If it wasn't for Piracy, I wouldn't have found some of my favorite bands. Back in the Napster days, I would play around and fish for similar themed songs. Just to get a listen of different music that I wasn't willing to spend $20 - $35 on. Most of the time, these themes were from song titles of bands that I already liked and have obtained legally. And most of the playlists got deleted very quickly.
Two playlists stand out for the same reason. The first one was called Songs for Superman. Think about it. How many good alt-rock songs have Superman in the title. You have Our Lady Peace, R.E.M. The Crashtest Dummies, Five for Fighting, Stereophonics and the Killing Heidi's. Enough to make a base out of a pretty good playlist. Add in songs like Honky-tonk Superman by Aaron Tippin, O Superman by Laurie Anderson among others you get a good collection of songs that doesn't get old. However, one song, I kept listening to and enjoyed: Resignation Superman by Big Head Todd and the Monsters. I had never heard them before but with a name like Big Head Todd I went searching. Three record stores later I found their Live Album (which had Resignation Superman on it) and was hooked on them since having bought most of their music either in CD format (I always got dirty looks from HMV store reps when I said i wanted to order a CD by Big Head Todd) and more recently with iTunes.
I found Belle and Sebastian the same way with their song Lazy Line Painter Jane in a playlist I made called Songs for Jane. I liked the '70s sound of it and thought it was from that decade. When I went into the store to find their CD I was surprised at the catalog that they had (and were still around and not from the '70s) and bought 2 CDs then and there and I have been hooked since.
Technology has come along way since Napster, so I no longer do it this way. Youtube and iTunes allow me to find new music quickly and with less hassle. And that is the main point. I am willing to purchase your items if you make it less of a hassle to do so. I will purchase your music if I like it, but if radio and word of mouth are the only ways you have access to my money then you'll probably never see it.
~ I never pirated games, ok I lie, my father brought home a pirated version of Civ2 that I played to death and when Civ3 - 5 came out, I bought them as soon as my computer could run them, but that is the only one. But I know video games were being pirated, I wasn't stupid. I watched my roommate at the time go out and buy a Sega Saturn just because he could burn all the games onto CDs and play them. He had the technology to do it. Saturn was the downfall of Sega because of it, and all other gaming companies took notice and clammed up that it almost destroyed the computer game industry. That is until Steam came out and showed the big boys how to effectively market video games in this technological savvy world.
~ I do not want to pirate certain shows, but alas I have to (until the DVDs come out) because certain companies are clinging to old technology that does not resonate with today's public. Why are HBO shows the most pirated? It is because you need a cable subscription to access them even though they have HBO Go and have seen a Netfix pay model that works.
I would happily give HBO my money if I didn't have to give it to a service I do not want nor trust first. It is that simple in that situation. So I will stream Game of Thrones online when it comes out (because everyone talks about it and waiting for DVDs is pointless because I know half the show before they come out) and wait patiently for the DVDs of shows like Boardwalk Empires and in the past Rome and The Wire to come out before getting a chance to watch them.
That said, I do not like pirates who do it just because they can. It does not reward the hard work countless people have put into making something entertaining for you. Do not look at it as if you are giving money to the head company (say EA games) look at it that you are giving money to the CEO's secretary for putting up with his BS every day or the set designer on the movie you are watching.
tl;dr Use technology to your advantage to get legitimate clients instead of treating them like criminals. If you cling to the past and block your potential clients from giving you money, then it is your loss.
Five years in jail seems a bit harsh doesn't it? I would just fine them double the amount it would have cost to pay for everything they stole. Half for the state, half for the companies wronged in the crime.
it is easy to diss piracy and blame all kinds of issues, great and small, on it's parrot-filled shoulders. I think it is sometimes just as easy to forget how great deal piracy has done in helping digital revolution to happen.
Take torrents for example. If we forget the minor detail of most of them being completely illegal, we can appreciate how places like Piratebay actually offers an extremely comfortable and easy to use environment for the end user to acquire, search, share digital media. As a service, it is vastly superior to what many game or movie studios offer even today. If piracy hadn't forced their hand, I'm betting major TV networks or major game publishers would not have been so eager to embrace services such as Steam or Netflix.
(for purposes of this example I pretend I don't actually own my Lord of the Rings dvd box:p ) Let's assume I really wanna watch Fellowship of the Ring. It is not available in Netflix or in any other legal digital service that I know of. My options are to either A) Go in a shop, buy an old fashioned cumbersome fragile lame disc with insulting anti-piracy ads and annoying trailers crammed all over it. Illegally download the movie from net. It likely comes in as high quality as I wish,without trailers, stupid RIAA warnings and as a file, is more comfortable to use than a cumbersome clumsy old physical disc.
Even If we completely remove legality and cost from equation, we are left with Option B providing a superior product in more convinient fashion.
Pretty awesome, perfectly legal services like Netflix, Steam,Spotify, perhaps even Youtube wouldn't have had the success and publisher support they enjoy without Piracy. Piracy forced greedy studios, labels,publishers to approaches reasonably fair to customer.
As a general rule of thumb, as long as a Studio can afford to pay a single actor 75 mils for a two hour role, I'm going to assume the Studio is very well off. It provides a situation where it is extremely difficult to feel any wrong in just watching their movies for free.
As a general rule of thumb, as long as a Studio can afford to pay a single actor 75 mils for a two hour role, I'm going to assume the Studio is very well off. It provides a situation where it is extremely difficult to feel any wrong in just watching their movies for free.
Well, they generally take a while to film all the footage for those about 2 hours of screen time... Because barely anyone gets it right on the first try so they have to film it multiple times.
But at any rate... The film industry hasn't responded to piracy by improving service like every other part of the entertainment industry... Their reaction to it was to throw money at goverments to try ban the internet.
I think the trend these days is towards online only games. It's very hard to pirate these, because someone needs to firstly find a way to copy the server software, then secondly someone then needs to host the copy.
Or freemium games - it always amazes me the amounts of money people are prepared to pay for rubbish. Of course these are generally online only (candy crush, farmville, etc).
Ohhh yes. Lets NEVER go into Star Trek Online and my wallet. They are very well acquainted with each other. I don't even know WHY I need that god damn bird of prey refit it just looks so damn good! :P
I reckon Overhaul got BG:EE right in terms of payment for new content. 20 bucks for the game and all additional content is something I far prefer to either a free/cheap game with dozens of micropurchases that are almost necessary for the game to be worthwhile. The Mass Effect games really annoyed me like that. Half the DLC added weapons or other gear that actually made the game either easier or should have been included in the basic package.
Avoiding piracey isnt that complicated, you have to offer a product desireable enough that people want to financially support it. Pricing shouldnt be too high, or you'll drive people away. The most pirated things I'm sure are things people would be embarassed to buy, ie porn. Crazy how the internet giveth, and then taketh away from The Industry.
Even back in my heyday, my piracey levels were negligable. Like most people, I pretended that standards made it more reasonable, but most of it was pure sophistry, but I still would hate to download a Canadian band's music. I always bought their products where possible, they've got an uphill enough battle as it is. Even then, I bought way more albums rather than pirating, usually limiting piracy to music I was very unfamiliar with. For things thst were not music, I usually DLed stuff I had no interest in buying, but wouldnt mind checking out. Only dled 1 game, to check if it was worth purchasing (I was on a limited budget), and it was almost unplayably buggy so I did not buy it. I do not feel this is really a bad choice, because if I HAD bought it I probably would be in jail still for homocide... I really hate rushjob games. I think developers, some anywsys, have encoursged piracey by releasing bad or buggy games. Playtesting seems as dead as plot development.
I don't think we should demonize piracy, but I don't think we should romanticize either. For example, it's estimated that 25% of humble bundle downloads are illegal downloads. For something that you can legally buy for 1 cent. There are some pirates out there who are just cheap and/or lazy.
What I always wonder, is why so few game developers release demo's of their games. I remember that like, 12/13 years ago a lot of new games would have demos that would let you taste the game before you decided to buy it Where as now, while internet is a perfect distribution system for demos (cheaper than sending CD's around back in the day) it is not used any more.
Yea I remember diablo 1 having a demo for it. That was great because you could play the first 1-3 levels of the game and get a feel for it. Watching "lets plays" or reading reviews isn't really the same thing to me. Its a shame its a practice that seems to have largely disappeared, at least when it comes to better known releases for PC games. Steam for instance has a ton of demos it offers but most are for games coming from smaller studios.
I have no money so "downloading music" and whatnot enables me to not spend $$ on overpriced songs and cds. In terms of piracy on movies or shows. I would rather just use netflix but instead other members of my household download movies and shows without any real major fear.
I think gaming as an industry is prone to trying to what forestry would refer to as overlogging. Developers seem to ship games that clearly needed another year of development, a game that might have been truly great is instead barely worth playing, like logging a tree 20 or 30 years too soon. There is too much emphasis on immediate gains, and as is usually the case, gaming then screws up and drives gamers to pirate, or to just not game.
Basicaly I am arguing that demos only hurt the sales of games that suck anyways, and that if a person buys too many $#!/ty games, they'll begin to game less. I suspect its mostly a % issue, and the turning point will vary from person to person. Probably its a scale of enjoyment vs disapointment, too much disapointment and you will stop spending money. Summed up, buy too many of those games you'd have avoided after trying the demo and you will stop buying.
The only way a demo could reduce sales is if the game was utter garbage that nobody should play and it would warn people ahead of time... oh... wait...
Five years in jail seems a bit harsh doesn't it? I would just fine them double the amount it would have cost to pay for everything they stole. Half for the state, half for the companies wronged in the crime.
^ Even if we were to " readjust" it to..say, 50 millions for 200 hours of work, it doesn't get all that much less absurd now does it? Bottom line remains that studios are perfectly able and willing to pay absolutely world changing amounts of money for some asshole to look and sound cool on screen.
It is all somewhat irrelevant nitpicking bit beyond the point but Robert Downey Jr. made like 70-80 millions from the first Avengers movie. First around 50 millions to sign the contract and show up, then 20-30 millions through ticket sales.
I don't know of a single actor who's made anywhere close to $75 million for 3 roles, let alone one.
Daniel Radcliffe made over $105 million by playing harry potter according to the richest.com
I meant 3 movies, sorry.
Edit: This line of conversation is kinda besides the point. Actors making millions of dollars can afford to be affected by piracy. But that is a very small minority of us. I only make at most $2,400 a month and that's only because of where I live and work has that kind of pay available. It also has a ridiculously high cost of living. And there are plenty of us who make even less. I apologize for soapboxing, but it's a livelihood.
@jackjack Do you feel you have been affected by piracy?
Absolutely. As I stated above, because it costs the industry money. They save it by cutting down on the number of available jobs, which makes getting work even more difficult.
That may be true, but the fundamental problem is with the industry and not piracy. As I said, there are too many jobs and too massive organizations in the distribution business which are very expensive to run. These expenses drive up the costs of products and make them unappealing to consumers. I would argue that the number of artists' jobs is cut down by the amount of other - often pointless - jobs in the industry, not by piracy.
The biggest problem with anti-piracy measures is that they only hurt the paying customers. Annoying unskippable adds on dvds; missing content on games which requires entering a long code to access; inflated prices due to anti-piracy budget; horrible DRM like EA's Origin or Ubisoft's Uplay.
When you pirate the game/movie you don't need to deal with any of these. You need to reward the consumer for paying full price, not punish them.
An interesting thing about pirates is that their social structure is one of the first examples of democracy found anywhere, predating the French revolution by a century. At the same time sailors in the navies of the day experienced some of the most autocratic & repressive regimes going.
When lives are nasty, brutal and short, the temptation of plundering a rich ship and earning in the order of 1000 pounds if you're lucky, or dying if you're not, is pretty strong, particularly when you can see others doing it, and then buying a full pardon.
.. digital piracy? Yes I've done it in the past, but Steam sales have utterly removed the need to. The last one I tried was Age of piracy 2 (no joke ), which is impossible to buy online anywhere, although Amazon America still have a couple of copies. I downloaded two separate cracked versions, and spun them up in a virtual machine with no access to the internet. Viruses yes, working game no, so I killed the entire VM. I am in the process of importing a copy from Amazon, $40 including shipping, I haven't paid this much for a game since I bought Baldur's gate 1 back before ToTSC was even released.
As for DRM, if there was ONE DRM system, that would be kinda OK. I'm OK running Steam (which is a DRM system) because it has benefits, like sales, free games (team fortress - dear god, 560 hours, DOTA - 63 hours), you can share games with family members, altogether it's not in your face like the others are.
What is particularly annoying is when you buy a game from Steam, and then you need to install some other DRM system, create an account, and log in to that to play the game. Uplay for the Assassin's creeds, something else I haven't bothered with yet for Dragon age, and something I'm getting ready to hate in order to run Dark souls. The last one might be windows live, because my computer keeps slowing down, so I go and look what's installed recently, I've uninstalled live twice now.
To paraphrase what CD Projekt (the creators of the Witcher games and GoG) said in various interviews:
"You cannot stop piracy and DRM only hurts the legal buyers. If you want to sell more, offer better quality products and stuff worth buying. And don't treat your customers like thieves."
Comments
Eric Flint says it well, here: http://www.baen.com/library/prime_palaver6.asp
If it wasn't for Piracy, I wouldn't have found some of my favorite bands.
Back in the Napster days, I would play around and fish for similar themed songs. Just to get a listen of different music that I wasn't willing to spend $20 - $35 on. Most of the time, these themes were from song titles of bands that I already liked and have obtained legally. And most of the playlists got deleted very quickly.
Two playlists stand out for the same reason. The first one was called Songs for Superman. Think about it. How many good alt-rock songs have Superman in the title. You have Our Lady Peace, R.E.M. The Crashtest Dummies, Five for Fighting, Stereophonics and the Killing Heidi's. Enough to make a base out of a pretty good playlist. Add in songs like Honky-tonk Superman by Aaron Tippin, O Superman by Laurie Anderson among others you get a good collection of songs that doesn't get old. However, one song, I kept listening to and enjoyed: Resignation Superman by Big Head Todd and the Monsters. I had never heard them before but with a name like Big Head Todd I went searching. Three record stores later I found their Live Album (which had Resignation Superman on it) and was hooked on them since having bought most of their music either in CD format (I always got dirty looks from HMV store reps when I said i wanted to order a CD by Big Head Todd) and more recently with iTunes.
I found Belle and Sebastian the same way with their song Lazy Line Painter Jane in a playlist I made called Songs for Jane. I liked the '70s sound of it and thought it was from that decade. When I went into the store to find their CD I was surprised at the catalog that they had (and were still around and not from the '70s) and bought 2 CDs then and there and I have been hooked since.
Technology has come along way since Napster, so I no longer do it this way. Youtube and iTunes allow me to find new music quickly and with less hassle. And that is the main point. I am willing to purchase your items if you make it less of a hassle to do so. I will purchase your music if I like it, but if radio and word of mouth are the only ways you have access to my money then you'll probably never see it.
~
I never pirated games, ok I lie, my father brought home a pirated version of Civ2 that I played to death and when Civ3 - 5 came out, I bought them as soon as my computer could run them, but that is the only one.
But I know video games were being pirated, I wasn't stupid. I watched my roommate at the time go out and buy a Sega Saturn just because he could burn all the games onto CDs and play them. He had the technology to do it. Saturn was the downfall of Sega because of it, and all other gaming companies took notice and clammed up that it almost destroyed the computer game industry.
That is until Steam came out and showed the big boys how to effectively market video games in this technological savvy world.
~
I do not want to pirate certain shows, but alas I have to (until the DVDs come out) because certain companies are clinging to old technology that does not resonate with today's public.
Why are HBO shows the most pirated? It is because you need a cable subscription to access them even though they have HBO Go and have seen a Netfix pay model that works.
I would happily give HBO my money if I didn't have to give it to a service I do not want nor trust first. It is that simple in that situation. So I will stream Game of Thrones online when it comes out (because everyone talks about it and waiting for DVDs is pointless because I know half the show before they come out) and wait patiently for the DVDs of shows like Boardwalk Empires and in the past Rome and The Wire to come out before getting a chance to watch them.
That said, I do not like pirates who do it just because they can. It does not reward the hard work countless people have put into making something entertaining for you. Do not look at it as if you are giving money to the head company (say EA games) look at it that you are giving money to the CEO's secretary for putting up with his BS every day or the set designer on the movie you are watching.
tl;dr Use technology to your advantage to get legitimate clients instead of treating them like criminals. If you cling to the past and block your potential clients from giving you money, then it is your loss.
Take torrents for example. If we forget the minor detail of most of them being completely illegal, we can appreciate how places like Piratebay actually offers an extremely comfortable and easy to use environment for the end user to acquire, search, share digital media. As a service, it is vastly superior to what many game or movie studios offer even today. If piracy hadn't forced their hand, I'm betting major TV networks or major game publishers would not have been so eager to embrace services such as Steam or Netflix.
(for purposes of this example I pretend I don't actually own my Lord of the Rings dvd box:p )
Let's assume I really wanna watch Fellowship of the Ring. It is not available in Netflix or in any other legal digital service that I know of. My options are to either A) Go in a shop, buy an old fashioned cumbersome fragile lame disc with insulting anti-piracy ads and annoying trailers crammed all over it.
Even If we completely remove legality and cost from equation, we are left with Option B providing a superior product in more convinient fashion.
Pretty awesome, perfectly legal services like Netflix, Steam,Spotify, perhaps even Youtube wouldn't have had the success and publisher support they enjoy without Piracy. Piracy forced greedy studios, labels,publishers to approaches reasonably fair to customer.
As a general rule of thumb, as long as a Studio can afford to pay a single actor 75 mils for a two hour role, I'm going to assume the Studio is very well off. It provides a situation where it is extremely difficult to feel any wrong in just watching their movies for free.
But at any rate... The film industry hasn't responded to piracy by improving service like every other part of the entertainment industry... Their reaction to it was to throw money at goverments to try ban the internet.
Or freemium games - it always amazes me the amounts of money people are prepared to pay for rubbish. Of course these are generally online only (candy crush, farmville, etc).
Even back in my heyday, my piracey levels were negligable. Like most people, I pretended that standards made it more reasonable, but most of it was pure sophistry, but I still would hate to download a Canadian band's music. I always bought their products where possible, they've got an uphill enough battle as it is. Even then, I bought way more albums rather than pirating, usually limiting piracy to music I was very unfamiliar with. For things thst were not music, I usually DLed stuff I had no interest in buying, but wouldnt mind checking out. Only dled 1 game, to check if it was worth purchasing (I was on a limited budget), and it was almost unplayably buggy so I did not buy it. I do not feel this is really a bad choice, because if I HAD bought it I probably would be in jail still for homocide... I really hate rushjob games. I think developers, some anywsys, have encoursged piracey by releasing bad or buggy games. Playtesting seems as dead as plot development.
Basicaly I am arguing that demos only hurt the sales of games that suck anyways, and that if a person buys too many $#!/ty games, they'll begin to game less. I suspect its mostly a % issue, and the turning point will vary from person to person. Probably its a scale of enjoyment vs disapointment, too much disapointment and you will stop spending money. Summed up, buy too many of those games you'd have avoided after trying the demo and you will stop buying.
Its true in Germany is the justice bit harsh...
It is all somewhat irrelevant nitpicking bit beyond the point but Robert Downey Jr. made like 70-80 millions from the first Avengers movie. First around 50 millions to sign the contract and show up, then 20-30 millions through ticket sales.
Edit: This line of conversation is kinda besides the point. Actors making millions of dollars can afford to be affected by piracy. But that is a very small minority of us. I only make at most $2,400 a month and that's only because of where I live and work has that kind of pay available. It also has a ridiculously high cost of living. And there are plenty of us who make even less. I apologize for soapboxing, but it's a livelihood.
When you pirate the game/movie you don't need to deal with any of these. You need to reward the consumer for paying full price, not punish them.
When lives are nasty, brutal and short, the temptation of plundering a rich ship and earning in the order of 1000 pounds if you're lucky, or dying if you're not, is pretty strong, particularly when you can see others doing it, and then buying a full pardon.
.. digital piracy? Yes I've done it in the past, but Steam sales have utterly removed the need to. The last one I tried was Age of piracy 2 (no joke
As for DRM, if there was ONE DRM system, that would be kinda OK. I'm OK running Steam (which is a DRM system) because it has benefits, like sales, free games (team fortress - dear god, 560 hours, DOTA - 63 hours), you can share games with family members, altogether it's not in your face like the others are.
What is particularly annoying is when you buy a game from Steam, and then you need to install some other DRM system, create an account, and log in to that to play the game. Uplay for the Assassin's creeds, something else I haven't bothered with yet for Dragon age, and something I'm getting ready to hate in order to run Dark souls. The last one might be windows live, because my computer keeps slowing down, so I go and look what's installed recently, I've uninstalled live twice now.
"You cannot stop piracy and DRM only hurts the legal buyers. If you want to sell more, offer better quality products and stuff worth buying. And don't treat your customers like thieves."
It's how I feel as well.