US Gov admits piracy figures are bogus

Fishstick

Graduate Poster
Fishstick
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Article on Ars:

We've all seen the studies trumpeting massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One famous figure, used literally for decades by rightsholders and the government, said that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement. A couple years ago, we thoroughly debunked that figure. For years, Business Software Alliance reports on software piracy assumed that each illicit copy was a lost sale. And the MPAA's own commissioned study on movie piracy turned out to overstate collegiate downloading by a factor of three.

Can we trust any of these claims about piracy?
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Full article HERE.
 
I saw this yesterday. It has been pretty obvious that the numbers media industries used were inflated and flawed. Importantly the government understand that since people who download illegally spend elsewhere in the economy money isn't just going into thin air and overall it has a much smaller impact than the industries were trying to portray. It still hurts smaller companies though. But a leaked copy of the new Wolverine movie means just about diddly for Fox. It still made $180 million in the box office and in fact people believe the leak might have helped Wolverine more than it hurt. http://my-life-as-a-blog.com/post/2010/01/03/Did-File-Sharing-Make-Wolverine-a-Hit.aspx
 
These claims have been the driving force behind the ACTA treaty...
 
I wonder what percentage of illegal downloads are done by people who wouldn't have purchased the movie or song (or an alternative movie/song in its place) if there wasn't an illegal copy freely available? These kinds of downloads have no effect on profit or employment figures of the movie and music industries.

I find it kind of strange how the music industry complains about people illegally downloading MP3s. In the 80's people recorded songs from the radio to listen to on their Walkman, and nobody cared. In th 00's people download songs from the internet to listen to on their iPod. Same thing, different era. But all of a sudden it's a problem.
 
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Eric Flint has written quite a lot about this, presenting evidence that the wider publicity given to an author when some of his or her work is available for free actually boosts legitimate sales.

I suspect only a small percentage of illegal downloads are actually carried out by people who would have spent the money on the legitimate item if the download hadn't been avaliable.

Rolfe.
 
Don't forget the percentage of people who download something that they already own but can't play because the copy protection is so draconian that the legitamately bought disc won't play in their computer. These people have bought the product, they just can't use it in all the places they want to.
 
Brian-M said:
I wonder what percentage of illegal downloads are done by people who wouldn't have purchased the movie or song (or an alternative movie/song in its place) if there wasn't an illegal copy freely available? These kinds of downloads have no effect on profit or employment figures of the movie and music industries.

I find it kind of strange how the music industry complains about people illegally downloading MP3s. In the 80's people recorded songs from the radio to listen to on their Walkman, and nobody cared. In th 00's people download songs from the internet to listen to on their iPod. Same thing, different era. But all of a sudden it's a problem.
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Quoted for truth. Especially the last bit - though I believe that is explained as being compensated for by the levy on blank tapes....so put a levy on blank CDRs then and / or MP3 players?
 
Ethan Thane Athen said:
Quoted for truth. Especially the last bit - though I believe that is explained as being compensated for by the levy on blank tapes....so put a levy on blank CDRs then and / or MP3 players?
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In Belgium and some other european countries, there's already a levy on blank media like DVD-R's and CD-R's. Recently in Belgium harddrives, USB sticks and MP3 players have gotten their own levy (to much protest), and now there's talk of a levy on internet connections as well. All for piracy. This means you're paying IP 3 times before you've even pirated anything - all that achieves is that people are ending up feeling justified when they download something.
 
Fishstick said:
In Belgium and some other european countries, there's already a levy on blank media like DVD-R's and CD-R's. Recently in Belgium harddrives, USB sticks and MP3 players have gotten their own levy (to much protest), and now there's talk of a levy on internet connections as well. All for piracy. This means you're paying IP 3 times before you've even pirated anything - all that achieves is that people are ending up feeling justified when they download something.
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Indeed - that's certainly the risk. And fundamentally it seems unfair for the rest of us as it assumes copyright misuse of such media. However, in practical terms no-one seemed to mind much when it was applied to blank tapes and the level of levy was pretty small as I recall - less than the difference between different manufacturers products.

Thanks for the extra info though.
 
Ethan Thane Athen said:
Quoted for truth. Especially the last bit - though I believe that is explained as being compensated for by the levy on blank tapes....so put a levy on blank CDRs then and / or MP3 players?
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Wow, I hadn't known about the levy on blank tapes. Doing a bit of research, I can see that we had a blank tape levy over here for four years before the High Court struck it down in 1993 as an unfair tax law.
 
There's also the people who download stuff illegally, but end up buying the record or DVD if they really like it. I'll admit it probably isn't a lot of people, though. :)
 
A lot of the problem with piracy figures is that it's impossible to determine how much money is lost. I do contract work coding ipod games for people locally, and 'unlocked' copies usually show up in 2-3 days, and in the first few weeks usually about 85-90% of the leaderboard scores submitted are submitted from pirated copies. This number slowly goes down over time.
Counting those as "lost sales" would be completely disingenuous because it ignores how most pirates/torrenters work. For example, a lot of 'pirates' just browse the ipod cracking sites and download the week's latest torrent of 100 or so new iphone games. They play them for a little while, then download the next week's torrent. This greatly inflates % pirated as the vast majority of the 85+% playing the pirated game would have never bought or even heard of the game except for the fact that it was in some torrent they downloaded.
Also as a result, the worse the game does, the higher the piracy %, since the pirate downloads are mostly static. For simplicity say 100 people log on each week to download the new game torrent. If the game does 'well' and 200 people buy it, that's 33% "piracy rate." Whereas when the game does poorly and only sells 3 or 4 copies, it has an over 95% piracy rate, which will scare the bejeesus out of an uninformed developer. The pirates downloaded both games because they were free and in a torrent, but the bad app still would have only sold 3 or 4 copies.

Note I'm NOT excusing piracy, but calculating an amount of "losses" based on copies pirated is totally meaningless, because most pirates are downloading "just because." How many 13 year old's download Maya, 3DS Max, C4D, etc.? Plenty. How many are lost sales? ≈0.
 
Mirrorglass said:
There's also the people who download stuff illegally, but end up buying the record or DVD if they really like it. I'll admit it probably isn't a lot of people, though. :)
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Oh, Me Me!!

I torrented Hearts Jupiters Darling a few weeks ago, and I bought the cd this morning.
 
Ethan Thane Athen said:
However, in practical terms no-one seemed to mind much when it was applied to blank tapes and the level of levy was pretty small as I recall - less than the difference between different manufacturers products.

Thanks for the extra info though.
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As someone who used to do a lot of tape trading before cd recorders existed I can tell you we were well aware of and angered by the tape tax.
 
Brian-M said:
I find it kind of strange how the music industry complains about people illegally downloading MP3s. In the 80's people recorded songs from the radio to listen to on their Walkman, and nobody cared. In th 00's people download songs from the internet to listen to on their iPod. Same thing, different era. But all of a sudden it's a problem.
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You'll be one of those young people then, who don't remember the 'Home Taping is Killing Music' stickers on vinyl records in the early eighties or even the Betamax CaseWP.

The Film/Music industry has always had a huge hair up it's arse about people using their product without paying, and seems unable to learn, no matter how many times new technology turns out to be a way for them to make even more money when they embrace it.

ETA I see 'Home Taping is Killing Music' was a British campaign, so no wonder you hadn't heard of it.
 
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I know several people who ended up pirating games because they are thieves.

[/half troll-half serious]
 
roger said:
I know several people who ended up pirating games because they are thieves.

[/half troll-half serious]
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SOmehow I think those who pirate games because of DRM issues are a minority.
What it amounts to is people want entertainment but don't want to pay for it,and I am getting tired of the justifications for piracy that are so common. They are just trying to make their stealing sound moral.
 
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