since I have no objection to it being copied. And although i retain the legal copyright - essentially so that my own right to use and re-use my own work remains protected - i invariably grant other people the right to make copies of my work not only for their own amusement but even for profit, with the qualification that they clearly acknowledge that it is my work and not theirs).[/quote]
blah blah blah - whatever allows you to sleep at night
I am almost certain that nobody here has a music library with anywhere close to half of the pirated material was produced by dead musicians (unless you’re into classical music of course). I don’t really give a shit what you do but fooling yourself this way is a joke. I download because it’s cheaper and it’s a hell of lot more convenient.
Yes, i sleep well at night… 
Would be interesting to see a study on how recording artists and movie makers are able to make more or less money because of the Internet. I would assume that the benefits of becoming famous and rich through the exposure on the Internet far out-weighs any loss of possible income because of copyright infringements. Getting your name out there, especially with the help of social networks, is a head start artists couldn’t even dream about a decade or two ago. Once you are famous, there are trizillion ways of making money. But you have to be good, that’s the most important part.
It’s impossible to say how much money a given person would have made this way or that way, so some of the pioneers may have felt they were taking a financial risk leaving the umbrella of the big companies - but there is an obvious trend, inasmuch more and more artists are using the internet to self-publish their work.
Exactly - we live in a different age now, and many individuals had to adjust to this different age when they saw the demand for their special skills disappear - so what is the deal about our taxes being used to protect the record industry dinosaurs from change?
Not to forget that for many artists life is not so much about making money as it is about making a fulfilling living (meaning, there are other useful ways one can profit from one’s own artistic activities).
Hm, what does “being good” as an artist mean? What i’ve seen in the past and what i see in the future is the same: in the art market (as in many other markets) “being good” means basically nothing more than finding customers who want your product (for whatever reason). To be specific, for someone “being good” could mean being outrageous, flambouyant, controversial, or crude; for someone else it could mean being a virtuoso on their chosen instrument, performing other people’s music; for others it could mean being creative and making their own songs - exactly what we’ve been hearing and seeing for all of human history! I don’t think the internet makes life for artists any harder than it used to be, on the other hand i think it gives them more freedom to do what they really want to do.
i would treat music and movies as having two distinctly different dynamics when it comes to piracy. i think it is a fair assessment to say that giving away music could be a net positive for music artists, with revenue coming from live concerts and other appearances, but once someone watches a movie for free, the ability for the movie maker to make another cent from that person is sharply diminished to basically zero expected value.
currently, widespread discovery is still through traditional media (TV, radio, magazines) where time and space slots are still a scare commodity that needs studio backing and clout to get. meaning if it’s not on TV, the radio or the magazine, most people don’t know about it. the radiohead “pay what you want” experiment worked in large part because they had already built their brand through years of airplay that was brokered and backed by the studio.
that said, the world is changing. organic discovery through things like social networks used to be a rarity (eg: lily allen) but is now happening more and more. where the record companies used to be the curators, the votes of everyone now count. the real difference is a question of scale. today we still see very few grassroots artists able to capitalize on getting found on the internet. they currently still need professional backing to get the traditional media coverage they need to go from internet phenomenon to mega star simply because people don’t spend all day in front of a computer. this may or may not change as more and more people have connected computers in their pockets in the form of smartphones, but for the foreseeable future: TV, radio and periodicals dominate what gets put in front of mainstream eyes.
further on scale and to your question on quality, one can produce music on an iPad these days and have it be quality enough to comparable to a mainstream studio release. the gorillaz did this last year. note however, the gorillaz already had a following built from their previous mainstream airplay, once again brokered and backed by the studios.
guardian.co.uk/music/2010/de … illaz-ipad
so basically it’s basically free to make music, but promoting it for free on the internet will likely cap at some limit if there is no bridge to traditional media channels.
movies, on the other hand, at least the stuff that goes into major theater rotation, cannot be produced on the cheap. there are huge upfront investments that must be made to make any serious movie and the cash for that investment is usually syndicated between movie studios, institutional investors and also private investors. those investors are risking their money, and thus have the most to lose and gain from piracy. viewing it this way, when one pirates a movie, they actual people they are ripping off are the people who risked he money to make the movie in the first place.
back to the point about piracy as copyright infringement versus stealing. whatever semantics are in use, here are the mechanics: person one risked money to make a movie. person two sees the movie without giving any compensation to person one. person one is robbed of that expected return. call this copyright infringement all you want, but if you risked money on a venture and someone used your good without paying you… there’s another word for that which isn’t copyright infringement.
For movies, there is still a market for the traditional product in that the average person finds a movie on a big screen to be more satisfying than the same movie on a small screen. If I had a choice, I would always prefer to see a pristine print of a film on the biggest screen available.
For musicians, I would say the internet has had a positive effect. More people than ever can hear their music, causing a potential loss of sales - but not always. Many songs that become hits are downloaded for free a lot, but also bought in huge quantities. Plus the exposure generates more money in concert tickets. Justin Bieber is a good example - from small-town busker to superstar just because of the internet.
[quote=“bababa”]For movies, there is still a market for the traditional product in that the average person finds a movie on a big screen to be more satisfying than the same movie on a small screen. If I had a choice, I would always prefer to see a pristine print of a film on the biggest screen available.
For musicians, I would say the internet has had a positive effect. More people than ever can hear their music, causing a potential loss of sales - but not always. Many songs that become hits are downloaded for free a lot, but also bought in huge quantities. Plus the exposure generates more money in concert tickets. Justin Bieber is a good example - from small-town busker to superstar just because of the internet.[/quote]
Perhaps like iphones, the cost of the hardware such as big screen TV’s can include the cost for movie producers, movie based merchandises, happy meals, etc. can all account for profits a movie would bring in. Besides, not everyone has a home theater system that can give quite the same experience as seeing a movie on the big screen.
[quote=“Taiwan Luthiers”]
Perhaps like iphones, the cost of the hardware such as big screen TV’s can include the cost for movie producers, movie based merchandises,[/quote]
what are you talking about?
[quote=“mabagal”]
back to the point about piracy as copyright infringement versus stealing. whatever semantics are in use, here are the mechanics: person one risked money to make a movie. person two sees the movie without giving any compensation to person one. person one is robbed of that expected return. call this copyright infringement all you want, but if you risked money on a venture and someone used your good without paying you… there’s another word for that which isn’t copyright infringement.[/quote]
I dont think its quite as black and white as that. I separate movies into 3 categories, those I go watch at the movies, those I think might be worth watching but don’t have that much interest, which I rent, and those which I don’t even think are worth renting and wait for them to come round on HBO or something. All paid for fair and square.
In reality, there is a fourth, perhaps some crappy tv show, perhaps its even been on cable here, I would NEVER spend one NT dollar to buy/rent, yet someone has a copy (either original or copy) and asks me if I want to check it out. How do the producers of that loose anything from someone who had absolutely no intention under any circumstances of ever paying a single NT to watch their product.
In fact, getting a taste for something, a tv series or movie, can increase the sales of their product as Monty Python found out.
[quote]“We’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”
And you know what? Despite the entertainment industry’s constant cries about how bad they’re doing, it works. As we wrote yesterday, Monty Python’s DVDs climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.[/quote]
Can Free Content Boost Your Sales? Yes, It Can
[quote=“Mick”][quote=“mabagal”]
back to the point about piracy as copyright infringement versus stealing. whatever semantics are in use, here are the mechanics: person one risked money to make a movie. person two sees the movie without giving any compensation to person one. person one is robbed of that expected return. call this copyright infringement all you want, but if you risked money on a venture and someone used your good without paying you… there’s another word for that which isn’t copyright infringement.[/quote]
I don’t think its quite as black and white as that. I separate movies into 3 categories, those I go watch at the movies, those I think might be worth watching but don’t have that much interest, which I rent, and those which I don’t even think are worth renting and wait for them to come round on HBO or something. All paid for fair and square.
In reality, there is a fourth, perhaps some crappy tv show, perhaps its even been on cable here, I would NEVER spend one NT dollar to buy/rent, yet someone has a copy (either original or copy) and asks me if I want to check it out. How do the producers of that loose anything from someone who had absolutely no intention under any circumstances of ever paying a single NT to watch their product.
In fact, getting a taste for something, a tv series or movie, can increase the sales of their product as Monty Python found out.
[quote]“We’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”
And you know what? Despite the entertainment industry’s constant cries about how bad they’re doing, it works. As we wrote yesterday, Monty Python’s DVDs climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.[/quote]
Can Free Content Boost Your Sales? Yes, It Can[/quote]
Your delineation implies that people only pirate stuff they don’t really want to begin with, which as we all know is not true, and secondly defies all logic and reason.
The Month Python case is one the elementary examples of the freemium models I talked about in my first post in this topic. It is also the example Chris Anderson gave in “Free”.
But let’s get things straight here. Having the stuff pirated and giving it away on YouTube are two totally different things. That the creators of Monthy Python did well by giving away the content does not justify piracy at all. There are very distinct differences here.
- Pirated material has no inbound links to a premium product that will benefit the content’s creator. By giving it away for free, the creators of Monthy Python can control the links that people see along with the video. Watch the video, see a link on where to buy the premium version. This is “Inbound Marketing” in a nutshell.
- Giving it away for free lubricates the discovery process because a normal person can easily find it on YouTube where they wouldn’t even know about torrents. Even if one knew about torrents, typing “Monty Python” into YouTube is a lot easier, so it’s +EV to give away the stuff to make sure the path of least resistance to your content is he video you put up on YouTube that includes your inbound link.
- A more subtle difference, but worth noting. Putting it on Youtube so a ton a people see the link also bumps up the search engine optimization score of the premium product they were linking to on Amazon. Meaning simply putting Monty Python in Google or Yahoo will more likely have a link to the premium content show up in the search results. Convert any of those search results, and it’s +EV.
Piracy gives none of this to the content provider.
The more astute music artists are using YouTube now in a similar fashion, simply by linking to iTunes along with the YouTube video. Piracy gives them none of this. True, some percentage of people will download the song from YouTube and never pay, but the fact that the artist got to control the link and have some % of people purchase from iTunes is better than people viewing a pirated version that has 0% of the people going to iTunes. People are willing to pay for the convenience of being able to carry the song around with them.
Movie previews on YouTube surprisingly have not capitalized on this as well as they could. The ideal would be a dynamic link to buy the ticket to the movie at a theater nearby. Part of this is a technology limitation in that normal browsers are not location aware (mobile browsers and Chrome/Firefox are). Linking from the preview to DVDs of existing movies is already being done, but linked to digital downloads of a movie would be better. This is not being done so much except of course with titles which are already being sold on iTunes or the like.
Not so. If it defies your reasoning, I can try again, this is quite a standard response to the argument that what amounts to sealing is the loss the person would have paid. If the person would never have paid to watch, there is no loss.
Hence I see there are levels of morality involved, waiting breathlessly for a movie release and then downloading, would be at one end. Downloading an episode of 24 I missed on HBO on the other.
I’m not the one trying to make a black and white distinction here, you are. I accept if everyone were to download movies instead of going to the theater, it hurts the industry. But as I tried to preface my last post, I do go to the movies to watch what I am looking forward to, I do rent and do pay for cable. However, in instances where I truly have no desire to spend one cent on a product, please, you explain to me where the theft is?
Let me guess, mabagal, you’d be arguing from the point of view of one of the people whose business model stands to lose from pirates?
you could come up with another business model. most of us little people hate being screwed by the majors.
Just one point about films (movies): here is, for example, a film that i happen to know well, since the director is a friend of mine: it is not exactly a lightweight, as youcan see on the related Wikipedia page, but its budget was around US$ 40,000 (that is $ 0.04 million, to put the figure into a millionaire investor’s perspective)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blosso … o_Oliveros
There is no reason to believe, either, that there won’t be any great films in the future - without the big movie companies or other investors putting down tens of millions…
There is no reason to protect big business of a kind whose era has passed…
[quote=“urodacus”]Let me guess, mabagal, you’d be arguing from the point of view of one of the people whose business model stands to lose from pirates?
you could come up with another business model. most of us little people hate being screwed by the majors.[/quote]
No, quite opposite. Our business model relies on free.
The answer to this thread is three.
[quote=“Dr. McCoy”]The answer to this thread is three.[/quote] times twenty one is forty two.
are there any cases of actual busts ? of people using torrent to download movies, music etc? (just download not selling or host links for people to download)
Rarely. That’s why it’s so fun to steal what you can’t afford to pay for 
Rarely. That’s why it’s so fun to steal what you can’t afford to pay for
smh.com.au/technology/techno … 25r7r.html[/quote]
Out of interest Aboriginal girl, the title of you link says [quote]US woman loses $222,000 music [color=#FF0000]downloading [/color]appeal[/quote] a quick search on her name has this come up, [quote]The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacates a lower court’s decision and rules that Thomas-Rasset, found by a judge to have lied about illegally [color=#FF0000]uploading[/color] music[/quote]
There is a difference in copyright law, from downloading and uploading is there not?