[Phil Smith]

I haven't really followed the issues piracy and copy protection much, so I don't know much about it. But from what I have read, I sympathize with content owners wanting to protect their product. As others have pointed out, piracy is a huge problem in many other parts of the world. I read an article that said in Mexico, it's much easier to buy a bootleg CD than it is to buy a legit original, and that legitimate CD sales make up only a tiny fraction total sales. If YOU were a content owner, be it audio or video, wouldn't YOU want do everything you could to protect it?


This opinion, by the way, is from a guy that has a 1TB drive case and rips 3 Netfilx DVDs every week. If someday I'm no longer able to do so, I won't like it, but I'll certainly understand.

 

[overclkr]

You know, I guess that would have to depend on my bottom line if I was the content owner and how much am I REALLY losing??


For instance, what is the bottom line of the movie industry?? They say they are losing 3 billion dollars a year to piracy. Is their profit 35 billion?? If it is then I would certainly think that is acceptable.


Fact of the matter is, some people cant afford to go out and buy 1 movie a week or month for that matter. For those people, I understand.


Cliff

 

[Graham Johnson]

Any copied disks I have are ones I wouldnt have bought as originals anyway. (which isnt many) If its something good, I buy an real disk.


So they are not missing out on anything from me. I plain and simple wouldnt have spent money on the copies I have anyway.

 

[Dean Roddey]

Quote:

For instance, what is the bottom line of the movie industry?? They say they are losing 3 billion dollars a year to piracy. Is their profit 35 billion?? If it is then I would certainly think that is acceptable.

1. You wouldn't feel that way if you worked in the industry and didn't have a job because yours was one that fell into the jobs that would have existed if that extra 3B was coming in.


2. That's money other countries are stealing from our country (and other countries that have movie industries.)


3. Their profit is often non-existent for the theatrical run and they sometimes get most to all of their profit from video sales, or the video sales actually bring them out of loss. This is why they are concerned about it. $35B is actually more like the *gross revenues*, i.e. how much they brought in before taking out the costs of making that money.

Quote:

Last year, the six major studios—Disney, Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, Sony, and their subsidiaries—had total revenues of $7.4 billion from world box-office sales, $20.9 billion from world video sales, and $17.7 billion from world television licensing. Revenues, however, are what companies record, not what they earn. And, in the case of Hollywood, the revenues from movies, DVDs, and TV yield very different earnings. Once upon a time—before the TV and VCR—studios earned virtually all their profits from a single source: the theater's box office. Nowadays, in the new Hollywood, the world box office is a money loser: In 2004, the studios lost an estimated $2.22 billion on the $7.4 billion they took in from the box office. (Click here to see a table of this data.) This sad reality is not a result of the high cost of making movies, inefficiencies, or of any sort of studio accounting legerdemain. The simple fact is that the studios pay more to alert potential audiences via advertising and to get movie prints into theaters than they get back from those who buy tickets. Consider, for example, Warner Bros.' movie The Negotiator, with Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey. It was efficiently produced for $43.5 million, scored a world box office of $88 million, and appeared to be a modest success. In fact, Warner Bros. collected only $36.74 million from its theatrical release after it had paid check-conversion and other collection costs, the theaters had taken their cut, and the MPA had deducted its fee. Meanwhile, to corral that audience, Warner Bros.' advertising bill was $40.28 million, and its bill for prints, trailers, dubbing, customs, and shipping was another $12.32 million. So, after the movie finished its theater run, without even considering the cost of making the movie, Warner Bros. had lost $13 million. Why? For every dollar Warner Bros. got back from the box office, it shelled out about $1.40 in expenses, which was about average, if not slightly above par, for studio movies.

 

[Dean Roddey]

Quote:

So they are not missing out on anything from me. I plain and simple wouldnt have spent money on the copies I have anyway.

That's not a valid excuse for copyright violation. If the fact that someone wouldn't have bought something anyway is a valid excuse to steal it, we are in trouble.

 

[Graham Johnson]

My point is (before I got set upon). They get damn greedy.


The copies I have (all 10 of them out of a library of 500) are disks I wouldnt have bought and rarly watch.


If the companies didnt jack the price on DVD's who's content is 30 years old and sold them for a reasonable price, piracy wouldnt be as much of an issue for me anyway. The copies I have are of movies that arnt in production any longer.


I agree that new movie piracy is a problem, but anyone who is prepared to accept the crap quality of a copy for the sake of having it is the issue.


I know people who have entire collections of ripped disks. These people are the problem not I. The ones who religiously look for copied disks of newly released movies.


Dont dare lump me in with them! I spend more than my fair share every month keeping them in profit.

 

[dav99]

And after all said and done, is the expense of copyrite protection profitable, given that many would not make the purchase anyway?

how much of this cost do we pay?

 

[Ridebreck]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey That's not a valid excuse for copyright violation. If the fact that someone wouldn't have bought something anyway is a valid excuse to steal it, we are in trouble.

No it's not valid excuse Dean, but the record companies are sure going to use it in their calculations for what they think that they've lost due to copyright infringement. At any rate though, downloads/copies of the new/popular stuff is going to far outweigh the "old stuff that nobody would buy anyway", so it's probably a moot point. However, I would be curious to know the percentages of people who just pull down and old song or two from their childhood that they lost the tape of long ago. In reality though, I realize that it would be impossible.


The way I see it, there are two certainties in the whole copyright debate:

1.) People are going to continue to download/copy copyrighted material as long as it's available.

2.) The owners of the copyrighted material are going to continue to develop new and improved ways to combat #1.


The unfortunate part is that those of us who just want to listen to/watch our legally purchased material at our own leisure without jumping through firey hoops are the ones made to suffer.

 

[Phil Smith]

Well put Dean! The quantity and/or reasons for the theft does not lessen or justify the theft. Now, if I would only climb down from my holier than thou pedestal and quit ripping DVDs...

 

[Dean Roddey]

Quote:

And after all said and done, is the expense of copyrite protection profitable, given that many would not make the purchase anyway? how much of this cost do we pay?

There are on the order of a billion illegal downloads a week worldwide, the bulk of which is music, and I assume porn being second though I'm not sure. They count a track as a download, not an album. That's around 52B a year, let's make a round 50. If you assume (for easy calculation) that there are 10 tracks on an album, that's 5 billion CD's worth a year. Only ~9 billion CDs were sold legally in 2004.


It wouldn't take a large percentage increase in legal sales through enforcement to make a significant different when over half as many were downloaded as sold in total.

 

[Don_Kellogg]

Oh I thought it was not illegal to copy discs you own but it is illegal to break the encryption on the disc to do it.. Kinda like the it's illegal to sell pott with out a license or what ever becuase of the tax law, I don't know much about that just things my college room mate would ratent about around 4:20 every day.

 

[Person99]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey There are on the order of a billion illegal downloads a week worldwide, the bulk of which is music

I note that you didn't use the word "estimated" or from whom this statistic originated. I for one would like to see the methodology used to determine this statistic.


To put it in perspective, there are about 6.5 billion people on the planet. Current internet penetration is at about 14.6% or a bit under a billion people. For the statistic you quoted to be true, that means, on average, EVERY SINGLE person that uses the internet would have to perform 1 illegal download EVERY SINGLE WEEK. Assuming that only 10% of the internet users download illegally (which seems quite high), that means each of them must perform 10 illegal downloads EVERY SINGLE WEEK. Not sure you are going to sell me on this one without some really good data aquisition methodology.


Dave

 

[raster]

And how does this thread pertain to CRT PROJECTORS??

 

[Dean Roddey]

Quote:

To put it in perspective, there are about 6.5 billion people on the planet. Current internet penetration is at about 14.6% or a bit under a billion people. For the statistic you quoted to be true, that means, on average, EVERY SINGLE person that uses the internet would have to perform 1 illegal download EVERY SINGLE WEEK.

On average yes. But if one person downloads 100 tracks in that week, he's covered 99 other people. So, it could be one person per period downloading one each, or towards the other end it could be 10 million people downloading 100 tracks each, or more likely a mixture of in between. It's not hard at all to reach those download levels.

Quote:

Assuming that only 10% of the internet users download illegally (which seems quite high), that means each of them must perform 10 illegal downloads EVERY SINGLE WEEK.

I think that's quite a low estimate. Casual piracy is pretty widespread.



The numbers are from this study from Harvard Business School. They used metering of servers to estimate the download levels.

http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/Fil..._March2004.pdf


These folks are actually trying to argue that piracy has no effect on sales, so I don't think you can claim that they are biased towards inflating the numbers. But I don't believe that you can prove anything using their methodology. You can certain take measurements, but you cannot figure out intentions or motivations from that.


Their study was in 2001 I think. At that time the download numbers were quite high already. By the time they published, or maybe they just refreshed the study, they comment on some subsequent collection of numbers, which they believe are not exaggerated:

Quote:

11At the end of 2003, roughly one billion songs are downloaded per week (Wall Street Journal, 19 November 2003) or 17 billion file downloads during our seventeen week sample. This overstates the world-wide number of downloads during our observation period, since file sharing has a high growth rate (the number of simultaneous users on the FastTrack/KaZaA grew by over a third from mid-2002 through the end of 2003, and the number of world-wide downloads likely increased at about the same rate, Ad Age, 28 July 2003). During February 2001, at Napster’s peak, about half a billion songs were downloaded per week (Romer, 2002).

So even those numbers are a couple years old now, and the numbers are likely up from that. There was also a study commissioned by the British Govt from an independent think tank that did demographic studies, which I think is the only realistic way to get useful numbers in this area. They showed significant drop of purchases because the interviewed people could get it for free.

 

[E. Martin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by raster And how does this thread pertain to CRT PROJECTORS??

It's right up there with your past CRT entry...

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=500017



While sad and timely, it is not at all pertaining to CRT projectors.


Pretty good arguments can be made that the copy protection and piracy that leads to copy protection zings all of us who own a display and wish to watch something other than network television.


It truly astonishes me that you have such a high post count and yet have said so very little, of value. A simple search feature reveals Rasters off topic posts as well as "for sale" items (in the wrong forum/venue).


With all due respect... Give it a rest man….

 

[raster]

I watched John on my crt, it was on topic

 

[Dean Roddey]

Quote:

To put it in perspective, there are about 6.5 billion people on the planet. Current internet penetration is at about 14.6% or a bit under a billion people.

BTW, is that percentage a measure of individuals or households? They usually measure that kind of thing in households, right? That would put the number of individuals with access a good bit higher. And I wonder if it counts all those college age kids who even if they don't have access in the household they live in, get it through school, and who are among the worst case offenders?



And, for what it's worth, the DRM scenarios that are going on now aren't so much about now, they are about the infinite future ahead of us, where connections into the home get very fast and the tools to pirate become more and more refined so that more and more people can easily use them. Growth of piracy has been very fast, and even if it levels off a good bit, we are still talking about the rest of human existence on this planet that we still want to be able to encourage people to create intellectual property and to be able to do it professionally.


The important horizon right now is probably a decade out, where if trends continue, it could be a serious problem. There are already places like China where there is effectively no intellectual property industry to speak of, because there is almost no respect for IP there. Obviously all Chinese are not evil people, but they have no problem destroying their own IP industry (important to any modern country today) for their own immediate wants. And if they'll do it, other countries will as well if human nature is allowed to take it's course.

 

[Phil Smith]

I don't see any explanations or rationalizations for copying that are not self serving. If the shoe were on the other foot, you non-empathic types would surely champion the copy protect cause.

 

[overclkr]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey 1. You wouldn't feel that way if you worked in the industry and didn't have a job because yours was one that fell into the jobs that would have existed if that extra 3B was coming in. 2. That's money other countries are stealing from our country (and other countries that have movie industries.) 3. Their profit is often non-existent for the theatrical run and they sometimes get most to all of their profit from video sales, or the video sales actually bring them out of loss. This is why they are concerned about it. $35B is actually more like the *gross revenues*, i.e. how much they brought in before taking out the costs of making that money.

1. Chances are Dean, the person that is watching that movie DOESN'T even have a job to begin with and couldn't afford to even purchase it anyway. While YES there is PIRACY, not EVERYONE is profiting from renting a movie for 3 bucks and copying it to keep for themselves to watch later. This is a ridiculous argument.


2. I will agree 100% BUT and that's a big BUT, think about other countries wealth and the condition of their economies before you make that statement. Most are VERY poor in comparison to the "middle income" American. Not to mention, the "middle income" American is not even considered middle class anymore. Hell, there is no middle class. There is "Rich" and "Poor".


3. That is a crock of ****. I've seen movies with a gross cost of say 5 million to make and distribute and easily made 10 million plus BEFORE they even hit DVD. That argument will not and doesn't fly with me. IF YOUR MOVIE SUCKS, YOU DON'T DESERVE TO MAKE MONEY ANYWAY. You deserve to lose on your investment as far as I'm concerned.


There is WAY to much value placed upon things like movies and WAY to much money being made period. When are people going to wake up and place priorities where they belong?? (I'm not EVEN going to get into that last statement right now). It's JUST A DAMN MOVIE.


Cliff

 

[Phil Smith]

Would you steal a Honda lawnmower from Home Depot and justify it because this particular model mower is crappy, and for making such a shoddy product, Honda deserves for it to be stolen? Would stealing it be ok because both Home Depot and Honda make $hit loads of money? Would you steal the mower and feel no remorse because your impoverished?


Cliff you're starting to scare me. I think you could come up with some bizarre, twisted justification for doing almost anything.