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Originally Posted by Kirnak /t/1436730/new-ruling-confirms-copying-dvds-is-illegal/120#post_22565643
It's absolutely clear. Look at the sales of new Blurays. Bluray releases like "The Avengers" are producing vast sums of money for the studios. That wouldn't be true if everyone was just pirating it.
The issue isn't whether every single person on the planet is pirating content or not. It's how much content is being pirated vs. being legitimately sold. You keep taking anecdotal evidence and trying to argue that these things prove something that they don't. And the other thing you are missing is that MAKING the Avengers took a vast amount of money, as do most movies these days. Once in a while a movie makes a lot more than it cost, but that's the exception, not the rule. In the music industry, something lie 8 to 9 out of 10 acts never even recoup the investment made. The movie industry has it better in that it has more outlets for its content, but still it costs a lot to make movies and most of them don't make a lot more than it cost to make them. If a movie doesn't much much more than it cost to make it, then it lost money effectively, because that (large amount of) money could have been invested elsewhere for a much better return, and you won't get people to invest that kind of money without a good ROI.
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I absolutely disagree that pirating exceeds legitimate purchases.If that was true, why are Apple and Amazon making incredible amounts of money selling music?
Here again, you are factually incorrect. The number of songs downloaded illegally in a couple of months is around what Apple has sold in the entire history of iTunes. The music industry's sales are down by half from the year that the Naptser case widely publicized the free availability of music on the internet, and created the anti-IP owner propoganda machine that permeates the internet today.
*Apple and Amazon* don't pay for the production of the content, so they aren't particularly hurt by losses, they mostly only gain from sales. Think about it. It's the people who pay to produce the content who lose when content is stolen. BTW, Apple more or less claims that it's never even made a profit from sales of content via iTunes. And that's probably not THAT far from true. They want to have an iTunes so that they can sell you expensive, high margin hardware. If they make a little money selling you some legal content, that's great, but not essential.
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The easiest media to pirate, yet people buy it instead. How many people know--or bother to learn--how to download a 40GB Bluray.
They don't need to. One person buys it, does a high quality down conversion and uploads that. And most people would be more than happy to download that instead of purchase the Blu-Ray. And of course the more that it's possible to generate revenues from providing pirated content, the easier it can be made to provide that content to non-technical people, with fast downloads because you have the revenues to build the infrastructure to do so.
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Yes, people are copying rentals, but as I describe above that could be addressed easily. Also, consider this: In today's environment, does the copying of a rental really cost the studio anything? The studio gets their revenue from the rental in the first place.
The studio both loses revenue, because people just rip and return immediately, so fewer discs are required to meet the demand. And the fact that they can rip and return means they don't need to buy something that they would like to keep around, so they lose sales as well. When someone is walking through the grocery store and they see a movie on the shelf, and it costs $19, how many will buy it vs. thinking, I could just put that on my Netflix queue, it'll be here in a couple days and I can rip it and keep it instead.
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When business embraces new technology, they inevitably make a fortune.
This is a statement that is true (mostly) but basically meaningless to this discussion. There ARE people making a fortune, but they are mostly people making money off of the content without having to pay the price to generate the content. And the movie industry HAS embraced new technology. They spent a lot of money creating and adopting the DVD and BluRay formats.
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Where would the studios be without the huge revenues they are getting from legal downloads? Worse off, for sure. Yet they fought that for a long time.
Again, they are not huge. The revenues from legal downloads doesn't even cover the losses from downloading, hence why the music industry is imploding. You need to do some research I think. And of course, of what they do still sell, the price is going down more and more to try to offset losses from piracy, but it also lowers revenues. Compared to the cost of a CD when they first came out, in real terms adjusted for inflation, a CD is something around 3 times less than what it was. How many things do you buy today cost 3x less than they did decades ago? But of course people still use the high price of music to justify stealing it.
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Declining revenues are due to poor content. Revenues from good content are skyrocketing.
This is absolutely not true. You really are quite misinformed. It's well proven that the most popular stuff is the most downloaded. Since both the music and movie industries depend the most on the revenues from those things that happen to do particularly well, they are MOST hurt by downloading of the most popular stuff. And of course you have to explain why people would download stuff they that they think is bad. They don't. They download what they want, and that is the most popular stuff.
Even the (quite conservative) Harvard study, in its second version, estimated a loss of 20% to pirating. And this is a study that initially, maybe five years earlier in the first round, argued that there was no loss. Of course that first version of the study was very widely quoted on the internet, the second one not nearly so much so. Most industries, if they had 20% losses from theft, would be taking their security people out back and shooting them. And that's likely a quite conservative estimate, actually it's almost guaranteed to be, given the massive decline in sales of legal music since Napster.
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It really comes down to what's right. Will our government, will the Obama administration, protect consumer rights--or will they be bought off? I believe that as a consumer I should have the right to consume content I have legally purchased as I see fit. In the end, that will be best for everyone, consumer and business alike.
There's no such right per se. It's perfectly legal for a company that sells a product to require that you agree to usage limitations before they sell to you. It's not a product required for life or liberty, it's entertainment content. You aren't being stripped of any human right if you can either buy the product and agree to the usage limitations, or not buy it at all. Or sign up for some streaming service that will allow you to do what you want to do.
And, so far, it's NOT been best for businesses, at least not the ones who foot the bill to generate the content. It's been GREAT for people who provide the means to do the stealing, storing, and playing. And, furthermore, that damage has been done within less than 20 years of the internet going public, so MOST of the population up to now has been pre-downloading born people who were used to buying content. That group will get smaller and smaller over time.