Why does piracy still exist?

[Daniel]

Does anyone here think that piracy is a problem that shouldn't even exist? :mark: I can't recall the amount of times I've downloaded a song because I've heard it on the radio, it's catchy and it's good enough to listen to but not to purchase because you know in a week or two you're not going to want to listen to it ever again. My view is that record companies don't want music to have longevity and they don't want any one particular artist to be dominant because you could just buy their one album rather than buying 10 different singles each with a short lived number one on them because they make more money from 10 singles rather than 1 album. I haven't pirated a computer game for ages mainly because there are usually a few quality titles out there and you feel it much easier to hand over your hard earned cash to buy a proper game.

If songs were actually a reasonable price (closer to US prices) I'd consider buying songs off a site rather than downloading them illegally. Same goes for DVD's. Why would you pay 20+ quid to buy a seaon of a crap series when you know that once you've seen the bizarre twists and turns inserted into the story for the substandard actors to play out there is nothing interesting in going back and seeing it again.

Then there's the format. Why in this age of broadband and stupidly large hard drives do we get people to go to a store and pay for a DVD and case which they don't necessarily need or want? I bought the Great Escape a few weeks ago because I really like it. But to be perfectly honest the fact that it's on a DVD doesn't bother me, if I'd been able to download it (legally) for less I would have done so. As long as I own the licence to play it and am able to play it I'm happy either way. I don't know if anyone has ever used Steam (www.steampowered.com (http://www.steampowered.com)) but it's great. The games are cheaper than they are if you want a physical copy so you're not paying for packaging, it's very much legal, you can have your games on 10 different PC's at the same time but only play on 1 at a time, you don't have to wait! You buy it and it starts downloading straight away, you can buy games 24/7, you can delete your games and download them again as much as you'd like and it's convenient. Why not allow people to download movies as you can download songs? The nearest place to me which has any decent selection of DVD's is probably at least 40 minutes away and although you could use Amazon or any other online store to buy DVD's it still takes an annoyingly long amount of time (longer if Royal Mail are striking which they seem to be more often than not) to get to you in this age where we could just download it in overnight and watch it the next day. One thing which annoyed me greatly about Vista was the fact that I could (illegally) download it but not obtain a licence online to legally use it. The (legal) copy of Office 2007 we have was purchased online and we got the licence key via email which meant that within an hour it was downloaded, installed, operating and Microsoft had their money in the bank. Couldn't get any easier than that!

I'm very much against piracy but when you make it more difficult and inconvenient for people to do the right thing then you're always going to lose out to piracy. I personally wouldn't bother pirating the games I buy these days firstly because they're worth buying and secondly because it's probably easier and less painful to buy them legitimately than it is to do the wrong thing and pirate them. Kind of proves my point don't you think? :mark:

[penagate]

I agree with you and you've explained exactly why piracy still exists.
Record companies are trying to squeeze every buck out of the artists and consumers that they can using their outmoded business model.

I think charging for music is silly. If you want to support an artist, go to one of their concerts; they'll make more money from that than selling you a record. All file sharing has done for the music industry is give many independent artists free publicity and all the music industry has done for file sharing is slap it in the face. It's a war which cannot be won and should not exist.

Although I dislike it for unrelated reasons, iTunes is a brilliant example of how people are willing to pay reasonable amounts of money for quick, easy, and legitimate access to the content they want.
The record and film industries should be learning from this model.

[Daniel]

I agree with you and you've explained exactly why piracy still exists.
Record companies are trying to squeeze every buck out of the artists and consumers that they can using their outmoded business model.

I think charging for music is silly. If you want to support an artist, go to one of their concerts; they'll make more money from that than selling you a record. All file sharing has done for the music industry is give many independent artists free publicity and all the music industry has done for file sharing is slap it in the face. It's a war which cannot be won and should not exist.

Although I dislike it for unrelated reasons, iTunes is a brilliant example of how people are willing to pay reasonable amounts of money for quick, easy, and legitimate access to the content they want.
The record and film industries should be learning from this model.

The fact that iTunes forces you to use iTunes and an iPod kind of makes it a little less attractive. I think in some ways the battle against music piracy will go on forever and the labels will never win. If they'd embraced MP3 back when everyone was using Napster then perhaps it wouldn't be almost habit for people to pirate music rather than buy it legitimately online and piracy would be a minute problem.

[penagate]

The fact that iTunes forces you to use iTunes and an iPod kind of makes it a little less attractive.

Yeah—those were the unrelated reasons...

[Dave B]

Personally it's down to quality. I cannot download even DVD-quality video (and even that's not brilliant) quickly, and while I've no objection to watching the odd clip here and there in "broadband" quality I certainly wouldn't enjoy a film or well-made TV programme that way.

The same goes for music. On my crappy car radio you can barely tell a CD from a 128k MP3, but through a decent CD player and amp the quality of a properly produced CD is far far superior.

[Storm]

Well piracy exists due to one reason alone - the price of the original product!

Especially in developing countries, its unbelievable how the DVDs and CDs are priced in general...e.g a few years back any DVD would cost atleast Rs 1000 which is a huge amount in my country to spend on entertainment...consider that you can go to the cinema for Rs 100 or have a meal for Rs 50.
So pirated movies which you could by for Rs 50-60 suddenly become very attractive to any middle class person...Same with PC Games which used to cost upwards of Rs500 and pirated versions under Rs 100.

Now some of this difference is going down with Indian film DVDs under Rs 300 and Hollywood under Rs 500. Still its a lot of money for a single title.

[Daniel]

Personally it's down to quality. I cannot download even DVD-quality video (and even that's not brilliant) quickly, and while I've no objection to watching the odd clip here and there in "broadband" quality I certainly wouldn't enjoy a film or well-made TV programme that way.

The same goes for music. On my crappy car radio you can barely tell a CD from a 128k MP3, but through a decent CD player and amp the quality of a properly produced CD is far far superior.
But if there's a choice between leaving your broadband on all night to download a movie and waiting for it to come through the mailbox and getting equal quality from both? :)

[Daniel]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7029229.stm right on cue the record industry sues someone for a silly amount :mark:

[DonnieDarco]

I did once illegally d/load an entire season of Buffy, but I went ahead and bought the box set when it was released anyway. Plus it was terrible quality and since I only had dial up at the time, took me three weeks day and night, to get hold of. This is not something I ever felt like repeating :D

I love films and I much prefer to own them so I always buy. And I own a LOT.

Music is much more of a sporadic thing for me, and I can't even remember the last time I bought an album. I almost always only really like two or three tracks anyway, so there's no point.

But I do think music is more expensive to d/load than it should be.

[Daniel]

I did once illegally d/load an entire season of Buffy, but I went ahead and bought the box set when it was released anyway. Plus it was terrible quality and since I only had dial up at the time, took me three weeks day and night, to get hold of. This is not something I ever felt like repeating :D

I love films and I much prefer to own them so I always buy. And I own a LOT.

Music is much more of a sporadic thing for me, and I can't even remember the last time I bought an album. I almost always only really like two or three tracks anyway, so there's no point.

But I do think music is more expensive to d/load than it should be.
Good point Donnie. I think a lot of people who pirate DVD's tend to get it from a friend who got it from a friend because of the time involved in downloading a DVD, the fact that you might not be able to get a good download speed on a DVD plus a lot are bad quality and you could end up downloading for days and end up with a corrupt file :mark: But if you could download a DVD overnight and watch it the next night would you? :) I certainly would if it would make movies cheaper and easier to buy

I've also bought a lot of games that I've pirated because I liked them. Sometimes

[LotusElise]

I rarely even bother downloading music now, I normally just stream it. In terms of other things, I don't have my DVD player with me at the moment, so there's no point buying or downloading films, and you can't really get knocked-off games for a Nintendo DS. Whoever could come up with a way of making pirate cartridges would make a lot of money before being hit by the might of the Nintendo Corporation.

[555-04Q2]

Piracy only exists because the price of "genuine" goods are so high (as Storm said, especially in developing countries). Over here you can get top notch pirate movies (95% of the quality of the original) for a tenth of the price of the original 4 to 6 weeks before the original is even released at the cinema :s hock:

[DonnieDarco]

Good point Donnie. I think a lot of people who pirate DVD's tend to get it from a friend who got it from a friend because of the time involved in downloading a DVD, the fact that you might not be able to get a good download speed on a DVD plus a lot are bad quality and you could end up downloading for days and end up with a corrupt file :mark: But if you could download a DVD overnight and watch it the next night would you? :) I certainly would if it would make movies cheaper and easier to buy

I've also bought a lot of games that I've pirated because I liked them. Sometimes


No, I actually wouldn't! I like to own them, and I have an eye for a bargain, so I never pay the full price anyway :D

[Drew]

I'd never buy anything pirated and I never have bough anything pirated. However I'd take pirated stuff for free.

[Daniel]

No, I actually wouldn't! I like to own them, and I have an eye for a bargain, so I never pay the full price anyway :D
Fair enough :) I think the idea of owning something that doesn't physically exist doesn't work for some people. But for me the benefits of digital distribution far outweigh the downsides :) Though to be honest I don't see myself buying Simpsons Seasons to go with the 9 I already have through online distribution :p

[Brown, Jon Brow]

I've never downloaded a song from the internet legally or illegally. I always buy CD's. However I've never bought single, I always get albums.

[nicemms]

I understand where you are coming from. I think online music tracks should be reduced in price alot but I could never download a whole movie on line - it would take too long! However I think a solution would be if it was made legal for people to copy the DVDs themselves for personal use and pay a lower fee for that right.

When it comes to software - Why pay too much for software, when you can just have it for free - Microsoft makes enough money anyway! (However my version of XP is legal but I got it for free as my employer is liscened 2 give employees copys.

[Sleeper]

Most of the music I listen to is very much album orientated with many of the bands never releasing a single, and those that do keep the most interesting stuff for the album so downloading indavidual songs is useless for me, and most likely not possible due to the reletive obscurity of the bands I listen to (how many of you have heard of Kayo Dot, or could even find indavidual songs of theirs to download, whether leagel or not?). Piracy does take money away from the artists and record labels, though I couldnt care about the big names as they tend to run the industry like pirates anyway. With the (much) smaller groupes and solo artists, they tend to be semi-professional because they cant make a full living off music and find that they need the money brought in by the sale of CD's and DVD's just to cover the cost of production, revenue that piracy does reduce and leave people dealing withn debt. And dont believe for a second that the touring will make up for it, many of the cant afford to go touring much and those that do struggle to brake even. Green Carnation became a studio only band this year and will never go touring again because of the debt they are now in after a poorly organised US tour.

I dont download at all myself as I prefer to have the solid product of a CD on my shelf with liner notes and artwork, makes it feel like I got the complete package for my money.

[Hondo]

Piracy exists mainly because there are always those that want something for nothing. Then there are degrees of piracy. I know a lot of the early games were copied and passed around but in a way, that was fair. There was a lot of really crappy game software sold with some really fantastic box art. I would get a game from a friend and if I liked it, I would go buy it so I'd also have all the cool documentation, maps, and manuals that came with games then. Sort of a try before you buy deal.

As far as the music goes, some people are irked about having to buy an entire album when they only have an interest in 1 or 2 songs. On the flip side of that, because I had to listen to the entire album, sometimes you heard songs you liked even better than what you bought the album for and perhaps became a bigger fan of the band which in turn, led you to try other recordings from them. Some of those songs never get air play time. Case in point, I read where amongst Neil Young fans, Powderfinger is their favorite tune, but I can't recall ever hearing it on the radio.

Some piracy is just that. I don't know how many here remember Gnutella, but a lot of music and video world wide was swapped with that free p2p network. I loved it. I worked with people that would, using their computer and printer and the appropriate software, deliver to you the cd of your choice for $10 as opposed to the $16 or more charged in stores. Graphically it was not exact but it was a very close replica.

[donKey jote]

and you can't really get knocked-off games for a Nintendo DS

I never tried it and won't, as I would be giving my kids the wrong message, but I admit to having done some t'internet research and I believe it would be quite simple. Same goes for the wiikey. :dozey:

[Mark]

Depends really. In my car I have copies of all Travis' albums. But I don't feel too bad about it, because Karen did pay for them in the first place, I wouldn't have bought them myself, and I paid good money to go and see them live.

Downloading is too troublesome at the moment, you don't get the same quality as you do with proper DVD's, and you have services such as Amazon DVD rental you can see the films you want for a reasonable amount anyway.

As for songs, they are far too expensive, to download and keep a song should be around 20p for singles, and maybe a couple of quid for albums. Everyone gets less money but I'm not crying, they get too much anyway.