In which I make an unsubstantiated claim, to see what y'all think of it.

[xiphias]

A thought for your consideration: online piracy is about convenience, not primarily money, unless the amount of money is so high that it becomes an actual barrier.

If it is easier and more convenient to get content illegally, people will do so. If it is easier and more convenient to get it legally, people will do that. And, for the most part, "reasonable" prices don't count as an inconvenience.

I contend, without any evidence, that iTunes did more to stop file sharing than RIAA lawsuits ever could. It's just easier to spend 99 cents to download a song easily and conveniently than it is to get it through a Napster-like service.

Movies and TV shows are pirated when they are released at different times around the world. If a Doctor Who episode comes out, but won't be released in the United States for another six months to a year, people will Bittorrent it, because they don't want to wait six months. However, if it's available legally at the same time, it's just easier to get it THAT way.

If the MPAA and RIAA want to stop online piracy, they should make their material available for sale simultaneously everywhere, and at a price people want to pay. The existence of significant online piracy is a sign that, primarily, they are preventing easy legal access to the material, or, possibly, that they are charging prices that the market won't support.

But more the first than the second.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think you're right.

[navrins]

I do agree making it easy to access material legally at a reasonable price (when the owners of the material intend to do that anyway) would reduce piracy. Whether the reduction would be 1% or 99%, I couldn't say - but I suspect (with as much evidence as you cite) that it would vary greatly from community to community. The reduction among your friends probably wouldn't be representative of the reduction among baby boomers, American teenagers, or Russians or Chinese. Some people won't (or can't) pay a penny for music; some of those pirate to get it anyway. Some can't be bothered to find out if they can get what they want legally. At this point some have simply grown up on pirated music; pirating music is as natural to them as jaywalking. Changing that would be hard. (Not that legislation like SOPA or PIPA would do any better a job.)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Among the people I know it's partly convenience, and partly a cross between price and a sense of justice. People tend to feel that if they've paid for something, they ought to be able to copy it on to all their devices.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

This is absolutely true.

[snippy]

This.

Already during my life time I've rebought all my music (record album, cassette, CD, MP3) and my movies (VHS, DVD). Books were always a problem with hardback/paperback issues, and now I have an e-reader too. I'm frustrated and fed up.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

True, but nothing the American government does will have any effect on that . . .

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Hear! Hear!

[sethg]

Gabe Newell, cofounder of Valve, agrees with you.

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market.... [T]he people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia.... So that, as far as we’re concerned, is asked and answered. It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

"One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates."

Apropos of that, is this image (which I think is exactly right): http://imjustcreative.posterous.com/experience-of-dvd-pirate-vs-paying-customer

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

I think you're right. I'd much rather buy my TV and movies on iTunes or watch them streaming on a network website with ads, than go looking for a torrent site, try to figure out what's a reputable site, and deal with malware that might arrive.

Partly that's convenience. Partly that's because I earn my living with my brain and creativity and I want to support other people to do so. And partly it's ... if a TV series is still in production, I want the decision makers at the network to know that I am watching and willing to keep paying, even though I don't own a conventional TV feed. So I look harder for legal visible sources for stuff that's still in production.

I am aware that not everyone has this kind of privilege. But I think there are enough people like me that more convenient availability would make a significant difference.

[dhole.livejournal.com]

It seems like a good test is if the most popular songs on iTunes are also being heavily downloaded. As far as I can tell, they are (based on looking at the top 40, and the number of seeders & leechers on the Pirate Bay.) Of course, I just did a casual google, rather than in-depth research, and I didn't have a control group to compare, but it seems like the sort of thing that wouldn't be too hard to get solid numbers on.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

You see it, I see it, why don't the lawmakers see it? 1. Ignorance of the net. 2. Blinded by lobbyists.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Z was saying that they ought to look at the Steam model. Steam is a site for computer games which makes it easier to buy legally than to illegally download, and lets you play the game on any computer as long as you are logged in and the game works. It's wildly popular.

[navrins]

Well, alternatively, it might just not be true. We're amateurs looking casually at the world and making casual inferences about it. Other people actually do studies on this sort of thing, and it might be that what they've found indicates we're wrong. Obviousness does not imply accuracy.

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

I think that you're correct for some segment of the market and the general population. "Casual piracy", I've heard it called. But there's another segment of the market for whom that's completely *not* true, and even if iTunes had every song in the world, with no DRM, at 10 cents a track... they'd still be getting everything from bittorrent.

The difficulty of the analysis then is comparing the two market segments. The segment that you're talking about can be pushed back and forth across the line. Make legal content easier to get, and they stop pirating. Give out insane prices and draconian DRM, piracy goes up. The content providers want to have strong DRM to protect their rights as content creators, so they're trying to push on the other end of the lever. Which just results in *everything* being harder to get, legal or illegal, and just annoys people. But because they're in effect pushing on both ends of the lever at once, they're not moving the midpoint at all.

The *intent* of SOPA, poorly understood and even more poorly implemented, was to try to strike at the *other* segment, the hardcore pirates. The part that both the lawmakers and the content providers have always failed to understand about that fight is that you *can't win*. For two reasons. One, the pirates are smarter and more agile than you. If you plug one hole, they just make a new one, and life goes on. They broke Napster, they broke Kazaa, they're tightening the noose on parts of the bittorrent network, and they just broke Mega. None of which makes any difference at all to my ability to acquire content. *shrug* The other problem, is that even if by some miracle you could magically stop all the pirates forever, it wouldn't make *any* difference to the rate at which people bought your content. The people that are doing that much downloading were never going to buy the thing in the first place. If we can't get it on bittorrent, we'll probably just do without.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

Shhhhh. We can't say that any more. Don't you know? They'll send the Two Vitos after us if we realize that the US government is not all-powerful.

*wry face*

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

This, and also what linenoise says.

iTunes may make it convenient to access music, but not, by my standards, to manage it. So I don't use it, which, in my case, means doing without.

Kiralee

[badmagic.livejournal.com]

Mostly true. At 99 cents per song, yeah, most people will buy it instead of torrenting it. At 5 bucks a song, you'll start to see more people taking the pirate route.

So if you were thinking of telling Apple to go jump, from now on music is gonna cost what you think it should cost, step #1 would be a preemptive strike against that route.

(Although the RIAA and MPAA see the Internet itself as competition. It provides entertainment, and they see that as their turf. If you're reading LJ, you're not going to a movie, or paying enough attention to the song playing the background to realize that you've already heard it a million times, and you want to buy new music. I suspect a certain amount of their motivation was to stomp on the intruder.)