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Forums - Gaming - Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo unite... to support internet censorship.

 

What's your opinion on this?

Great! Those damn pirates... 44 26.67%
 
Scary stuff... 106 64.24%
 
See results. 13 7.88%
 
Total:163
kitler53 on 21 November 2011
Mr Khan said:
Seece said:
Mr Khan said:
Seece said:
kitler53 said:
 

and i'm telling you that's not true.  this isn't a money issue, he makes plenty.  i've said it before but maybe you didn't see it...i'm quite well off as is really all of my friends.  when i say well off i specifically mean household incomes of $100k to $300k -- i'd hope you'd agree that's plenty enough to buy a couple of games/movies/songs a year.  

and yet across all my friends only two households don't pirate; myself because i have a huge stick up my ass on the subject and one other who is a lawyer and says he's too afraid to loose his job/career.   all of the rest pirate their media and that makes me sad and angry.  the problem is that it's just too easy to do, there is almost no risk of getting caught, and they get free shit out of it.  

what i'm telling you is that as long as they feel they can get away with it they won't change no matter what business model content developers create.  seriously, they pirate free content just because they don't like watching commercials.  promise you though, if they had to...they'd pay.

No kilter, mr Kahn knows your friends better than you and every other pirate, you're WRONG.

Everyone in both threads is coming at me with all kinds of anecdotal evidence, and their only refutation is that i cannot refute their anecdotal evidence.

I shall make an examination into this. Surely there has to be scholarly data in the economics discipline to support this and either shut me up, or shut the rest of you up.

Difference is we're refuting what you're saying. We're not saying this goes for everyone (I already said that) just that you simply can't tell either way what people will do when they can't pirate. Wheras you and that other guy seem adamant it's not going to change anything without any proof.

Prevailing trends defy anecdotal evidence without making it untrue. Take for instance the countless "My Wii is gathering dust," statements put forth across the generation that, while they might have been true for the individuals, were not true on the whole.

I'll grant that i have only been going off of prevailing wisdom i have heard in discussions involving those whose economics knowledge i trust. Therefore i shall table further arguments until studies can be cited


i don't think you're going to find much in terms of legit studies, everything i've seen is highly highly biased.  so just look at this fact:

the cost of music has stayed roughly level over the years while the revenues have been cut in half since the introduction of napster in 1999.  so i'll leave it to you to infer ... over the last ten years has half the population decided to no longer consume music or is half the population just no longer paying?

..i think it's the latter.  you just can't compete with free. 

 

"Now just 44% of U.S. Internet users and 64% of Americans who buy digital music think that that music is worth paying for, according to Forrester. The volume of unauthorized downloads continues to represent about 90% of the market, according to online download tracker BigChampagne Media Measurement."



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Millenium on 21 November 2011

As for pirating games, i'm (mostly) with them, i don't do it in most occasions, sure i downloaded the Crysis 2 leak, but that was after i had already pre-ordered it, paid for the pre-order, and knew i wasn't going to cancel it, so i don't feel guilty at all.

As for movies & tv shows, it's a different story.

I download movies, for either one of these reasons:

1: Already own the movie on dvd/blu-ray but want it on my harddrive for convenience. - Don't feel guilty.
2: pre-ordered it already, but don't want to wait to watch it. Don't feel guilty.
3: I know it's either a average movie that i don't want to pay for, or a great movie that i know made 100's of millions of revenue, if not 1 billion+ Don't feel guilty..

I do buy movies if i think they're worth it.

As for tv shows:

Sorry, but i don't want to wait 3 years after release to be able to watch House & Game of Thrones on tv, so i download them, and hell no, i don't feel guilty.



Makaha on 21 November 2011
pezus said:
Makaha said:
Mr Khan said:
Makaha said:
Mr Khan said:
 

More accurate to say that if pirates do become paying customers, that it becomes a wash economically. You don't generate money from nothing, and its not like these people who might be consuming certain intellectual properties are sitting on the money that they would be spending, but it is generally acknowledged in economics that a good deal of piracy comes from customers who you are priced too high to access in the first place.

 

 

Well in terms of music, many teenagers today have never bought any music, at all.  Zero. Nada. Zip.

So you're saying that if teenagers couldn't get music illegally online, they wouldn't be listening to music at all??

That's total BS.  In national polls in the US, most teenagers value their music collection the MOST--more than movies and games, and yet they don't pay for it.  They expect to get it for free, like it's an entitlement.  As a songwriter and producer myself, I can guarantee you that producing music is not free.  My 5-string Fender bass by itself cost over $1,000.  My Roland VS-1680 hard disk multitrack cost $3,500 when I bought it back in 2000.  Over the years, I easily spent over $10,000 on my synth/keyboard, acoustic and electric guitars, percussion etc.

When I talk to teenagers in some online forums and I suggest to them that they can save their allowance from their parents (if they get an allowance) to buy music.  That's what I did when I was a teenager, but to the young generation, most can't understand that concept.

 

1. Anecdotal evidence

2. The fallacy here is to equate every bit of pirated music as lost revenue. Sure teens wouldn't go without music, but they wouldn't necessarily consume at the same levels either

 

Anecdotal evidence??

Which part of my post??

 

In regards to your second point, sure, not every bit of pirated music is lost revenue, but the fact that many teenagers don't buy any music, at all, speaks for itself.  If you were to shut down the internet completely (not saying that would ever happen), how else do you think teenagers would get their music??  Well, it would be old school again, which means they would have to BUY their music, like how it was before.

SO you think shutting off the internet would improve sales for the music industry? Okay then...

 

If that happened (and it won't), it sure would affect sales.  Lamont Dozier, who is a legendary R&B songwriter, has said his royalties have been cut by 60% over the last decade because of illegal downloading.  It's affected pure songwriters (pure songwriters are songwriters who don't sing their own music , like Diane Warren or Craig Wiseman, and pure songwriters are some of the best out there, Diane Warren is one of the most successful songwriters of the last 50 years, go see her catalog online--it's phenomenal).  The SGA has stated staff songwriters positions in Nashville have virtually disappeared because of illegal downloading.

Besides, it's not just about the money.  A copyright owner has the right to control how his music, movie, book, is distributed.  By illegally downloading, that person is spitting in the face of the songwriter, film director, etc.  It's uncool.  Forget the money.  That's just being a jerk, period.

Sure, some artists have said publicly that they want to give away a song for free, but the overwhelming majority do not.  I'm in the songwriter community, and we do not want to give away our songs for free.  So by illegally downloading a song, you are being disrespectful to the singer and the songwriter (if the singer didn't write the song). 



 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3oVRJm-RBU

Etanclan4life on 22 November 2011

This is completely against what America stands for, why should we be controlled online? Are we not controlled enough already in the real world? I understand, its their lively hood and they have every right to protect there games and money. But this is not going about it the right way. Find a way to block or stop the piracy sights. Its our freedom of speech that is at hand and I for one have never illegally downloaded anything on the internet. I do not believe the majority should be punished for the people that decide to break the law. THE NEEDS OF THE MANY, OUTWEIGH THE NEEDS OF THE FEW.



Etan

JOKA_ on 22 November 2011
kitler53 said:
Mr Khan said:
kitler53 said:
crippling free speech -- lol, plagiarism isn't protected by free speech nor should piracy.

@ Mr Khan -- way up you said you can't turn pirates into paying customers. BS. my friend has a ps2, wii, ds, psp, and ps3. cant you guess which is the only system he has paid for a game on? hint, it is the only one he can't pirate on...

Right, and would he have bought a PS2, Wii, DS, or PSP if he could not pirate on them? Would he have had the revenue to buy all the games he had bought? At best he would have bought a few games more legitimately on one system at the expense of legit PS3 games

It's a wash, i'm telling you.

and i'm telling you that's not true.  this isn't a money issue, he makes plenty.  i've said it before but maybe you didn't see it...i'm quite well off as is really all of my friends.  when i say well off i specifically mean household incomes of $100k to $300k -- i'd hope you'd agree that's plenty enough to buy a couple of games/movies/songs a year.  

and yet across all my friends only two households don't pirate; myself because i have a huge stick up my ass on the subject and one other who is a lawyer and says he's too afraid to loose his job/career.   all of the rest pirate their media and that makes me sad and angry.  the problem is that it's just too easy to do, there is almost no risk of getting caught, and they get free shit out of it.  

what i'm telling you is that as long as they feel they can get away with it they won't change no matter what business model content developers create.  seriously, they pirate free content just because they don't like watching commercials.  promise you though, if they had to...they'd pay.


I completely agree with this.  In college my circle of friends were definitely doing well in the money department, yet most everyone I knew pirated their media.  A bunch of these well off friends can afford to buy iPhones...and then jailbreak them so they can download all the content they want for free. 

Hell, my freshmen year (I went to a very nerdy technical college) some kids set up a network for any student to upload and download any sort of file they wanted.  Movies, songs, games everything was up there for free download, and everyone I knew was using it.  It eventually got shut down and some kids got expelled.

I think some people in this thread have too much faith in humanity when it comes to getting stuff for free.  There are definitely people in this world that pirate because they don't have the money to, but I think there are just as many that have the cash but the free stuff is just so easy and available.



Platinums: Red Dead Redemption, Killzone 2, LittleBigPlanet, Terminator Salvation, Uncharted 1, inFamous Second Son, Rocket League

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Epke on 22 November 2011

kingwandymion 3 days ago
so this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause

very well said first censor the pirates then anyone the government dissagrees with!



Mr Khan on 22 November 2011

Alas that i cannot create a real link to this, you have to be logged in through my school to see it...

Author:
Jain, Sanjay
Author Affiliation:
TX A&M U
Source:
Marketing Science, July-August 2008, v. 27, iss. 4, pp. 610-26
Publication Date:
July-August 2008
Abstract:
In recent years, the issue of copyright protection for intellectual properties such as computer software, music CDs, and videos has become increasingly important. It is often claimed that illegal copying of intellectual property costs companies billions of dollars in lost revenues and reduces firms' incentives to innovate. Some researchers have shown that copying can be beneficial to firms when there are strong network effects and copying expands the market. In this paper, we first examine the impact of illegal copying of software and other similar intellectual properties on firms' prices, profits, and quality choices, even when there are no network effects and the market is saturated. We show that contrary to the claims of manufacturers, there are conditions under which copying can increase firms' profits, lead to better quality products, and increase social welfare. This is because weaker copyright protection enables firms to reduce price competition by allowing price-sensitive consumers to copy. Thus, weaker copyright protection can serve as a coordination device to reduce price competition. We also examine how equilibrium copyright enforcement is affected by network externalities. In contrast to previous research, we show that strong network effects can sometimes lead to a firm choosing higher levels of copyright protection. Our results show that in the presence of strong network effects, stronger copyright enforcement by one firm can serve as a coordinating device to reduce price competition.

Here's another
http://cyberlaw-dev.stanford.edu/system/files/digitalmusicarticlecirculation.pdf

Some evidence towards how market segmentation allows companies to profit off of the offering of free content, and data shown that piracy does not cannibalize sales
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2017429

Another one stuck behind my school's logon, abstract below
Impact of piracy on innovation at software firms and implications for piracy policy

Jeevan Jaisingh Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author
[Author vitae]
ISOM Department, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Available online 27 November 2008.
Abstract

In this paper, we look at how innovation in the presence of piracy is affected by the policy choice of alliances such as the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Surprisingly, we find that a stricter piracy policy, that increases the perceived cost to using pirated software for end-users, may in some cases lead to an increase in piracy, and a decrease in product quality. The implication for a social planner is that in a monopoly market, an increase in the policy variable, could act as a disincentive for innovation. In a competitive market an increase in the policy variable provides an incentive for innovation.

Keywords: Software piracy; Policy; Quality; Innovation
_________________________________________________________________________________________

Your move.



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

S.T.A.G.E. on 22 November 2011

Pirating isn't freedom of speech its non physical theft. Freedom of information is another story, which is why we have an act which protects it.



Mr Khan on 22 November 2011
S.T.A.G.E. said:
Pirating isn't freedom of speech its non physical theft. Freedom of information is another story, which is why we have an act which protects it.

Yes, but in this effort to curtail piracy, they will be infringing upon freedom of speech. This is no different than other unconstitutional ventures trying to prevent some sort of problem that end up trampling on all sorts of rights in the process



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

S.T.A.G.E. on 22 November 2011
Mr Khan said:
S.T.A.G.E. said:
Pirating isn't freedom of speech its non physical theft. Freedom of information is another story, which is why we have an act which protects it.

Yes, but in this effort to curtail piracy, they will be infringing upon freedom of speech. This is no different than other unconstitutional ventures trying to prevent some sort of problem that end up trampling on all sorts of rights in the process

 

Again....what does piracy have to do with freedom of speech?