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Originally Posted by
DuB
Uh... correct me if I'm reading you wrong, but are you now arguing that nobody illegally downloads music?
I'm arguing that profits lost to piracy are recouped in increased sales, or at the very least, that piracy doesn't cause such a massive negative impact on the music industry as you paint.
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I've seen lots of conflicting data on record industry sales figures, so by this point I've just accepted that the issue has become too politicized to put too much stock in any one source. The music industry insists that sales are tanking while blogging music pirates insist that the industry is doing better than ever. So I'm skeptical to the data presented by either side. But I'll point out that even if sales figures really are higher than ever, there would be many other potential reasons for this than "piracy increases sales" (which, again, assumes an implausible causal link that I'll discuss below). As a couple quick examples, the world population (i.e., music consumer base) does continue to grow and grow, and the Internet has brought one-click music purchasing capabilities to nearly everyone's cell phones, which are themselves becoming increasingly ubiquitous across the globe.
I consent that the issue is too politicized to trust any one source, but a point I think should be make clear: the increase in internet sales, as in a per-track basis, has hurt the music industry far more than piracy ever has. Albums are the most profitable by far.
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The reasons are irrelevant. People like Joe Music-Lover exist for whatever reasons (my Dad's spending patterns are more or less like Joe Music-Lover), and they contribute to a net financial loss. More importantly, if the direct causal link between piracy and buying is negligible (which I have suggested is the case and you have implied is not), then even someone who buys 99% of their music and downloads 1% represents a net financial loss.
Assuming the link is a correlation and not a causation, then yes, piracy is purely detrimental. The question is: to what extent is it detrimental? If the losses are marginal, then is it really worth pursuing the matter? If the sources are as uncertain and controversial as they are, that indicates that the matter is not cut and dry, and it remains undetermined exactly how much the RIAA is losing as a direct result of piracy. The main headquarters could be losing a hundred bucks due to an inefficient cooling system every year, but that's hardly a good reason to installl a brand new 100,000 dollar system.
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Originally Posted by
Alric
That is like saying, its okay to steal two apples, if you buy two later. If a company sells an apple for two dollars and makes a dollar profit. Then buying two apples makes them a two dollar profit. You stole two apples but it only cost a dollar to produce each one. So in actuality the two dollars they made from you buying the apples, evens out with the cost of the two stolen apples.
In other words, its okay to steal two apples, since their not actually losing money in the long run. In fact you are now an apple lover, and you will buy apples all the time, increasing their profit. So if everyone stole a few apples, apples companies would make more money in the long run. I think most people can see the flaw in this argument. Most would probably object and say it is wrong to steal, even if the math did say the company actually benefits from it.
Still wrong. Stealing two apples removes the vendor’s opportunity to sell those two apples. Piracy does not. To make the example work, every pirate would have to walk into a store and physically remove the item in question, which obviously doesn’t happen. The attitude of the vendor also comes into play. If the vendor were smart, he’d see that if he gave a person an apple now, they may become hooked on apples and come back for much more. For the relatively tiny cost in the present, that is a good business strategy, and one that has been employed in other industries. If I ran a company, I wouldn’t be miffed over a few pirates, and certainly not to the extent that I would invest large quantities of money and resources to developing new DRM technologies that do effectively nothing at all but piss off valid customers. Now you can say that stealing is always wrong, no matter what, but if both parties ultimately benefit, is it still purely wrong? Maybe. But morality isn’t the question…the question is whether or not it is worth going after the thief. In this situation, the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term costs, and it certainly beats drilling a hole through each apple so I can secure them to the stand to prevent thieves from snatching them once in a while.
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Any way I think its kind of silly. If a person who pirates musics or games, didn't pirate music or games they would buy them. You really expect me to believe that a person who downloads 100 songs a year, wouldn't buy even a single CD, if he couldn't download them? A person who downloads 30 games a year, wouldn't buy even a single game if he couldn't download them? Bullshit, of course they would buy cds and games.
Who the hell said that? I said I would not buy certain kinds of games or music, and that is true. A year ago I did not like techno. Guess what changed that? Youtube. Grooveshark. Playlist.com. A handy thing called a download manager. I didn’t buy techno until my tastes changed and I realized I actually liked it. Now I do buy techno. Without those tools, I wouldn’t have realized my love for the genre until later, possibly much later, in life. Same for video games. I had no idea a year ago that I actually enjoyed FPS games. I got Halo and found out they’re awesome. Now I buy them. Again, if I had to pay for every single game, I would have been much more likely to stick to what I know I like, and I buy those games anyway.
If piracy were eliminated entirely, of course people would buy things. Piracy can help open doors, though. It can help people find out what they’re interested in without them spending fifty bucks on a new game it turns out they don’t like after all, leaving them jaded on some level and more hesitant to buy unfamiliar games. It is not a thing of pure, absolute evil.
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Also if you upload a game, then its a moot point. If you upload it, you have no control over who downloads it, which means very well the person who downloads it, would have bought it but instead stole it because it was cheaper.
Funny you should bring this up…the first lawsuit against a pirate was against a person for uploading three movies for download. Lawsuits, though sometimes filed against downloaders, are usually more focused on seeders, or those who make the file continually available for download.
