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We Don't Want Everything For Free. We Just Want Everything

Culture

from the kids-today dept

Fri, Mar 23rd 2012 07:39pm -

Recently, I gave a Sita Sings the Blues talk to a roomful of 15-to-17-year-olds. Near the end I explained Free Culture and my stance against copyright, which led to some interesting discussion. Turns out most of them are manga fans, and familiar with publishers’ complaints about scanned and translated manga shared freely online. They all read them anyway (except one, who prefers to read entire manga in the bookstore). I asked them how they would choose to support artists they liked (once they had some disposable income) and they said:

  1. Donate buttons – with the qualification that they want to know as much as possible about where the donation is going. They said honesty and transparency are important.
  2. Kickstarter – They all knew about it (which was notable because none of them had heard of Flattr) and valued pitch videos that explained how the money would be used.
  3. Custom drawings
  4. Merch
  5. Physical copies
  6. Live Shared Experiences, including ballet, museum exhibits, and concerts. The event aspect was important; they wanted to be able to say, “Remember that one time when that awesome show was here…” They agreed seeing things in person is a more powerful experience than seeing things online, and worth spending more on. One said she would buy CD at a live show because “it reminds you of the show.”
  7. One said he would support artists by promoting their work to his friends.

Semi-related, I took an informal poll of how many would prefer to read a book on paper vs. an e-reader. The vast majority said paper, but what they really seemed to want was dual formats: paper copies to read comfortably and collect, and digital copies to search and reference. Makes sense to me. Only two of them had iPads, and none used them for “enhanced eBooks.”

My favorite quote of the afternoon, from a 15-year-old girl:

“We don’t want everything for free. We just want everything.

crossposted from ninapaley.com

 

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Comments on “We Don't Want Everything For Free. We Just Want Everything”

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266 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

>”We don?t want everything for free. We just want everything. When you don’t give it to us, we take it, because we are the entitled generation”.

Good job describing copyright extensions and retractions of the public domain.

>Nina, isn’t it time to move on and make a new movie? You have been milking this one for years.

Hollywood has been milking franchises for years. (Sequels really don’t count a lot as new movies.)

Suja (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:5 Re:

I’d say someone who was able to make a whole movie by theirself has alot of talent. ALOT.

It took me 3 days to make 1 crappy animation type thing, 3 friggin’ days. Mostly cause I redraw the same crap over and over. And that’s WITH a flash-like program to fill in most of my betweens.

Ask me for a whole movie and I would call you insane, yet this lady was able to do it with practically no help at all.

And you come here and tell me she has displayed no talent what-so-ever……………………

Had this been an isolated incident, I would’ve laughed, but unfortunately there’s no shortage of obtuse people in world.

Leigh Beadon (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Re:

Hmmm – well, I do get a tad tired of the term “talentless schmuck” because you’ve been using it for months and it’s still every bit as toothless and pathetic as it was the first time. I really much prefer it when you’re creative with your insults – at least then it’s slightly entertaining. Which is why I’m glad you’ve got this new “bidet” thing (how long did it take you to come up with that one?)

Of course, with your trademark lack of original ideas, you’re already starting to run that one into the ground too. I wonder… what will you think of next?

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:4 Re:

They aren’t going to waste creativity on free insults. They want you to pay for those. Then again, if they had any creativity (notice it’s the gatekeepers not the artists hurling those insults) they would figure out a creative solution to their PR problem instead of hurling insults in the first place.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:4 Re:

“what will you think of next?”

With you, there just isn’t much to think, except perhaps to pity you. 20 years from now, you will look back and realize how brainwashed and how much of a pathetic toady you were, and you will regret the time wasted not moving forward in life.

You are pushing someone else’s rock up a hill right now. You don’t get any reward in the end for it.

Gwiz (profile) says:

Re: Re:

“We don?t want everything for free. We just want everything. When you don’t give it to us, we take it, because we are the entitled generation”.

Maybe you should re-read this article. The kids were asked how they would support artists they like. That doesn’t sound like taking to me. It just sounds like they value a bunch of stuff more than a simple copy of something.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

I read it just fine – pay attention.

What they are saying is that they want everything. As many have pointed out here before (Hi PaulT) is that if the industry cannot deliver it to them on time, in the format they like at the price point they like, then they have absolutely no issue at all in pirating it. For many, the though of actually purchasing “content” is as weird as having three heads.

They are a generation who feels incredibly entitled, and are more than willing to take it for free if you don’t meet their often unreasonable demands.

Watchit (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

“What they are saying is that they want everything. As many have pointed out here before (Hi PaulT) is that if the industry cannot deliver it to them on time, in the format they like at the price point they like, then they have absolutely no issue at all in pirating it.”

yes… and? something wrong with that?

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:4 Re:

No it does not.

If you “move on”, you perhaps choose another entertainment option. Further, your desire for the product remains, and may be filled later when you are more included to buy it, or perhaps when it hits the bargain bins. In the case of a movie, you may not go to the theater, you may not buy the dvd, you may not rent it, but perhaps one night you will watch it on TV, and thus pay for it with your attention.

If you pirated it and watched it, you (a) didn’t do something else for anyone else, and (b) you removed your desire for future purchase, by satisfying your desire to see the movie.

Piracy isn’t without effects.

The Infamous Joe (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:5 Re:

If you take into account the possible negative effects of piracy, you should also take into account the possible positive effects.

Unless, of course, your mind is already made up, and no amount of contrary data can change it. In that unfortunate event, you should keep doing what you’re doing.

Side note: the concept of bargain bins is also outdated. They are designed to move old product to make room for new products. When dealing with digital goods, such a concept is ridiculous. Case in point: how many $0.79 songs can you find on itunes?

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:5 Re:

You are entirely missing the point.

In the case of a movie, you may not go to the theater, you may not buy the dvd, you may not rent it, but perhaps one night you will watch it on TV, and thus pay for it with your attention.

You’re saying all these things as if the consumer has a CHOICE, when the reality of the situation is that the studios/labels are WITHHOLDING the content. The point of the article is that if they CAN pay for it they WILL pay for it.

In the case of pirating a movie, it’s painfully obvious that the studios CAN put it on the ‘net because it’s already on the’net. What this article and many, many others are trying to illustrate is that people will pay for content if the middlemen choose to make it available.. Putting your hands over your ears and screaming, “Pirates!” doesn’t change that.

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re: Re: Re:5 Re:

Sure, I’ll find something else, made by someone else, with the money that I didn’t spend there. The thing is, if I were to pirate something, I’ll still have the money to purchase that other thing.

Have spare money –> will make a purchase.

The question is whether I purchase something they sold, or something someone else sold. See, I can always find some form of free entertainment, whether or not I’m pirating it. I can play forum games, word games, card games (even home-made cards if you’re being a stickler), tell jokes, play my own instrument (or sing, stickler) and so much more. So they have always and will always have to compete with free (all of that stuff is available because I need it elsewhere).

As for who else is getting my money, if I don’t spend it on entertainment, I’ll get a better car or eat at a fancier restaurant.

If they don’t give me what I want –> they don’t get a dime.

In other words, the act of pirating doesn’t diminish the amount of content I’m willing to pay for, because I was clearly looking for a specific option (remember, this is someone who is pirating because they couldn’t find a way to purchase what they wanted). This money isn’t going out of the economy (no net loss) and it isn’t going to the offending label/studio (local loss), but this is not the fault of piracy. It is their own fault for not offering the thing I was willing to buy.

tl;dr: I will not buy second rate crap, even if it is the only thing you are selling.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:4 Re:

yes, speeding when driving is not stealing either, but it is a crime.

you break a law you commit a crime, sure call it stealing, speeding, assault, murder, theft or making a copy of something that the LAW says you have no right to do.

Do you think if you were caught speeding, you could use the excuse “I was speeding because I am capable of driving faster than the law permits” or “I speed because I CAN !”.

plus you do not have to take something physical off someone to steal off them, that is theft.

That does not make the theft any less real, why cant you guys work that out.. you like to call it “infringement” and other nice crime friendly terms, call it what you like, it is against the law, therefore it is a CRIME.

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re: Re: Re:5 Re:

While the example is a fair amount more extreme than the current situation: Rosa Parks was commiting a crime when she say down in the front of a bus. She was also utilizing a method known as civil (non-violent, low-level) disobedience (crime) to protest the disparity between the way the law handled the rights of white citizens and colored citizens (I think those terms are correct for the period of time).

The law, you see, is very far from being immune to error. When the law has stepped into a discriminatory or corrupt area, it no longer has the moral authority usually associated with it. When the law is used to abridge the constitutional rights of the citizens, the law itself is illegal and can not be binding on those citizens.

Copyright law has breached the limits of the uses the constitution allows it to be enacted for, rendering it null and void as a moral and legal authority. Its enforcement is left as little more than abuse.

Further, the strong restrictions of the first amendment overrule the reservation of the right to create copyright law, and it is clear that copyright has stepped into territory where the two are in direct conflict (in fact, they may well be in direct contradiction of each other).

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

The thing is, the industry has it before the pirates do, with plenty of lead time to have all the formats made up and even quality checked. So really, why are they always coming in so far behind?

The truly strange part, is that if you aren’t willing to wait years to use the format the industry likes (reads, has compatible DRM for), at the higher price point of a physical object, then they have no issue at all in losing the sale. For many, the thought of customer service is as weird as having three hands.

But aside from that, what the obviously intended sentiment is, is that they want everything to be available.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

You do understand that the concept of capitalism(not crony capitalism) was based on exactly those assumptions right.

If you can’t deliver on time a quality product at a desirable price point and others can you are out of the game.

Those others will find a way to do it and you will be left without a market.

That is the whole point of why we exercise capitalism and think it is a great thing, because we reward the people who can do it, not the people who complain how hard it is.

Please don’t tell me how hard it is to get a 100 million dollars to make something when others are doing it with little to no money and some are even becoming millionaires.

Is not that people won’t pay, they won’t pay you and your kind, that is all.

AR (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

“They are a generation who feels incredibly entitled”

You want to talk about people who feel entitled? What about the spoiled people, like yourself, who feel the world owes them an existence just because they possibly created something that they think they should get rich off of? Wake up! If no one thinks it worth anything they arent going to pay you for the lifestyle you think you deserve. Good god, get over yourself already. NO ONE OWES YOU ANYTHING!!! If someone wants to support you for life be thankful, dont bitch about how no one else wants to. You say everyone wants something for nothing, well heres an idea;
LOOK IN THE MIRROR!

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Re:

“You want to talk about people who feel entitled? What about the spoiled people, like yourself, who feel the world owes them an existence just because they possibly created something that they think they should get rich off of? “

Wait a sec here. You are saying that someone who created something, that everyone wants, should for whatever reason have to be a monk and take a pledge of modesty and poverty, just to suffer as an artist?

I don’t know. Someone who created something everyone loves feeling entitled to make a living from it, or someone who likely has never even had a job expecting everything for nothing? It’s not hard to see which one is on the high ground here.

Oh, and when I look in the mirror, I see a reflection. I suspect when you look, you see someone else’s reflection, because you feel entitled to that too – and you are unable to even create your own reflection.

Torg (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Re:

“Wait a sec here. You are saying that someone who created something, that everyone wants, should for whatever reason have to be a monk and take a pledge of modesty and poverty, just to suffer as an artist?”

Did you even read the article, or did you just glance at the title? People are fine with paying under certain conditions, such as if the money is actually going to the artist.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:4 Re:

Torg, people are fine to pay under certain conditions, but those conditions are often so limited, and so restrained, that it is pretty much impossible to operate a business and meet those demands.

They want it now, they want it all, they want it cheap, they want it delivered in a million different formats, and they want it whenever and wherever without restriction. They want to be able to give it to their friends, share it on their facebook page, and use it as the background for their latest talentless rap song. They want it all… and they want it so cheap that it’s impossible to provide.

So yeah, if you can meet up with all of those requirements, they may give you a couple of pennies for the effort.

Piracy has instilled a “it’s gotta be cheap” mentality on everyone, nobody is willing to pay the price to get it made anymore.

ottermaton says:

Re: Re: Re:5 Re:

They want it now, they want it all, they want it cheap, they want it delivered in a million different formats, and they want it whenever and wherever without restriction. … and they want it so cheap that it’s impossible to provide.

Impossible? How does the Pirate Bay manage to do it then?

I know! Magic!

Torg (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:7 Re:

Does worldwide release and multiple available formats somehow become more difficult once money gets involved? I was under the impression that relying on people to do things for free meant it was done worse.

A few shows have been made available in torrent form from the outset, which should be close enough considering that the Pirate Bay is at best a distributor. None of them have made a lot of money, but that has less to do with the worldwide distribution and more to do with the completely optional payment system.

Torg (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:5 Re:

Most people just want one of five formats, tops. And it’s not that hard to do, as anyone who’s ever bought from Bandcamp would be able to tell you. Whenever and wherever without restriction actually requires less code than limiting the when and where, so I’m not sure how that is a great hurdle, and, again, Bandcamp does that. Sharing on Facebook is also something Bandcamp does, in the form of likes and the ability to listen to an entire track or album before buying it. I’m not sure if it qualifies as cheap for most people or not, but I’ve never had a problem with the pricing. Having music used in talentless rap never hurt anyone, since the rapper must first have that music and the listeners won’t use it as a substitute for the original music because it’s got all that talentless rap in it.

So yeah, basically what people are asking for is wider adoption of a system that already exists, not some great technological hurdle the likes of which would drive Sony bankrupt.

The success of Kickstarter shows that people are quite literally willing to pay the price to get things made. I’m not sure where you got the idea that they aren’t from.

AR (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Re:

“You are saying that someone who created something, that everyone wants, should for whatever reason have to be a monk and take a pledge of modesty and poverty, just to suffer as an artist?”

No, what I am saying is that just because you create something that YOU love doesnt mean that EVERYONE loves it, let alone enough to give you their hard earned money for it. Also just because You think your entitled to a certain amount of money or are entitled to a certain lifestyle doesnt mean others think the same way.

There are many things in life that most people are willing to pay for (as the article indicates), there are many things that people will “take” (or accept) if it were given to them, and there are many things in life that you couldnt pay most people to take. Your job as a creator (artist) is to create something that people WANT to pay you for. Figuring out how much money people are WILLING to pay is another part of YOUR job.

If your idea of self-worth is to high then guess what, people wont pay you. No matter how much crying, whining, and bitching about it you do. In fact this type of behavior tends to make things worse for you, by people thinking your “value” is even less than what it could be. Throwing yourself on the floor, like a 2 year old, kicking and screaming “pay me more…pay me more” doesnt make people want to pay you, it makes them want to slap the crap out of you and tell you to shut up and go away!!! Not everybody gets to be a diva, Which, by the way, is supposed to be an insult, not the twisted definition that many elitist/entitlement minded “artists” with delusions of self-worth, have mutated it to be.

If an “artitst” is “suffering”, then its because of their own failures to see the realities of life and their own abilities, not the fault of “pirates” who dont buy into the “artists” delusions of self-worth.

like I said “look in the mirror” if you want to find the person with the biggest sense of entitlement. Just because you create something and think it has value, doesnt mean that it actually does. It also doesnt mean that you get to walk the red carpet with the people who do.

Thats how life works, get over it.

silverscarcat says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

“They are a generation who feels incredibly entitled, and are more than willing to take it for free if you don’t meet their often unreasonable demands.”

As opposed to the MPAA and RIAA’s unreasonable demands, which they have gotten for almost 200 years by now?

Boo-freaking-hoo.

I, for one, don’t care about the MPAA and RIAA’s hurt feelings.

Karl (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:6 Re:

Oh, how we would loved only to have wolves on our heels! They jumped right on our backs, and we had to carry them all the way to school!

Oh, we used to dream of having wolves on our backs! Back in our day, we had to carry dinosaurs on our backs, both ways uphill, barefoot, and our “school” was a damp cave with paintings on the walls.

And you try and tell the young people of today that, and they won’t believe you.

Josef Anvil (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

“They are a generation who feels incredibly entitled, and are more than willing to take it for free if you don’t meet their often unreasonable demands.”

What is wrong with that? Meet the demands of the consumer so they pay or they will take it without paying. That is pretty much how economics works with infinite resources. Buy a clue, the customer is still willing to PAY if you meet their demands. So it would actually be intelligent to meet their demands rather than whining about the customer getting the content for free.

This generation is no different than previous generations, they just have MUCH BETTER tools. We recorded music from the radio onto cassettes and we did it with CDs, but we were limited by radio play. Now kids can file share or just go to YouTube or an internet radio station or Spotify and record what they want when they want.

Once more for those in the cheap seats that can’t hear….

The behaviors are NOT NEW, the technology has evolved and ENABLES all the same behaviors on a vastly larger scale. Deal with it.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Re:

Apparently you are sitting past the cheap seats, because you aren’t hearing it:

It doesn’t matter how the technology has changed, because when it’s no longer economically feasible to produce high end content, you will lose exactly what it is that you seek on youtube, on spotify, and the like.

Your actions are self defeating, the literal eating of the golden goose. Today’s feast is tomorrows empty roost.

Torg (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Re:

I find it hard to believe that the high-end content won’t just migrate to somewhere better adapted to the digital age, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here. High-end content is dead, the companies that produced it nothing but a broken pile of bankruptcy paperwork and a page on Wikipedia doomed to never be updated again. No multi-million-dollar piece of media will ever be produced again, as people slowly realize that Double Fine and Wasteland 2 really were just flukes that will never be repeated (this is part sarcasm and part contribution to the hypothetical, in case you decide to interpret it as an admission of defeat). You know what happens then? All the mid-end stuff that’s floating around rises to the top. Movies and series are made with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they’re just as cool as they always were (no, seriously, check out L5; that show was made with $15k and has special effects and acting comparable to some of the late 90’s better offerings). No actor will ever be paid millions of dollars per role again, but they will earn enough to live comfortably. Video games, are, of course, safe from all this, as the existence of Steam mostly protects them from the ravages of the Internet. People are making awesome music for no good reason all the time, and with the fall of the “high-end” stuff everyone else realizes that there wasn’t really a high end there to begin with. Today’s feast is tomorrow’s buffet. It’s not that terrible.

Karl (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Re:

It doesn’t matter how the technology has changed, because when it’s no longer economically feasible to produce high end content

The only way it’s “no longer economically feasible” is if your only business model is selling copies of the content.

That’s not the case now – and it wasn’t true before the internet existed. For example, most movies were made before Hollywood even could sell copies of movies. DVD, Blu-Ray, or VHS are all very, very late sources of income for movie studios. Yet most the best movies in history were made without them.

You’re also ignoring the fact that the technology also allows content production itself to be immensely less expensive, and that digital distribution is far cheaper than physical distribution. The technology that causes consumer demand to be more discriminating, is the same technology that allows you to meet that demand.

That’s why many artists and studios are using that technology in order to make money. Bandcamp, YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, etc.

And, of course, file sharing doesn’t affect the plethora of other ways that artists and studios have always made money: live/theater performances, advertising, B2B licensing, merchandising (e.g. Star Wars toys), and so on. Historically, these were always bigger sources of income than selling copies.

you will lose exactly what it is that you seek on youtube, on spotify, and the like.

As if “high end content” is the only form of content that people want. That’s utterly ridiculous. For example, the music I have been listening to for the past twenty years is mostly produced by musicians who have day jobs.

And most of the popular content on YouTube is produced by people who aren’t “high end content” producers. In fact, they’re so popular, that there are television shows devoted to YouTube videos. In other words, “high end content” is depending on non-professional artists for their content.

If the current sources of “high end content” disappeared (and there’s absolutely no indication that this is happening), it’s not like people will stop listening to music, stop watching movies, or stop reading books. They’ll just shift to different content – whether it be “amateur” content, or content produced by businesses that are smart enough to use the many, many ways to make money that technology allows.

Your actions are self defeating, the literal eating of the golden goose.

Have you actually read the Aesop fable on which that phrase is based? The goose is valuable because it lays golden eggs for free. That doesn’t sound much like “high-end content” industries to me.

In fact, if anyone is killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, it’s those “high-end content” industries. You hear things like “stepping over analog dollars to pick up digital dimes” all the time from these industries. This conveniently ignores the fact that nobody is paying “analog dollars” anymore, “digital dimes” or no. So, they try to outlaw “digital dimes,” driving away their “analog dime” customers – the golden geese – in the process.

In other words, they’re trying to get rich right now, and killing off any chance of earning income in the long run. They’re greedily cutting open the goose to get to all the eggs inside, and scratching their heads when they come up empty.

Colin (user link) says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

if the industry cannot deliver it to them on time, in the format they like at the price point they like, then they have absolutely no issue at all in pirating it. For many, the though of actually purchasing “content” is as weird as having three heads.

For someone who read the article, you seemed to have missed the part where they do purchase lots of things.

Also, you say if the industry “cannot” deliver these things, when more often it just seems to be the case of “will not”.

The IT Skeptic (user link) says:

Re: Re: Re:

“how they would support artists they like.” Oh crud. Everyone says fine words but people don’t pay. Only a few megastar content producers make a living off internet content. Content producers will give up except for a passionate few who are willing to give it away.

In a gold rush the ones who make a living sell shovels and tents. Google, twitter, wordpress, paypal… the creative ones starve, as always

Karl (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

Only a few megastar content producers make a living off internet content.

Very, very false. YouTube, alone, has created a sizable middle class of video artists that simply could not have existed under the traditional studio model.

Making a living off “internet content” is much more likely, to the average artist, than making money off of “traditional” content. Most won’t, but they wouldn’t have made any money before the internet, either.

Quantum Flux says:

Re: Re: Re:

With all due respect, I think you should take a closer look.

3,4,5 and 6 are all claims that they would support *existing* work (for which they expect not to pay), by asking for *more* product.

This is the equivalent of saying “Im going to take these pants for free, but dont worry, Im willing to buy the shirt”

This would be *laughable* with tangible goods. The flagrant disrespect for those who produce *intangible* goods, by people who claim to worship said creators, is mind boggling.

The 7th response sums it up best… “I would support them by telling my friends to support them” Yeah great, thanks for that.

The joke will be on us. Creative people are a minority. If devoting time to a creative pursuit means starving to death nobly, then guess what? They wont do it. They will give you the big “F you” and just choose to work on something that will help pay their bills and, perhaps in their spare time, work on some creative outlet for their own personal consumption.

It is just *amazing* to me how many people truly do feel *hugely* entitled to the creative output of the very few who can produce even as they themselves do nearly nothing.

I’d feel better if even *one* of those “kids” had said “I’d offer to provide something to the artist for free that *I* am able to do – like fix their car or paint their house”

The thought never even crossed their minds because they can’t even begin to envision *doing* anything – just taking and consuming.

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

If they need some software, feel free to hit up the open source community (Red Hat even makes good money on the support side). If they want a good comic, I know a number of awesome web comics (donation and book/merch driven, free archives).

If they need a car wash, that is a tangible service and we can’t reproduce it with a couple clicks of a mouse.

If they need to look up anything, they can use Google (ad spots). If they want to stay up on certain types of news, blogs like this one are a pretty good place to look (made for the love of what they do or floated on donations/ad spots).

If they want a house, they need to pay.

If they want a good book, the local library has tons, and those have been around for ages (and have always had good relations with authors pre e-book).

Do you start to see the pattern? If it can be easily reproduced, you can’t make money on it directly, but it can add value to other things or even float you on donations given with the understanding that you need the money to be able to provide future iterations of it.

Titania Bonham-Smythe (profile) says:

Re: Re:

This is someone whose world view only accommodates young people buying products promoted by the RIAA and MPAA – industry representatives who have so utterly destroyed the reputation and brands of the industries they serve that they have alienated their core audience. It doesn’t make sense to pay money to these industries because they use their profits to destroy the civil liberties and freedom of speech of all members of society in the furtherance of the business interests of a relatively tiny minority. The change that is on the horizon is that people have realised that they can and should sack any politicians who fail to represent their interests.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

> “We don?t want everything for free. We just want everything. When you don’t give it to us, we take it, because we are the entitled generation”.

Which generation? I have a daughter older than that girl, but I feel precisely the same as she does – I taught my kids how to share data online…

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

Hmm, the quote makes that unclear:

>> “We don?t want everything for free. We just want everything.”
>…When you don’t give it to us, we take it, because we are the entitled generation”.

Which generation? I have a daughter older than that girl, but I feel precisely the same as she does – I taught my kids how to share data online…

Karl (profile) says:

Re: Re:

When you don’t give it to us, we take it

Fascinating that none of the students actually said this.

we are the entitled generation

Only accurate if you’re talking about publishers. Remember, copyright’s purpose is to serve the public good – and if the public is composed of pirates, then your Constitutionally-mandated obligation is to serve the pirates.

Try to spin it any way you like, you’re still wrong. And also a douchebag.

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

Nope, they are saying, “when you don’t offer it to us, we take it.” When a reasonable offer is put forward, the number that takes is much smaller and the number that reaches for the wallet is infinitely larger! After all, any percent is infinitely better than 0%, and if there is no offer, you get 0%, even if you can stop them from just taking it.

TtfnJohn (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

I didn’t read that for a moment in how these kids responded. They did, in fact, list a number of ways they could and would support the artists they liked. From attending concerts to donate buttons and more. They did seem to show a preference for removing the middle man from the game which isn’t surprising it’s understood that the artists actually make very little from their record companies, movie studios and book publishers they assign their copyrights to. Except for a very few.

And even then the artist’s income is greater from concerts, book tours, readings and so on that it often is from sales or records, books etc.

I also read from them that if what they want isn’t offered they’ll find a way to get it. Much like we did recording LPs, mixing dance tapes, photocopying short pieces like essays and short stories and passing them around. The how is different and far easier but the principle is the same.

Though you don’t want to believe it the reality was that the LP or book was most often purchased by the receiver if they ( or I) liked it when I could find it for sale.

If publishers, RIAA and MPAA members can’t get it through their collective thick skulls that rolling or staggered releases through different national territories is old school marketing as the market is now global then they need to review what they’re doing.

If, as the story points out that Manga publishers in Japan delay too long in translating their work into English then someone will do it for them. The market is global now. Not regional and often not rigidly divided into linguistic groups.

And while it makes sense to roll out movies in major, influential areas such as New York, LA and Chicago in the States or Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto in Canada to see how they’ll do at the box office, the word of mouth and so on before committing to smaller areas once we’re into releases of DVDs and so on it makes no sense at all. The market is global now.

The kids never said they wouldn’t buy. But once something is released in a way where they can’t purchase because of region, usually the biggest impediment, they’ll find a way to get it. They understand that the market is global now.

Will they buy later? I haven’t a clue. I suspect a significant number would but they may get fed up with the same pattern repeating over and over and over again without any reason in the retail sector they may not eventually.

One more point. IP maximalists also seem to be MSP maximalists. That is to say that the market hasn’t got a choice but to pay price the maker puts on a good. If the price is too high the market (consumer) protests by not buying the product until it’s sold a a price the market finds acceptable.

Music piracy began as a protest over RIAA member’s refusals to release and sell singles so people ripped their CDs and did it on their own. Not the legal reaction from a copyright perspective but the rational one given that the format the market wanted wasn’t otherwise available. And yes, the consumer (market) DOES get to set things like acceptable format and price.

The “content” industry can howl and complain all it wants. While most of us do want to support the artist it’s apparent the *AA’s don’t because they refuse to sell in formats and pricing that the market will find acceptable.

There’s not a thing immoral, illegal, an over abundance of entitlement or freetardy about that. That’s was markets exist for.

Clear???????

Quantum Flux says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Re:

Not clear at all. You are laser focused on the RIAA and MPAA. I get it. You hate the massive organizations. I hear you. I agree actually.

But this is about Manga artists.

Lets take some loan Manga artist (and keep in mind, these kids claim to *worship* these guys… just IMAGINE their attitude for some other form of content)…

What the kids are saying is… “I will pay SOME money if the artist produces even MORE for me” CUSTOM ART (must be kidding), LIVE productions… Sure. So writing books isnt enough now. You have to be a dancing monkey too and MAYBE you get paid.

I fully “get” slamming the RIAA and MPAA. I do NOT get the specious argument of defending this attitude because it is convenient for your argument.

The 7th kid said “well Id tell other people to support the artist”. That one is the best.

NONE of these kids even thought to say “Id offer the paint their house for free”. These kids cant imagine *doing* anything for *anyone* – just consuming.

You must not work in a field where your very ability to eat is directly tied to someone consuming an intangible product.

What will happen, if this attitude were to become universal, is that creative jobs will simply no longer be viable.

Watchit (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Re:

Well, they are kids, and none of them want to pay for an overpriced manga in a bookstore where their money goes to who knows where, they want to support the author. It’s up to the author to decide how to monetize his work, the kids were just giving suggestions. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, find a new one that does. Same as ANY business not just entertainment.

The problem is that manga sold in the US is so far behind and disconnected with the Japanese market, and the fans want to be caught up, they want manga. If the publishers have the product and have the market, but don’t seize it, then it’s the publishers fault, not the author, not the fans.

My argument in this comment:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120322/15404918215/we-dont-want-everything-free-we-just-want-everything.shtml#c346

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:4 Re:

Yet, for all of that, the US market really isn’t big enough for them to bother. See the problem? They only stuff they will bring here is stuff they are sure will sell, and that is judged by how other stuff performs, as well as how it performs in it’s original market.

Nobody wants to pay for the risks involved in being totally current.

Torg (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:5 Re:

Then current media will be supplied by those who aren’t taking any risk. I don’t see how this is a problem for anyone except the small, elite cadre of American translators who take several months to translate a comic. Japan isn’t going to stop making stuff just because it isn’t selling in America, and fans aren’t going to stop getting stuff just because it isn’t sold in America.

Jay (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Re:


Lets take some loan Manga artist (and keep in mind, these kids claim to *worship* these guys… just IMAGINE their attitude for some other form of content)…

The manga artists? Like Eichiro Oda who makes the incredibly detailed One Piece manga that stands atop the manga field for very complex characters taken from history?

Characters such as Roronoa Zoro based on the actual Zoro figure? How about Blackbeard whose real name is Edward Teach, two characters that make up the One Piece world and give it incredible diversity?

Oh, it seems you need more manga artists that are making money… Well, they aren’t. But the manga artists are making comics despite how much it’s pirated.

Don’t believe me? Link

Arguably the licensors are failing because they have no digital plans. Bandai recently went bankrupt because they decided kids such as the one interviewed were too dumb to understand the most recent offerings they had. Guess what? The pirates, the ones that enjoy a series and put it up for free, are the ones that are making the free sites that people can keep up to date with the manga artists. Also, the artists are figuring out how to use iTunes and put up their offerings for others to share or pay for. If you haven’t heard of Gen Manga or Comics Loud, it’s time to look at other publishers and see how they’ve adapted to digital.

I do NOT get the specious argument of defending this attitude because it is convenient for your argument.

No one’s defending piracy, they’re showing that the failing is with the middlemen that believe that their gatekeeper mentality will suffice in a digital era.

You must not work in a field where your very ability to eat is directly tied to someone consuming an intangible product.

Why do people think that just because you aren’t in one field it suddenly disqualifies you from showing the inaccuracies of their argument? If you have to rely on an appeal to morality, you’re doing it wrong.

What will happen, if this attitude were to become universal, is that creative jobs will simply no longer be viable.

Right. And more artists will make creative works and sell them where they want without a nasty editor criticizing them. Just because the industry is changing doesn’t mean the creative jobs are going away. They’re just going elsewhere (ie people are making art and selling it in other areas).

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

Do you think we will stand idly by while they do so?

We have the ability to kick out the elements in our government that won’t listen to us. When they do listen, we have the ability to demand certain actions. The corporations can’t control the vote if we are willing to ignore the campaign trail in the instances where a politician has failed to be a representative of the people.

Do this, for every instance of such a politician, from now until the end of your life, and they will be unable to ruin it. Spread the word.

Zos (profile) says:

look, the plain fact is that if you want all content, available all the time, in high quality, in any format (or preferably in a universal format that everything can work with) you have to pirate. And anything less is unacceptable, when it’s so easy to do.

Every piece of media on earth is available for free, one search and a couple clicks away.

I don’t, and probably will never, have enough money that i can piss it away acquiring this stuff the way they want me to buy it. but i pay for netflix. and i pay for internet. i’d even pay more for good internet. Give me a nice fat data pipe like google wants to lay, and i’ll pay money.

But content? yeah right. i’ve got kids, and bills, and a mortgage. They will never get that genie back in the bottle, sharing will never be hard again. (barring the fall of digital civilization, or a medium sized EMP pulse).

Leaving all that aside, i’d rather pay 8 bucks a month to russian gangsters for a nice proxy, than a hundred to cable for programming, of which 99% is irrelevant to my interests.

Dancing on the grave of the middlemen in a decade or two is just an added bonus. Declaring war on fans was one thing, suing grandma, or an occasional 8 year old or a printer…those sucked. Screwing with the web, rewriting laws worldwide to turn back the clock and piss all over civil liberties in a quest to make consumers bend over and take it again….that’s a war to the knife. They should have expected us.

The Infamous Joe (profile) says:

Re: Re:

I could easily set up something where I download a song/album/entire-collection and have it upload automatically to, say, Google Music so I can listen to it anywhere. Hell, I can even kick off the download remotely. Free, yay!!

That being said, I pay $10/mo for a music streaming service, not for the content (I can get that for free), but for the service (in the form of music discovery, usually) and the convenience.

I don’t want everything for free. I just want everything.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

But you do want it for free. How much is the streaming service worth to you if the music isn’t there? What if they were just streaming Marcus Carab rap songs all day? Where is the value?

See, you don’t want streaming – you want the music. The convenience of the streaming is nothing without the underlying product.

The “price” you assign to the content is incorrect, because without it, none of the services would have value.

Quantum Flux says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Re:

Can you please list all of the great things that *you* provide the world for free?

Im no fan of the status quo at all, but these “debates” always come down to a bunch of grand political rants that amount to “I take stuff because I can” being made by people who almost certainly do *not* work for free themselves.

So art should be free, music should be free… Every thought and creative work should be free. But tangible goods *are not* and *will not* be free. That means that working on the production of *intangible goods* is a *very bad move* for the creators.

Everyone focuses on two things – what THEY “want” and “get”, and who the “bad guy” is.

I really want my car repaired free too… oddly enough it doesnt happen.

Watchit (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Re:

To the first question, nothing yet I’m a student, though sometimes I provide free labor as a favor.

To the rest of your argument, I’m sorry your so bum hurt that art and music has no real scarcity since it can be copied and reused infinity, but that’s the way the world works. If you could create a copy of a tangible object at no real cost of say a car than guess what everyone would be “pirating”. Cars.

Instead of complaining about the difference in the auto market and the entertainment industry maybe you should be grateful of all the new ways that have appeared to monetize on said entertainment?

Watchit (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:3 Re:

Oh wait! I see the analogy you were trying to make now. Comparing auto-repair to content creation. The problem here is that auto-repair men do not repair one car and then copy that repair and sell it to other people. No he has to repair the car. every. single. time.

But woe to the poor poor musician who has to “create” content (his job) in order to make money! Why can’t his job be like the auto-repair man who only has to repair one car and live the rest of his life off that one act!?

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

Not entirely. The convenience here comes through the suggestion service. The actual streaming of the music is provided because we can find free streaming music elsewhere (that is produced for the love of music, not to make a buck), so they need it to be competitive.

However, while the value of the service as a whole would certainly decrease in a world with no free music, the value of the targeted advertisement of songs would still remain somewhat greater than nothing.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

So please show everybody how a world without music would look like, because I can’t see any scenario in which people would stop the production of music.

Even Marcus here produce his music, others just may do the same and by doing so without constraints people would be creating their own local identities musically and passing it down for future generations until some bastard tries to steal it and claim ownership on it.

Torg (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

“But you do want it for free. How much is the streaming service worth to you if the music isn’t there? What if they were just streaming Marcus Carab rap songs all day? Where is the value?”

I’m curious how pointing out that the music streaming service he pays for gets value from the music it offers is supposed to show that he wants music for free.

The Infamous Joe (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

After all this time you can’t figure out the difference between value and price. So sad.

But you do want it for free. How much is the streaming service worth to you if the music isn’t there? What if they were just streaming Marcus Carab rap songs all day? Where is the value?

You start out somewhat sensible (assuming, of course, that a variation of this question hadn’t been explained to you a hundred times already) and quickly degrade into senselessness. I do want music for free. I never claimed otherwise. Although I value music, because otherwise I wouldn’t listen to it, it has a price point somewhere around a fraction of a penny, to me. In fact, I detailed how, if I so desired, I could get all the music I wanted, relatively conveniently for the overhead cost of a smart phone, a computer, Internet access for both, and electricity! The problem is that there is too much music to sift through. (Thanks, copyright! /s) I have a hard time discovering new music that I like. This is a service that has value to me, AND a price point of around $10/mo. Without music to go along with it, it wouldn’t be nearly as convenient, and it’s true that it would probably cause me to stop using it, or at least my price point would go down for it, but at no time would my price point for copies of music go up.

See, you don’t want streaming – you want the music.

I do want the streaming, and I’ll tell you why: It was beaten (Figuratively) into my head that I don’t own music. So, why the hell would I pay $1.29 for something I don’t own? I’d much rather pay a flat monthly fee, since either way I end up owning nothing. Trust me, I listen to way more than 8 new songs a month. (My cell data usage is usually around 10 – 12 GB, mostly music.)

The “price” you assign to the content is incorrect, because without it, none of the services would have value.

The price I assign music is correct, because I get to set my price point, not you. If our price points differ, then I will be forced to go elsewhere to get my music. I know, I know: you don’t think there should be competition to go to. I know, that in theory, I should be forced to pay what you demand or go without culture. However, in reality, there is direct competition, with a far better grasp of economics. It’s high time you face reality, it will make this all very simple.

I don’t want everything for free, I just want everything.

Watchit (profile) says:

My reasons for reading Scanlations

The reason I read fan-translated scanlations of manga online, rather than buy them in the store.

1. The “officially” published manga is anywhere from months to years behind Japan, sometimes the entire series runs through before it is brought to the states. That is, the manga already exist, the publishers just decide to arbitrarily space out their release dates.

2. Some mangas are NEVER released in the US and so the only way to get to them is through fan translated scanlations.

3. Why should I pay publishers who take so long to translate manga when there are fans who will translate it for free?

Watchit (profile) says:

Re: Re: My reasons for reading Scanlations

hmmm.. this is why I’m so glad for all the new opportunities the Internet offers to route around publishers 😛

The western comic industry was similarly shafted by our publishers, but that happened a while back, ironically by the devices of Marvel and DC themselves.

If you don’t know that story, it’s actually pretty interesting. A good description of it here:
http://vividstuff.blogspot.com/2008/12/article-3-score-one-for-idiocy-aka.html

TtfnJohn (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: My reasons for reading Scanlations

Interesting story, that. I’d wondered why comic stores went from delightful places where I could find a wide variety of different stories, comix and things that didn’t involve men with too many muscles even for steroids to explain and women who look like their surgeon had cornered the market on silicon. All in tights. All oddly sexless. Well genderless given how tight the tights are and how little actually shows in certain regions.

Of course, according to the IP maximalists monopoly is good because it encourages people to create.

Your link illustrates the exact opposite that monopolies suppress creation. At least quality creation. Just as DC and Marvel continue to re-create their men and women in tights so the RIAA and MPAA continue to recycle the same material over and over and over again under, if we’re lucky, a slightly different name. If we’re not lucky then it’s Batman 33!

So much for an incentive to create.

Watchit (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:2 My reasons for reading Scanlations

which is where the Internet comes in! There are a lot of artist using the internet to promote their comics now, mostly in the form of webcomics. While their are a lot of mediocre webcomics, if you look it’s easy to find some truly amazing comics in many different genres (none of them Marvel style super heroes *gasp*!). There are even a few who have started to support themselves off their comics as well.

Chargone (profile) says:

Re: My reasons for reading Scanlations

I kind of agree with your points…

but i still buy the ones i actually like that ARE available anyway.

that said, given that reading online scans on the agrigator sites is usually how i find out about a given manga in the first place (trying to figure out a million crosslinked blogs that each usually add very little data and badly designed publishers websites is NOT worth the time and effort to find new stuff that way)

i would go look on shelves in the shops, i suppose, save that the comic shop near here doesn’t actually Stock much in the way of manga (actually, they dedicate more shelf space to Flames of War, War Hammer 40k, and board games than they do comics of ANY sort, and the word ‘Comics’ is right their in their name, the other stuff isn’t.) though, if you ask, they will get it. (their thing is ‘if it’s published, comes out in three months or less (counting negative numbers there) and is available from a distributer other than the guy we used to get Phantom comics from (because that distributer is an ARSE who refused to sell to them due to them having to opperate out of a garage post Christchurch earthquake for a while. which made no sense.), we can get it for you.)

(actually, the way these things work and with print runs and such, if the US publishers actually kept up with the japanese publishers on new series they’d often be Out of Print before i even heard of them. that said, i know that’s not the usual situation people find themselves in. the english OMG! keeps up with the takubon(sp?) releases in japan these days, and it’s on about it’s third print run in english. (they started over from the begining when they shifted to unflopped as they caught up, As Well as continuing to publish the new ones. the new ones have white spines, the republished old ones have coloured spines. i’m not sure what will happen when the re-releases get to the point where they started printing them that way, though. might stop (because the whole thing was available in one format) or might keep going (easier entry point for new fans of an apparantly insanely popular series))

Brackets! (not really, but i can actually spell that one.)

Beech (profile) says:

“We don?t want everything for free. We just want everything. When you don’t give it to us, we take it, because we are the entitled generation”.

And guess what? Better get used to it. These kids grew up learning the important lesson that they can get any content they want at any price they want as instantly as they want. You’re not going to be able to trick a whole generation back into buying shiny plastic discs. Hell, my kid isnt even 2 and imagine the lesson he’s learning. We have a bunch of his shows on DVR. He can watch any show he wants any time he wants, and he knows it. When i was his age and i wanted to watch something i needed to wait until the right time of day. If it was during school or after bed i was screwed. My son can watch sesame street any time of the day or night, all he has to do is ask. So what’s he going to do when he grows up? All of a sudden its going to be acceptable to wait for a release window or time slot? Doubtful.

the internet is here, piracy is here, any content i want anytime i want for any price i want is here. it’s not going away. find a way to compete with free or its game over.

Anonymous Coward says:

Perception problem

The content industry’s fatal flaw is in thinking that they provide a product rather than a service. With regards to services MANY factors other than price affect the value of each competing service which in turn affects sales. With products this can also be true but but only when the products are similar instead of being identical and to a lesser degree. File sharing sites are providing a service and are fully aware of this fact. To compete the content industry has to figure out how to differentiate their service such that it is more valuable to the consumer than than the competition. If they do so they then can overcome the price differential. What advantages do they have that can be used to accomplish this? There are many.

1. First to market
2. Quality
3. Bundled access to other new and archived content from a central source
4. Reliability
5. Exclusivity in the fact that it is officially authorized from the original source.

And these are just the few I can think of off of the top of my head. This is basic Marketing 101 stuff.

Maybe I just fell asleep or something but I don’t remember ever hearing about the important principle of “Whining about the competition” in any of my marketing classes.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Perception problem

Your points fail for very simple reaons:

The pirates can mimic almost everything on the list except #4 and #5, and when people are getting it all for nothing, they don’t give a crap on #4, they will download it a second time from another archive. Number 5 is worse, you can see it here with enough people on the “f**k the **aa’s!” and “f**k Sony!” bandwagon that getting it from the original source is considered very uncool.

Basic marketing 101 goes out the window when your product is easily stolen and distributed for free, without consideration to the costs it takes to make it.

The Infamous Joe (profile) says:

Re: Re: Perception problem

Pirates cannot mimic first to market, unless they are creating the media. It has to be leaked or on the market for pirates to get it, so someone has to have it before the pirates, right?

Number 5 is worse, you can see it here with enough people on the “f**k the **aa’s!” and “f**k Sony!” bandwagon that getting it from the original source is considered very uncool.

This is not the fault of anyone but “the **aa’s” and Sony. Goodwill is a very scarce good that both groups pissed away to “stop piracy”. They deserve what they get.

Basic marketing 101 goes out the window when your product is easily stolen and distributed for free, without consideration to the costs it takes to make it.

I think there are several companies selling bottled water that would disagree. I do agree with you totally about taking into account the costs of making a product. So, how much does it cost to make a digital copy of a movie? I’ll gladly pay that price.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re: Perception problem

Open source business have to freely allow others to copy, distribute, modify and sell their own products and somehow they still manage to make not only a living but a profit, imagine that.

Restaurants can’t stop others from copying them and somehow we McDonalds provides around 2 million jobs worldwide.

The people in fashion can’t stop others from copying them and you get silly millionaires full of vanity and odd quirks.

Carpenters, truck drivers, waiters, secretaries, clerks, technicians can’t stop others from stealing their ideas but somehow they still function and find jobs.

Modplan (profile) says:

Re: Re: Perception problem

Which is exactly why Jason Rohrer has been spectacularly unsuccessful as a developer of public domain games. He has never made any money from it in all these years, and shakes his fist at anybody with an eye patch, which is a lot of people thanks to his propensity to stab forks in peoples eyes from all the rage at the freetards he sees on the streets.

Don’t forget to mention Nina Paley, the writer of the article you’re commenting on, she’s never sold a thing either and hates file sharing with a passion.

And let’s not even mention Johnathan Coulton. Isn’t he homeless or something?

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Perception problem

1. They ALWAYS have the ability to be first to market because they have it before it is released. That may be of little and diminishing advantage but it is still their advantage non the less.

2. Quality control still their advantage because on file sharing networks the quality can vary wildly.

3. They have an archive of content that is not currently wildly popular (and thus does not appear on file sharing sites) but would provide added value to a service where they were also available to those people seeking them.

4. The content providers wouldn’t have the PR problem you describe in the first place if they had taken this perspective from the outset.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re: Perception problem

Furthermore, you say “we can’t compete with free because people won’t pay for something they can get for free.” Well then explain how millions of waitstaff and bartenders can consistently survive basically on the principle that people will pay for better service even though they are not required to do so? Sure not everyone will but it’s not about that. It’s about percentages. Most will. And the better the service provided, the more they make on average in tips.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Perception problem

And attitude is EVERYTHING. It’s the classic glass is half full or half empty dichotomy. Those who have a positive attitude and focus on finding creative ways to provide better service do well. Those who spend their energy complaining about those who don’t pay them what they feel they are entitled to usually have a hard time and don’t last long. It’s called the SERVICE INDUSTRY for a reason. And it’s the perfect example of CwF + RtB.

And for the person who asked if there was such a thing as a “true dichotomy” in a comment in a different post a few weeks ago, the answer is yes. There’s your example.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re: Perception problem

No clever enough to know what is a failure (it looks like you with a microphone in your hand… )

Seriously, would you care to explain in meaningful terms how you are suppose to compete with free, without playing the “free this, sell you that” game that is mostly a dead end? Most people didn’t want “that”, they wanted “this”.

Also, explain why you think it totally acceptable for people to use your product (they one you paid to create) for free to promote their business, or to promote their social standing?

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:4 Perception problem

If by perfect arguments you mean putting both hands firmly over your ears and screaming “lalalala, I can’t hear you” yup, he perfected his skills on that.

Now on more practical matters have you ever considered opening a gardening store, because with that crap that comes out of you so abundantly you probably make a fortune selling manure to others.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Perception problem

Have you tried asking the people making millions on Arduino?

Remember open source is free to be copied, modified, redistributed and sold by anyone so how is that open source can create millionaires and now billion companies?

Or maybe you should ask how McDonalds which is a multi-billion dollar company that is in the top 10 employers of people in the world how they did it because everybody can copy them and there is nothing they can do about it.

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re: Re: Re:2 Perception problem

Customer Service.

Really, that is all there is to it. Just ask Red Hat.

Or you can float on donations because the customer is actually smart enough to realize that they stop getting their favorite content if you starve. Just ask the big name webcomic authors with the free archives.

Of course, get enough attention and ads can go a long ways. At least, that is how Google pays its bills.

Finally, if that is to arcane for you, there is always merchandising to fall back on.

Authors have been utilizing free for an incredibly long time with libraries. Ah, that’s your problem, you are drumming up fights instead of trying to work with people. Don’t compete with free, use it.

Rikuo (profile) says:

Re: Re: Perception problem

“Basic marketing 101 goes out the window when your product is easily stolen and distributed for free, without consideration to the costs it takes to make it.”

Tell me – when was the last time someone came up to you offering a product at $X,000, justifying the price because he said he sank the GDP of a small nation into developing it? Did you agree with the price?
I wouldn’t. The market WILL NEVER care how much money you’ve sunk into a product. You can spend $300 million making a movie. To you, that’s a fortune you’ve spent and you want to get it back, plus a profit.
Me, I don’t care. I didn’t spend that fortune. The movie will last on average two hours and I will base its value on that. I am not willing to pay both an exorbitant price in cash (such as 20 euros and up for a single disc edition of a newly released movie…what’s the difference between the newly released one disc movie and the one disc movie further down the shelf for a fraction of the price?) and in my civil liberties.
Your customer values your movie FAR LESS than you do, and is willing to pay only so much. Just the same with any other product. In fact, just by complaining about me not considering the costs is more likely to make me pass you over. I don’t care. Those millions of dollars mean nothing to me. My life won’t change one iota whether you’re telling the truth about your costs, and if you are, whether or not you make your costs back.

Jay (profile) says:

Re: Re: Perception problem

The pirates can mimic almost everything on the list except #4 and #5, and when people are getting it all for nothing, they don’t give a crap on #4, they will download it a second time from another archive. Number 5 is worse, you can see it here with enough people on the “f**k the **aa’s!” and “f**k Sony!” bandwagon that getting it from the original source is considered very uncool.

You’re delusional about #4. Megaupload was more reliable than what the MPAA was providing (Hint: The MPAA doesn’t produce anything, you’re thinking the movie studios they represent. Not the artists nor the film directors that are independent of the studios.)

And #5, is a misnomer since there are plenty of people that can find content outside of what the MPAA offers. Thinking they’re the only one that matters is beside the point that they once again want control of all people and what they can produce.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re: Perception problem

By reliability I was specifically referring to two things…

1. The ability to find what you wanted.
2. The factor of whether what you got was actually what you wanted instead of malware or something else of the sort

I was merely pointing out that to some people the fact that it is from the official source is important and to the extent that fans can support the artists they admire this becomes an advantage as long as it isn’t being overshadowed by the seller raping the artist and the buyer.

Anonymous Coward says:

Widespread piracy has a very unpleasant side effect, or blowback to the general public- namely overly reaching laws that intrude on your privacy, spy on you under the guise of protecting lawful copyright, expose you to lawsuits, high fines, etc.
Publishers and creators have the ear of lawmakers more than average citizens. You might prevent passage of SOPA or ACTA once or twice, but eventually they will get their way. Also don’t forget that people in power are extremely opportunistic- they will not let a good crisis go to waste. So while they are passing copyright laws, they will include bunch of other unrelated crap in the bills, which will mess with your life later.
Every action has consequences. Big actions like all intellectual property becoming extremely devalued in very short span of time, will have big consequences.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

Despite the doom and gloom, when it starts to affect people on the streets those things have limits, people just don’t take it very well and that tends to change things, it can even go so far as to reset the whole thing making those opportunistic people have to start from scratch.

If copyright becomes a burden to people they will find a way to get rid of those laws and that is a good thing, next they start looking at patents and why those are being enable while they can’t find work, because not many people can start a business.

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re: Re:

Resorting to threats, are we? I don’t respond well to threats. Looks like it is time to start firing politicians. Good thing it is an election year.

We have the internet. We can see your corruption. We can formulate complex action plans and promote them in every corner of a given nation. We will not fear the government. We will make it so they fear us.

If a politician ignores the people, vote him out. He has failed to be a representative. He has demonstrated corruption and dishonesty by failing his oath to serve the people. Nothing he promises in his campaign can be trusted. Ignore it and vote him out.

Watchit (profile) says:

Re: Re:

so you’re saying that unpopular works should make a ton of money just because someone put some effort into making something? of course popular sites would make more money through a donation button! Same with other forms of monetization, if something isn’t popular than less people will buy it or it’s associated merchandise, therefore less money.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

I don’t think anything makes much unless it is very popular.
When was the last time you saw anybody make money of something unpopular?

The good thing about popularity is that it can be localized and that may just be enough to make a living out of something, that is what people call it “niche market”.

darryl says:

It's not generational

It is not even a generational issue, it is an age and maturity issue, you dont get it do you ?

young people (and immature older people as displayed here) do not understand the value of work, effort and money (yet).

They have not had to work for a living, or to support others, as generally older and mature people do. They have been ‘looked after’ by people who have done the hard labor for them.

Give them 10 or 15 years in the “real world” and most (except those that frequent Techdirt) work out that “there is no free lunch”, and you “get what you pay for”

You also work out that everything you want comes at a cost, and that you can want things (that are available) but if you dont have the money you have to accept that is something you cannot have.

once they achieve more maturity, they work out that non-tangible things can also have value, it DOES NOT have to be something physical to have value, they also finally understand there is no such thing as infinite in the real world, that things have value because of that fact.

They work out a movie of a song is no cheaper to create regardless of it is copied no times or a billion times.

And if the cost of producing (creating) something exceeds to money that would be made from that product then that product will NOT be created.
Nothing to copy from, and no original.

it is sad that so many people here go to so much effort to justify their conduct, displaying their greed and immaturity.

Watchit (profile) says:

Re: It's not generational

There is infinite in real life, limited only by processing speed and disk space.

Yes, intangible goods DO have value, but if I am the one buying then I am the one who assigns that value. Though in this article specifically the problem is that the publishers are offering a tangible good at a too-high price, usually for their profit not the creators, and other people are offering an intangible product faster, better, and for free.

“And if the cost of producing (creating) something exceeds to money that would be made from that product then that product will NOT be created.”

too bad for that person then, they should have made a better product. Someone else will make a product that will make them a profit regardless of piracy (or maybe thanks to it), and people will enjoy it regardless of whether or not someone else made a product that failed.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: It's not generational

There is infinite in real life, limited only by processing speed and disk space.

wow, ‘limited infinity’, you do understand infinity by definition is “WITHOUT LIMIT”, therefore me saying IN THE REAL WORLD there is no such thing as infinity. It is a pure mathematical concept

There are many products that failed to turn a profit or even break even, perfectly good products, Iridium Satellite LOS phone system by Motorola is one example, great idea, worked perfectly, but the establishment (production costs) costs exceeded the rate of return on that product.

Nothing wrong with the product, no one is going to ‘create’ a better one, as it did exactly as intended.

Companies invest in new product, in doing so they take on an amount of risk, sometimes it pays off somtimes it does not, but either way someone has to pay for its development and creation. Things dont just pop out of thin air.

I costs money to design and launch a swarm of satellites, and there is a high level of risk. If it “pay off” it means it is able to make the money it cost to create it plus some.

Do you honestly believe you have to right to dictate the price you are willing to pay for a produce you deem to be ‘intangable’ ??

That is quite bizzar !! really, your saying I would have to sell you my product at the price you tell me I will get for it, and I HAVE to accept the ‘terms’ of that contract or agreement ?

You dont get to pick the price of anything you decide to purchase, tangable or not. Do you tell your ISP how much you are going to pay them based on the quality of the content of the internet ?

Im am sure you pay a certain amount for time, or whatever, that you will pay regardless of the quality of the content you are provied by by your ISP.

I guess you would only be will to pay the artist painter only the money to cover the cost of the paint and canvas ? and you would object to having to pay $10,000 for an original work, after all the arraingements of that paint and canvas is ‘intangable’ therefore you get to choose the price for that product ?

no matter how you try to spin it, you’re simply trying to justify theft, and your logic and arguments are weak, to say the least.

Rikuo (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: It's not generational

You are an absolute fool. The customer saying they are willing to pay only so much = theft, in your mind?
I’m not willing to pay the high prices you charge, because the value I place on the product and the value you place on the product ARE NOT THE SAME. The guy selling has to be willing to place a value on the product equal to or less than what the customer is willing to pay, otherwise he doesn’t sell. That is basic business.
I mean think about it…what if I write and record the greatest song of all time (at least according to me), but, if I was as stupid as you, I charged $1 million for the CD? Then it got ripped and put up on Piratebay, and I didn’t see a single sale? The reasons why are as follows
1) I put too high a price on copies of a product that are basically free to make.
2) The value I put on my product far exceeded the value the customer placed on it.
3) I didn’t connect with fans or allow any sort of discussion with them
4) I didn’t allow any other method of compensating me for my work. If the only thing I’m selling can be cheaply copied by someone else, then I deserve to fail. I didn’t have T-shirts, or other tangible goods. I didn’t capitalise on my fame (let’s say, my song becomes really popular on TPB). I didn’t cash in on that fame by, say, charging for live performances or some other scarcity (there is absolutely no way of pirating a live performance, the definition of whitch is being there in person and watching it as it happens. It can’t be counted as pirated if someone holds up an iPhone and streams it)
No, I relied on an archaic and outmoded business model.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: It's not generational

> “They work out a movie of a song is no cheaper to create regardless of it is copied no times or a billion times.”

Ta-dah! Correct Darryl. This also means it’s no more *expensive* to make a song/movie that is copied once, or a billion times.

And I think you need to look up “marginal costs” (cost per unit of the product). When you can copy for (almost) zero cost, the marginal cost drives towards zero. And noone wants to pay high prices for something they know has a marginal cost near zero without some other incentive.

BTW I am “older”, and “mature”. I’ve been working to feed my family for the last 20 years (and I produce easily copyable digital content: computer programs).

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: It's not generational

Ta-dah! Correct Darryl. This also means it’s no more *expensive* to make a song/movie that is copied once, or a billion times. you point is ?

It is no more expensive, but if you make your billion copies, then it becomes TOO EXPENSIVE to produce, with the same result, being that the ‘thing’ does not get made in the first place.

Leaving nothing for you to copy any amount of times.

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re: It's not generational

Yes, I am still a student (barely). That said, I have been working part time for a number of years now to keep the debt low and know just how painful that can be. This is not a maturity issue.

Libraries have been around a long time. Libraries offer to let people read books for free and even share those books. Public libraries are quite ubiquitous. Authors have never had a problem with libraries, because they have understood the net effect of introducing new readers to their novels.

The same thing is happening here, but to an industry used to having things behind lock and key. They don’t understand the basic principles of the new reality and are raising a panic.

This is a matter of education, and as with all education, there are some bright students and some students who lag behind. The artists that are doing so well online are the bright students. The MPAA and RIAA are in special ed, with the government providing for all their special needs.

The problem is that their special needs are hurting the rest of the world.

Rikuo (profile) says:

Re: It's not generational

“They have not had to work for a living, or to support others, as generally older and mature people do. They have been ‘looked after’ by people who have done the hard labor for them.”

I’ve had to look after myself for the last five years, haven’t had a single hand-out from either my loser parents or the state. I got a job, held onto it and worked hard at it. I bet more or less the same thing can be said of most of the people here. Except for you, darryl, in your world view, anyone who disagrees with you must automatically not have a job.

If I’m in a store, and looking at a physical product, I check the price on the shelf and I decide to myself whether or not its a fair price. Am I willing to pay it? Does it take care of the store’s costs, plus make a profit? Since we’re dealing with physical products here, the store has to constantly charge a price, because each unit has a production cost, a transportation cost, a stocking cost etc.

Not so with digital goods. As the customer, I don’t care if you sank $50 into production or $500 million. I’m wondering if the price you’re quoting is a fair price, considering there’s no physical product, just you telling the 1’s and 0’s on my hard drive to arrange themselves into a specific pattern. That is something that has no cost. I’ve got two people offering me the same movie: one, who’s charging me 10-20 bucks and the other, who’s offering it for free. Both offer the exact same product (but more often than not, the guy charging money is offering the more restricted product).

Beech (profile) says:

The main problem, morals and ethics aside, is that people CAN get anything made of 1’s and 0’s for free, and a large segment of human society has no problem doing so. Right, wrong, or grey area, piracy is here. And it isnt going anywhere. So even if piracy is the worst evil in the world today you better find a way to deal with it. That seems to be just about the whole point of techdirt. bitching about how wrong the pirates are will change nothing because either they don’t care, or have rationalized their position to themselves so they think they’re right.

more laws wont help
more comparisons to theft wont help
more pleas to morality wont help
innovate or die.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120227/04401917888/would-you-rather-be-right-realistic.shtml

That very idea was discussed rather well in this article actually.

Whether it’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is in the end irrelevant, piracy is here to stay, all that matters is how you deal with(and compete with) it, something that the ‘AAs can’t quite seem to grasp.

Karl (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

murder and rape are ‘here to stay’ too, so should we simply give up any debate regarding it’s right or wrongness ?

Murder and rape are not solely business model problems. Piracy is. It’s simply not productive to bring morality into a discussion about business models. Especially not when you have to mold your business model to your customers’ moral codes.

And, honestly, you don’t want to get into a moral debate anyway, since file sharing is unquestionably a moral act in and of itself. You are essentially creating abundance out of thin air; you are doing exactly the same thing that Jesus did in the parable about the loaves and fishes. When you share art, you are “feeding the soul” of society. Public libraries exist for a reason.

The only time file sharing can even be considered immoral, is when you bring money into the equation. Even here, things are not clear-cut, since making money is not a moral act in and of itself. (Most religions, in fact, consider it evil to some degree, though I don’t.)

So, allowing people to “starve the souls” of the masses, solely in order to make money, is not something that anyone would consider moral. Most would (and do) consider it evil. It may or may not be a necessary evil, but an evil it is.

It’s also idiotic to compare piracy with murder and rape. Murder and rape both involve physical violence; file sharing does not. Furthermore, though there are certainly evils involved when you enforce laws against rape and murder (imprisoning people against their will is not exactly moral), it is near-universally agreed that society is far better off with that enforcement in place.

Not so with copyright infringement. The actions required to prevent file sharing would unquestionably be far, far worse for society than file sharing is in the first place.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

The main problem, morals and ethics aside, is that people CAN get anything made of 1’s and 0’s for free

The main problem is that is not true, you can get SOME THINGS THAT EXISTS and is provided in a format that is digital (1’s and 0’s). You cannot get EVERYTHING thing digital for free, my bank account has a sum of money in it that is only 1’s and 0’s you cannot get that for free.

If I could get anything, I would be able to get “Water World 2” but I cannot, because it does not exist, that content was never created in the first place.

The fact is someone or group has to cover the expense of creating something, they take on certain risk, and hope it will ‘pan out’, cover costs and return a profit on that investment.

Sometimes it works and sometimes not, but anything that reduces the possible profit made from an investment will reduce the prospects of that investment being made in the first place. If that investment is not made, that product is not created.

no product created, nothing to copy, a lose/lose situation.

You cant pirate it because it was never made, they cant produce it because the loss from your ‘taking it for free’ reduces the incentive for an investment to create it in the first place.

Masnick and nina would have you believe that regardless of any possible failure to make profit from the investment someone will invest anyway !!!
Masnick and Nina are wrong…

Sorry, the real world does not work that way… deal with it.

accept being willing to allow investers to profit to promote investment therefore providing more product (variety).

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

Quote:

Sometimes it works and sometimes not, but anything that reduces the possible profit made from an investment will reduce the prospects of that investment being made in the first place. If that investment is not made, that product is not created.

no product created, nothing to copy, a lose/lose situation.

Then the race for profits works against the creation of things too, since if it doesn’t achieve a certain threshold it will never get made when it is entirely possible to achieve it, but it was not going to provide profits enough, that is one reason why so many people lost their jobs in America, because profits came first keeping people working and with jobs came second.

Quote:

You cant pirate it because it was never made, they cant produce it because the loss from your ‘taking it for free’ reduces the incentive for an investment to create it in the first place.

You mean like the tonnes of fan made films being done right now, where those people are learning and passing down their experiences and the level of those productions keep rising to the point that some actually can compete with big productions for a hundredth of the price of production?

Quote:

Masnick and nina would have you believe that regardless of any possible failure to make profit from the investment someone will invest anyway !!!
Masnick and Nina are wrong…

You must be a troll dude, because to say that on the same month that you got 2 big games being financed by crowdfunding is just ridiculous.
It is even more ridiculous after you read about how Red Hat today is a billion dollar open source company where everybody can freely copy, distribute, modify and sell their products, it gets hilarious when you see an open source hardware manufacture earning millions like Arduino.

Quote:

accept being willing to allow investers to profit to promote investment therefore providing more product (variety).

Investors are more than welcome to invest in anything they like as long as there is no granted monopolies involved that make it harder to produce things and enter a market, that bar should be lowered ASAP.

Sorry dude in the real world imaginary property doesn’t exist, get real or get out.

Anonymous Coward says:

Perception problem

Yes. Customer Service. Tell me this how’s pissing them off by trying to sneak in draconian laws illegally paid for by bribing law makers working for ya? The fact that this conversation even exists means you’be already failed to properly represent youself in the market. An adversarial relationship is not something most companies want to cultivate with customers and potential customers. But then again you must have ridden the short bus to school because you are “special” aren’t you?

Anonymous Coward says:

It's not generational

Quote:

Do you honestly believe you have to right to dictate the price you are willing to pay for a produce you deem to be ‘intangable’ ??

Yup, see your examples because people didn’t want that crap at that price point they all stayed away from those and they failed in the market.

If people can find alterantives they can do whatever they want, and there is nothing you or anybody can do about it, specially when you try to tell them how they should do things inside their own homes, now that is not going to happen dude.

Also the theft is being done by an industry against the people, that industry is trying to claim more than they have a right to and it doesn’t matter what the law says.
If a buy something I will do with it how I please and nobody and I mean nobody will convince me I am doing something wrong if I copy it, share it or open a business with it without paying more, I am not your parents I don’t own you a living, I don’t own you respect, I don’t own you anything, so get your entitlement mentally and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

Josef Anvil (profile) says:

Re:

“Do you think if you were caught speeding, you could use the excuse “I was speeding because I am capable of driving faster than the law permits” or ‘I speed because I CAN !’.”

Yes speeding is a crime, however there are often days when the entire flow of traffic is moving along at well over the speed limit. If one of us gets caught speeding and ticketed, then we pay a small fine. If speeding tickets were $15,000 on average we would see a change in the law.

Hmmmm. I like where you are going with this. Copyright enforcement should have a small group of enforcers (not entire ISPs) and the fine should be reduced to about $10 per infraction, for the small fraction of people that actually get caught.

Jay (profile) says:

Perception problem

I was merely pointing out that to some people the fact that it is from the official source is important and to the extent that fans can support the artists they admire this becomes an advantage as long as it isn’t being overshadowed by the seller raping the artist and the buyer.

You’ve just answered your own question. The official source is important to some people. Not all. And the people are supporting the artists. That’s why they want the content in their formats. The more content in the way that the people want, the more money they’re willing to spend. That’s the advantage.

Rikuo says:

Re:

“The fact is someone or group has to cover the expense of creating something, they take on certain risk, and hope it will ‘pan out’, cover costs and return a profit on that investment.”

So then its a business model issue. Traditional method failed, whereas you’ve got people going Kickstarter, doing comissions, etc.
Take a look at Epic Meal Time, Philip De Franco etc. They produce their shows and host it on Youtube, for the masses to view for FREE! But that does not mean they don’t have an income. Instead of going the traditional method of charging people for each viewing, they do advertising. In Epic Meal Time’s case, not only do they get advertising revenue from Youtube, but they recently launched a line of culinary products, so their videos follow the new meme of content = advertising, and advertising = content.
Oh sorry. I failed. The ONLY way, in your opinion, to monetise video, is to charge the viewer to watch it. My bad!

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

What issues would that be, man child?

I really feel sorry for you. I have met many like you in life, deluded by someone else into thinking they are important, or that their point of view truly matters. Yet really, for them you are a toady, a syncopate that pumps up their own ego, justifying in some ways their own existence.

Effectively you are third banana in a one banana show.

So yeah, we’ll see in 20 years where you are. My guess is that you will be working in a copyright based business, editing photos with your limited photoshop 30 skills, collecting a paycheck and being thankful that some part of the copyright universe survived your mindless assaults of your salad days.

Don’t think so? Just ask the hippies from the 60s that ended up working at Wall Street, trading stocks in defense companies and working for “the man” so they could afford to own their own house, away from the commune lifestyle that they stood up for publicly and declared perfect back in their youth.

Time has a funny way of shaving the pointy edges off of people. I only fear that you are only a collection of pointy edges, and once worn away, we will discover there is little left.

Prisoner 201 says:

Re:

“You must not work in a field where your very ability to eat is directly tied to someone consuming an intangible product.”

You have not been murdered, so you can not possibly contribute valid points to a discussion about the merits (or lack thereof) of being murdered.

Pro tip: Rational arguments stand or fall on their own merits, not because who states them.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

“the act of pirating doesn’t diminish the amount of content I’m willing to pay for”

No, but it increases the amount of content you enjoy for the same price.

I would love to order an 8oz steak and get 16oz one every time. I would love to buy a coach seat on an airline and always get first class. I would love to decide not to rent a hotel room and instead sleep in my car to save money, and have the hotel employee come out and drag me into the room for free because “you need to sleep anyway”.

Let’s look at it another way too: If you pirate a movie but don’t watch network TV as a result because you are too busy watching the pirated movie, in theory that costs them viewership and therefore money.

You only have a certain amount of time, and if you are getting what should be paid entertainment for nothing (not even commercials), the effects are there. It might be small for a single case, the the cumulative effects can add up.

Let’s go one step further. You choose to pirate rather than pay for cable. So, are you saying that cable didn’t lose anything?

Beech (profile) says:

Re:

First off, your examples fail. Tons of people have their bank accounts hacked, thus getting copies of their 1s and 0s made. Water World 2 does not exist, therefore is not made of 1s and 0s, therefore that is clearly not what i was talking about and i wonder what the hell of crazy point you are trying to make?

Then on to all those business model problems you point out of how to find initial investments; apparently you have a whole generation of kids who are willing and able to find shit on demand for free, legal or not, who simply dont care. They will download your stuff regardless. FIND A BUSINESS MODEL THAT DEALS WITH IT. like maybe crowdfunding?

In the end, if you don’t like the ways masnick and nina suggest to make money in a highly pirated market, feel free to find your own way. there are tons out there. or, lose a ton of money due to piracy and go out of business and someone else who has a shred of smarts will pick up where you left off.

(as an aside. waterworld sucked. waterworld 1 shouldnt have been made and if piracy kept a sequel from production than piracy is my personal hero for the day)

Josef Anvil (profile) says:

Re:

“No, but it increases the amount of content you enjoy for the same price.”

So what?

I can do that without pirating a damn thing. But first let’s address your silly counter. By your reasoning, cooking a steak at home is pirating from resturants and sleeping over at a friend’s house is pirating from the hotel industry, and a free upgrade to first class when the flight is nearly empty ( oh no, that NEVER happens ) is somehow pirating from the airline industry.

Ok not pirating options…. listen to music on YouTube, watch TV for free on Hulu or on the homesite of the content, go to a friend’s house to watch a movie or “the game”. Lots more content for less money.

The point you are missing is that this is JUST ENTERTAINMENT. Money that doesn’t go into entertainment or any other industry doesn’t disappear from the economy, it just goes elsewhere. Many of us see paying for broadband and devices as the “cost” of the content, just like buying a TV is the “cost” of watching the programming.

The Infamous Joe (profile) says:

Re:

More than half the articles on this blog detail the *exact* answer to your questions. I don’t know why you call it the mythical exposure model.. One, it’s not a model; it’s a tool that can be used as part of a business model, and two, it’s hardly mythical: it’s the basis for radio- which has rules against pay for play, which proves it works, otherwise there would be no need for such a law.

The thing is, there is no one model that will work for everyone. There is no formula to use over and over.. Each case is unique. How about you tell me the specifics of your case, and we can see what models might work for you?

The Infamous Joe (profile) says:

Re:

No, but it increases the amount of content you enjoy for the same price.

It’s interesting that this concerns you. You’ve been all over this article complaining that we just want everything for free; that no one will pay. Now, you acknowledge that people pay, but they have a set amount they can spend, and you’re angry that they might enjoy more of their culture without spending even more of their income. What does it matter to you? Either way, after they spend what money they have, there is no more to be had. You’re not losing anything. You should spend less time crying and gnashing your teeth about piracy, and more time gaining the loyalty of people who like whatever it is you create. If you connect well enough, you will rise to the top of the list when they have money to spend.

Torg (profile) says:

It's not generational

“wow, ‘limited infinity’, you do understand infinity by definition is “WITHOUT LIMIT”, therefore me saying IN THE REAL WORLD there is no such thing as infinity. It is a pure mathematical concept”

iTunes will never run out of any of its products or go bankrupt from the cost of making more copies. If the notion of a store saying that something’s out of stock is silly, then from a practical perspective, that’s infinite.

“You dont get to pick the price of anything you decide to purchase, tangable or not. Do you tell your ISP how much you are going to pay them based on the quality of the content of the internet?”

Actually, yes. My family just switched to a new ISP because the one we had was charging too much for the speeds we were getting. That’s telling the other ISP to either charge less or deliver more.

“I guess you would only be will to pay the artist painter only the money to cover the cost of the paint and canvas ? and you would object to having to pay $10,000 for an original work, after all the arraingements of that paint and canvas is ‘intangable’ therefore you get to choose the price for that product?”

I get to not pay $10,000 for a painting. I don’t buy paintings all the time, and the ones I do buy aren’t worth thousands of dollars. If enough people agree with me that the $10,000 pricing model becomes unsustainable, then the artist will be forced to lower his price until people start buying again. High prices reducing demand is one of the most basic rules of economics. Of course, I don’t resent the success of an artist that does manage to sell his work for thousands of dollars, but in no way does that mean that anyone who picks up a brush is allowed to tell everyone else how much they will pay for his work.

Torg (profile) says:

Re:

Let’s look at it another way too: If you get a Netflix subscription but don’t watch network TV as a result because you are too busy watching Netflix, in theory that costs them viewership and therefore money.

I haven’t pirated a thing since I got a bank account, but I still have no intentions of ever getting network TV, because that shit’s too expensive for something that doesn’t even let me decide what shows are on. Between Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and Crunchyroll I can find something new and interesting to watch whenever I want to. If something isn’t legally available online I simply won’t watch it, and the sale is just as thoroughly lost as if I had decided to watch it illegally. Cable is losing sales because cable sucks.

Anonymous Coward says:

Might as well call them Nazis

You just compared digital piracy (aka copyright infringement, aka violating an artificial monopoly) to murder (aka the worst possible crime). I’m sure that argument is going to convince lots of people.

Also, murder rates in first-world countries are at an all-time low, as in the lowest in the entire history of humans. Clearly we can and will stamp out murder. Nice try with the Chewbacca defense though.

btr1701 says:

Re:

> Further, your desire for the product remains, and may be filled
> later when you are more included to buy it

‘More included’? What the hell does that mean?

> you removed your desire for future purchase, by satisfying
> your desire to see the movie.

What if I remove my desire for future purchase by just not desiring to purchase it at all?

btr1701 says:

Re:

> Let’s look at it another way too: If you pirate a movie but
> don’t watch network TV as a result because you are too
> busy watching the pirated movie, in theory that costs
> them viewership and therefore money.

So you’ve apparently expanded the definition of ‘piracy’ into insane new territory. Basically, if I choose to do anything to entertain myself that doesn’t result in paying some big conglomerate, I’m ‘pirating’ my own free time. That about sum it up?

I mean, if I don’t watch network TV because I’m too busy entertaining myself by… throwing a ball for my dog in the backyard… fishing… hiking… painting… then I’ve robbed those media giants of my eyes and have pirated my own free time.

What a perfectly fascistic argument you’ve come up with. Kudos!

Watchit (profile) says:

It's not generational

Hello, it seems you have responded to my comment. I think I’ll just ignore your “limited infinity” thing, kind of off topic and pointless.

“Nothing wrong with the product, no one is going to ‘create’ a better one, as it did exactly as intended.”

There was something wrong with it, it was too expensive to justify it’s purpose. And the thought that no one will create a better cheaper version is a defeatist attitude.

“Companies invest in new product, in doing so they take on an amount of risk, sometimes it pays off somtimes it does not, but either way someone has to pay for its development and creation. Things dont just pop out of thin air.”

You answered that yourself, the companies pay for its development, therefore it did not just “pop” out of thin air.

“Do you honestly believe you have to right to dictate the price you are willing to pay for a produce you deem to be ‘intangable’ ?? That is quite bizzar !! really, your saying I would have to sell you my product at the price you tell me I will get for it, and I HAVE to accept the ‘terms’ of that contract or agreement ?”

Yes I have the right to dictate how much I will pay for a product, and no you don’t have to agree to those terms. If you don’t agree, I don’t buy it. If it is pirate-able and you don’t sell it to me at the price I might pirate it, but since I wouldn’t have bought it in the first place you don’t actually lose anything either.

While you call it “justifying theft” I call it simple economics. If someone has something that is infinitely reproducible at NO cost, why should I pay an unjustifiably high price for something that cost zero to make.

Inb4 rant about “paying the artist, creator, etc…” yes they need to do more than just create a product, that’s what happens in an over-saturated market with extremely low scarcity.

bluh, why did I write this long tirade? I’m done arguing with trolls!

Leigh Beadon (profile) says:

Re:

Bwahahaha! Oh man, it all finally makes sense… you think you’re my nemesis. You think we’re wrapped up in some silly psychological game. That’s rather sad…

Here’s a piece of advice: if you continue to derive your own self-worth and confidence from your role in an imagined conflict with me, you’re the one who’s going to wake up one day with a nasty realization. I’m not going to make things easy on you by telling you what that realization is going to be – suffice to say, you won’t enjoy it. I strongly suggest you find some actual value in your life – maybe some friends or some sort of productive goal to work towards. Until then you are nothing but a sad nutcase trying to make himself sound wise and important from behind an anonymous veil – perhaps the most pathetic thing a person can try to do.

It is a shame that you need someone younger than you to teach you to grow up.

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re:

You missed a core part of the argument. I didn’t choose to pirate rather than pay for cable, I chose a form of entertainment and it just so happened that the only way I could obtain that entertainment was piracy.

The choice about what I was going to do was made independently from how I was going to access it. You can’t move me into another category of your purchases by denying me access to what I want, because things you don’t sell rank higher then most of your content.

I don’t watch TV. I don’t like episodic stories and, here in America, they always lead most of the plot threads hanging in any other type of show. It just doesn’t appeal to me. So no, cable hasn’t lost a single thing on me.

Before I pirated content I was known to play board games by myself out of boredom. Board games bought and paid for in order to play with others, from a gaming store that understands customer service. With a TV sitting right there with a cable box on it. My pirating, if it cost anyone anything, cost me a little strategy crafting time.

Cowardly Anonymous says:

It's not generational

About the Motorola example, it is called a feasibility study and it comprises three key questions:

Can we actually do it? (example: yes)
Will it be useful? (example: yes)
Is there a significant market to recoup? (example: no)

These questions all have sub-components, but let us focus only on the problematic one:

Do people want what we will make? (example: not enough)
How much will people spend? (example: not enough)
How much will it cost us to make it? (example: too much)

There have always been technological innovations that are simply ahead of their time. The components cost hasn’t fallen to a reasonable level yet, or the actual deliverable is to cumbersome to work with or people just don’t understand what they are looking at.

The original personal computer that was released flopped too. A few years later, they took off like wild-fire in the US, but the data sink required to encode the language in Japan delayed launch there, generating the console market instead.

In short, the company is not the only player in the market and has to accommodate the customer if it wants to succeed. The customer can almost always go without if things go too far against them, the company can’t.

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re:

Telling the rapist that rape is wrong while he rapes you doesn’t stop rape. Other solutions have to be found. With murder and rape, legal solutions have been found to be somewhat effective, allow the prison environment also contributes somewhat to murder rates. Therapeutic efforts work better than legal efforts in some cases, especially with young offenders, and thus we have tended towards these methods for dealing with minors.

Legal methods have been found to be ineffective against piracy, drugs and online child pornography. They are even beginning to become ineffective against terrorist organizations, if the latest newspapers are to be believed. Clearly relying on legal methods isn’t going to solve these issues, and some other method needs to be found.

Piracy –> updating business models to new realities.
Drugs –> legalize the victimless cases, only police the actions that create victims (a la alcohol).
Online child pornography –> generate analogs and legalize victimless cases in order to satiate the sexual desires of pedophiles without involving real children.
Terrorism –> education and open government policies hinder radicalization efforts. Empowering citizens in their own defense diminishes the degree of harm a single radical can accomplish.

Harsher laws just makes the offenders better at what they do in all of the above cases, while actively harming the rest of the population.

Karl (profile) says:

Re:

The mythical “exposure” model?

Yeah, it’s so “mythical,” that record labels paid criminal investigations for paying for this kind of exposure. It’s called “payola,” and it wasn’t just limited to radio play.

Maybe that’s why many promotions departments in labels actually send music to music-sharing blogs, such as Dajaz1, fully aware that it will be shared. Or why Viacom employees uploaded Viacom content to YouTube, and did it in such a way as to make it appear it was “grassroots” (e.g. by uploading from coffee shops under a fake profile).

If the “exposure” model was mythical, there would be no such things as advertising agencies. In fact, there would be no such things as record labels – since “exposure” is quite literally the only thing they ever had to offer. Artists didn’t (and don’t) sign because they just want records pressed. They signed because that was the only way to get their songs on the radio, onto billboards, on display in record stores, etc.

Widespread availability of media helps not only your specific media (the song you wrote, the movie you made), but creates value for all media (songs in general, movies in general). The more that music (say) is ubiquitous, the more importance it has in peoples’ lives, and the more valuable it becomes. The entire theory behind advertising is that it creates value in the marketplace; that value can then, in theory, be exploited to turn value into income.

Not sure that helps out when there is nobody left to buy.

That would be a good point if it were true that piracy causes people to buy less. That’s not true, and no reputable study anywhere has found that it is. They’ve found the opposite: that people who pirate are also the people who pay the most for media. People don’t pirate “instead of” buying, they pirate “in addition to” buying.

Now, the shift from physical to digital certainly has caused a shift in consumer purchasing habits. They buy MP3 singles from Amazon or iTunes rather than full-length CD’s, for example. It costs less for a single MP3 than a full-length CD, so record labels make less money. But that doesn’t mean people make fewer purchases. In fact, the number of purchases has gone up – drastically – since file sharing became commonplace.

And the money that people save by buying MP3’s vs. CD’s does not vanish. It is a consumer surplus, and it is spent in other areas – often within the same industry. The money that people save on CD’s goes to, say, seeing live shows, buying merch, or what have you. That’s why the overall music industry is growing, and people are spending more money on music, than they did before file sharing became popular. The same is true for all the other content industries: they’re making more money… even in an economic downturn.

But, leaving aside economics for the moment:

what exactly is piracy doing that is so damn good?

– The infrastructure that allows piracy has also produced legal business models that unquestionably help both artists and consumers (YouTube, Soundcloud, CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, etc).

– Both the aforementioned business models, and often “pirate” sites themselves, lower the barrier to entry for artists who are not part of a corporate media industry. Because of digital distribution, indie label market share has steadily increased.

– Most importantly, without the specter of digital piracy, it’s unlikely that traditional media industries would have entered the digital market in the first place. (Even now, they are only reluctantly doing so.) Without piracy, the labels would never have worked with iTunes, for example.

But, leaving aside the benefits to artists that file sharing causes, it unquestionably benefits society in general.

– It is increasing access to the arts, especially among people who can’t afford to pay for it. Essentially, it’s acting like a global public library.

– It is creating a consumer surplus, which can then be re-invested into the industry (or the economy in general).

– Most importantly of all, it is inseparable from a culture that values open access to expression of all kinds. (You can’t have the Arab Spring without also having file sharing.)

I’d say that it’s a damn good thing for humanity that file sharing is here to stay.

Torg (profile) says:

Re:

“The fact is someone or group has to cover the expense of creating something, they take on certain risk, and hope it will ‘pan out’, cover costs and return a profit on that investment.”

As it turns out, normal people are willing and even eager to finance everything from video games to parks to iPhone accessories without any expectation of monetary profit. That’s how the world works now. Investors optional.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

” you think you’re my nemesis. You think we’re wrapped up in some silly psychological game”

Oh wow, you really do over value yourself too. How sad!

No, I don’t lose a lot of time on you Marcus. I just think you are one of the truly funniest, most self-important pricks I have met online (on a site that seems to breed them), and you are exactly the type of person I love to take on in a debate – because it’s funny as hell watching you try to smugly cover up your own failings.

You were a prick as a commentator, a prick as a guest writer, and now you have made it up to paid prick. But your still a prick, congrats!

Just remember, every time you think you got one over on someone, that the someone probably set you up.

Suja (profile) says:

Re:

All I can tell you now is that it will be called “Dimension Zerone” which is currently in a late alpha stage. I’d pretty much have to try and describe it in words, it’s a large project and I’d easily go on for a short novel.

A few more pieces in place and it will enter early beta; heavy-concept art/storyboarding time, then I’ll be able to show you something.

I realize all I have now is my written word, and it is frustrating, but I have no intention of giving up now cause I ain’t got nothing to show yet, one of these days this loudmouth will have more than wind.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

I wouldn’t tell someone “spellcheck, fuckwad” without making sure my spelling was spot on myself.

For instance:

overvalue NOT over value

you’re NOT your (as in: But your still a prick)

I won’t even get into the grammar and sentence corrections I see that are needed, but suffice it to say…

“spellcheck, fuckwad”

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

“spellcheck fuckwad”

This is a truly telling statement. The fact that he recommends reliance on an imperfect technology to overcome errors in spelling is indicative that his own lack of mastery of the English language is due to laziness. I fear that due to this deficiency, the irony in his statements which you deftly bring to light may be lost on him. However, the rest of us with a proper education, greatly appreciate your proclivity for mordancy as we find it highly amusing. Still I would have rephrased your parting comment in this manner…

LEARN TO SPELL fuckwad.

Karl (profile) says:

Re:

the only difference between “civil” and “criminal” is one is against the state and one againt an individual or private company.

That is a very big difference. If you lose a civil lawsuit, you don’t go to prison, you don’t lose your voting rights, you can still legally own firearms, you can get a visa, you can run for public office, you don’t have to inform prospective employers that you’re a convicted felon, etc.

There’s also a huge legal difference between criminal copyright infringement and civil copyright infringement. Criminal infringers can be accused of racketeering and money laundering, while civil infringers cannot; civil and criminal infringement has different seizure laws; and so forth.

The difference is huge. Calling civil infringers “criminals” is complete hyperbole.

Niall (profile) says:

Re:

And to second this, since there is alsways someone techy who wants an unusual format, you will always be able to find someone willing to go to the effort of converting stuff for you – probably for very little more than ‘official recognition’. So you could do the main formats yourself, let the fans handle the more unusual stuff = and by actually engaging with them, you get ‘stuff for free’ yourself, and much better community.

Niall (profile) says:

Re:

Haven’t they been trained to ‘consume’? All they are doing is providing /their/ parameters to it, which aren’t necessarily yours.

The ‘more product’ is them basically saying that for the cost of a simple extra drawing, someone might pay full whack for a bunch of your products. How do you lose, if they wouldn’t pay otherwise? Don’t people do this as a selling technique all the time?

If ‘telling my friends to support’ isn’t a positive, then please feel free to languish in obscurity, where I’m sure you will become plenty rich. If you want to rule out the power of word-of-mouth for teens, you deserve it.

TDR says:

As the trolls have been out in force in this thread, I’ll just shine a little mirror on them…

*AC trolls all sing along*

Reality! Reality! We just can’t stand reality!

Greed is good, greed is great!
We just love to voice the hate!
We can’t stand what we can’t slam!
We just shill ’cause it pays the bill!

Reality! Reality! We just can’t stand reality!

Twisting words is such a feat,
We just can’t help but shoot our feet!
We won’t see the good of free!
We just go blame instead of change!

Reality! Reality! We just can’t stand reality!

Building strawmen is so fun!
We just love to cut and run!
We can’t fool, we’re just a tool!
We just hate to be proved a fake!

Reality! Reality! We just can’t stand reality!
Reality! Reality! We just can’t stand reality!

jupiterkansas (profile) says:

Re:

And they have the incentive to do everything they can to control our access to information.

The internet is already a threat to middlemen in the content industries, but soon the internet will be a threat to governments. The internet doesn’t understand borders, and the whole point of governments is to maintain borders.

And judging from the current election runup, people are still sheep when it comes to electing politicians. SOPA was a fluke and business as normal continues every day in Washington.

btr1701 (profile) says:

Re:

> like speed, the only difference between
> “civil” and “criminal” is one is against
> the state and one againt an individual or
> private company.

No, they are not the same thing. That’s why one is a crime and the other is not, by definition. That’s why we have two separate judicial systems set up to handle civil and criminal cases.

There are also a lot of other differences between civil and criminal offenses. Burden of proof, for one. Right to an attorney, 4th Amendment, 5th Amendment, etc.

But you just go on and keep pretending that civil and crimianl offenses differ only by the identity of the plaintiff. It’s kinda cute.

Cowardly Anonymous says:

Re:

Oh no, I must be a thief since someone sent me a card and now I have it and I didn’t pay anyone for it and I’m a thief and I’m going to go to jail and oh no oh no… oh no… /sarc

Affirming the consequent is a fallcy. Just because, “If person A is a thief, then person A has something they didn’t pay for” is true, does not mean that, “If person A has something they didn’t pay for, then person A is a thief.”

Recieving a gift is not stealing.

The original copier paid for (or made) their instance of the work in question. Everyone else was gifted the copies for free from the orignal copier. Who is the thief?

The Moondoggie says:

We don?t want everything for free. We just want everything.

?We don?t want everything for free. We just want everything.”

To the idiotic first post:

Rather than saying we can’t pay for the content, it’s that there is no way to get the content except illegal means.

Do you think that the products entering 3rd world countries are legit? No.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

Quote:

Yeah, it’s so “mythical,” that record labels paid criminal investigations for paying for this kind of exposure. It’s called “payola,” and it wasn’t just limited to radio play.

Maybe that’s why many promotions departments in labels actually send music to music-sharing blogs, such as Dajaz1, fully aware that it will be shared. Or why Viacom employees uploaded Viacom content to YouTube, and did it in such a way as to make it appear it was “grassroots” (e.g. by uploading from coffee shops under a fake profile).

Like I dunno Youtube: Crackle

They offer free movies to everyone and it appears to be legit, more funny any video with less than a thousand views is free to watch on the entire planet LoL

ps: There are only 2 videos with less then a thousand views though, the rest is still free but you need proxytube(which can cause some connection problems with youtube) to view or be located in the US.

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