I spent a small fortune on a record collection. Then the record format was abandoned and it was all CDs. I spent a small fortune re-buying that same record collection, insofar as the records were even available as CDs. Then we went all digital (yes, I know CDs were already digital) and it became MP3s. So I ripped my CD collection and assigned them to a box in my attic. I will not be spending money on spotify or whatever other service to listen to stuff that I already have.

Movies... I spent a small fortune on a movie collection. Then I moved countries and to my surprise found that my movies wouldn't play anymore. So I ripped the DVDs to digital media and played them using open source software. This saved a small fortune and was more convenient as well. I think I still have the DVDs.

I spent a large fortune on books. Thousands of them. Typically read once, a much smaller number read multiple times. So I gave away my books, except for a few hundred that I still keep. I support the authors that I like by buying their books but I read on screens not on paper because my eyesight sucks and on screens I can set the font to whatever I want rather than to what the publisher thought was optimal.

There is no way the media companies are going to guilt trip me over any of this, besides that I read both Janis Ian and Courtney Love's pieces on the recording industry.

Copyright is great, it has enabled lots of people to earn a living creating content. But it has also become a weapon in an ever more absurd war between consumers and middle men, the producers caught in some uncomfortable position in the background.

What's interesting is that the middlemen brought this all on themselves: they equated buying a physical copy of a production with licensing IP, but the general public didn't think that way at all: they bought a book, they bought a record, they bought a movie. And passing on what you've bought when you no longer need it was and still is such an ingrained part of our culture that it felt really weird to have restrictions placed on what you could do with stuff you bought and paid for. So when the format changed from physical to nothing (bits) plenty of people felt that this was not quite what we had agreed to, after all we were paying for the medium as much as we were paying for the content so how come we paid the same or even more as before? And now we paid and got something that we could no longer share with others. No way to easily pass that e-book to someone else (talk about malicious compliance), no way to send the song you just paid for through Spotify or iTunes to someone else to let them hear it after you are done with it. You don't own the medium any more so therefore you own nothing at all.

And those publishers and movie producers are all laughing to the bank whilst doing nothing at all except for playing bank.

So copyright just with a shorter time limit?

Are there any links you could share for.. ..ehm.. ..research purposes?

Where do you buy movies, and in what format? Blu-Ray?

The difficult bit is working out what percentage of pirated copies are actually replacing a sale that would have happened if the content wasn't available to pirate. The more dramatic industry numbers like to claim it's 100%, which is ridiculous. It's certainly more than 0%, though.

I'd assume that for your indie game, there were a lot of people who wound up thinking "I would play this if it's free, but I wouldn't spend $X" on it. Adding successful DRM wouldn't have done anything to them but drive them away, and reduce the amount of buzz the game received. But then, particularly in the indie game space, maybe trading away a lot of buzz for a couple hundred more full-price game sales would have been completely worth it...

This is where the concept of services like Xbox Game Pass seem to be landing. Once someone has paid their fairly-small-amount each month, every game is now "free". Much like fairly-cheap streaming music basically stopped music piracy from being mainstream, cheap game-services might have the same impact on the game industry.

Though, much like streaming music, whether it turns out to be economically viable for the average game studio is certainly a question.

(For the sake of completeness: I don't pirate anything, so I have nothing to justify here.)

I think part of the question though is also, would they have been as popular as they were without piracy, which does provide some advertising benefits through audience exposure. It is easy to say a really popular game would still be popular without piracy, but some lesser known games might never have gained any attention at all if there weren't enough people spreading word about it. Of course trying to quantify the sales and word-of-mouth benefits from that sort of thing is extremely difficult.

Your story sounds like "World of Goo," which reported a 90% piracy rate from comparing unique IP addresses to number sold. Despite that, they didn't quit and recently released "World of Goo 2" still DRM free.

> The game had some online functionality (leaderboard or something). They were surprised when the number of accounts accessing the online functionality exceeded their sales by a dramatic number. The developer updates grew more and more sad as they switched from discussing new features to pleading with people to actually buy the game instead of copying it. Eventually they called it quits and gave up because the game, while very popular, was so widely pirated that few people actually paid.

Ok, but why? Whas the game actually unprofitable or did they just feel bad about some people getting it for free. You need to remember that a pirated copy does not equal a lost sale - in fact, sales may even be higher than they would be without piracy as popularity gained from pirated copies also translates to more legitimate buyers.

Yeah people pretending that "piracy" is good because they can try product first before buying which is true but lets be real

out of 100 people doing that how many actually buy product in the end???? if net gain is positive then developer would not pay millions to license DRM

Which indie game was that?

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I follow the newsletter from Borderlands Books in San Francisco. I usually buy one book off their best seller list a month (sometimes I’ll stop in and buy three or four)

I’ve recently started using my local library’s mobile app and I love it. (I typically use this for re-reading or audiobooks for plane trips) I’m tempted to donate my entire bookshelf to the library and let them store and maintain it for me :-p

Let me give you an example.

Some Lovecraft letters were translated into french some weeks ago. Great reading! There, Lovecraft gives his opinion about the litterature and art of his time.

And he mentions Nicolas Roerich. No idea who this guy was, but hey pretty interesting painter (thank god Google Images!). Ok, let's check on AA if there is a definitive book about his art.

No luck, but that very same guy wrote many books about Hindouism and eastern asia. After a few downloads on AA, no big deal, I am not so fond of them. Except for one that I knew nothing about (the name is Altai Himalaya, and I have absolutely no clue why this one is picking my attention, but it does).

That's definitely what I call serendipity.

And that thing happens a lot when you have a full access to whatever content is available. [and you are curious by nature]

In the end, retrospectively, such widespread access permits serendipity at a level that is absurdly miraculous !

That’s exactly how I do it. I enjoy reading DRM-free epubs on my Kobo, and whenever I finished a book I enjoyed, I buy it from the local sci-fi bookshop. I buy about 90% of all books I read.

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If you haven't read it, The Long Ride by Lloyd Sumner is (as I remember it) an excellent read.

maybe my tinfoil hat is on too tight, but to me that behavior sounds an awful lot like what a honeypot would do...

https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...

From above:

'The Dutch firm Ecory was commissioned to research the impact of piracy for several months, eventually submitting a 304-page report to the EU in May 2015. The report concluded that: “In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.”

The report found that illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games, according to the report. The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films: “The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”'

> I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to.

This is zero-sum thinking. Do you oppose libraries on the same principle?

Sometimes making a thing accessible can increase the overall market for the good, because it trains the behavior. The market for books requires readers, and readers are created by people reading.

I would not buy a book after downloading it from Anna's archive. But that's the wrong question in my opinion. You should be asking why aren't most books available in a DRM free format?

The main reason to download "pirated" books is that they get rid of all annoying barriers that exist in "legitimate" copies. It's a better product.

You feel. You think. Google up the studies of piracy and you’ll see that the biggest pirates are also the biggest buyers. Replace your private opinion with some science.

The reframing that will help you understand this is that these people are fans (I stole this framing from Korey Doctorow who releases his books online for free and encourages his fans to buy a copy if they like it). Fandom is a positive sum game. The more you do it, the deeper you go with it the more you’re happy to pay the people who create the content you love.

The easier it is for you to find new content the easier it is for you to become a fan of a new thing.

For example: I want to buy a copy of prince Pukler’s hints on landscape architecture. I can’t find a physical copy anywhere and I’m not sure if it’s worth $120 for a reprint or $500 for an older version. I could pirate it (I use that word loosely since this work is obviously in the public domain) and check it out, but I haven’t bothered so I haven’t bought a copy. This is a case of me NOT pirating and therefore NOT engaging with new content.

Your other points aside...

> I'm not against consumer boycotts, but it should generally come with a sacrifice on both sides--for consumers, that means missing out on the product or service.

I'm curious as to why you feel this way, genuinely. The decision to boycott means that there is no sale, full stop, so no money is being handed over. Why does anything after that matter? The important part, the money, is already decided from the start.

It's nothing to do with morals or conscience, pure self interest incites me to to take action and buy physical copies or official ebooks or collector's editions or CDs or lossless digital releases of works I first consume pirated. I want creators I like to make more stuff. I feel good looking at my bookshelf filled with things I enjoy. I don't like throwing out or donating tons of books every year because they're no good and I couldn't tell until I bought and read them.

Books seem somewhat unique to me in that the physical product is better or at least different from the digital one, so it kind of makes sense to buy it even if you already have a digital copy. This is unlike e.g. streaming services where the paid service is strictly worse than the pirated one (e.g. no offline, doesn't work at all with some monitors/setups, only low bitrates allowed).

Back when you couldn't buy most idSoftware games here I had to go out of my way to let an online buddy of mine with a non-German Steam account buy and gift the collection to me. So it does happen. And I even got quite some duplicates as I had managed to buy some, just not all of them.

> you are supporting the people you like as opposed to whose work you want to read

TBH personally I find that a much more convoluted reason. It might be an edge case of "I will watch this clip of horrible person to get the original source" but actively seeking out material for free just so that they get nothing, but I can consume it in whole? That sounds really rare to me.

In several countries customers are forced to pay a special tax on empty media (storage) with the intention of proceedings to be redistributed among the copyright owners.

Some of these countries are codified under the Roman law principle, ie whatever is not explicitly forbidden by law, is simply not forbidden (as opposed to common law).

In some countries downloading the published media (eg a film after the official release) is permitted.

And those who download, paid for it in the form of tax.

Directive 2001/29/EC for the EU only (Article 5).

Other countries rely in provisions of WCT, 1996 (Art 10) and WPPT, 1996 (Art 16)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy has several countries listed, with examples/extent of these laws

I hope you support downloading books/films/TV shows/music by the customers who paid for this privilege.

You are probably right, I am not representative of the vast majority of people who consume products, whereas I collect [what I consider to be, for me] GREAT stuff.

But one of the point I also wanted to highlight is that I knew nothing about those stuff and would have had no opportunity to taste them and be convinced that they are GREAT stuff [for me].

And to come back to your comment regarding creators. The thing that I hate are creators [for example writers who are interviewed in radios] who sell their book with a marvelous speech, but the content is eventually very so/so. As a consumer I feel robbed.

> I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to

I like the idea that consumers only buy stuff out of moral obligation.

Like if you went to your ethical friend’s house and saw that he had empty book cases and no art on his walls because he hasn’t yet been imbued with the requisite moral fervor necessary to buy anything. It’s hard for him to be sure what he’s obligated to buy or that he’s obligated to buy anything since it would be wrong of him to know what’s inside any book without buying it first.

And then you went to your no-good, dirty, downright despicable friend’s house and it’s full of books and art because for every 20 books he pirates he buys one, and because he’s just so darn unethical he pirates a lot of books

> But I flat out don't believe the "piracy doesn't lead to lost sales" shtick, of course it does.

I'm not as certain as you are. Correlation does not imply causation, but media sales have trended upwards in the age of piracy which leads to some interesting hypotheses.

A few years ago Shirley Manson (lead singer of the 90s band Garbage) accused YouTube of making its fortune off the backs of content creators - basically charging the entire enterprise as being one big exercise in copyright infringement. And yet the music industry, as well as Hollywood, seem to be doing better and better each year in terms of dollars made. Some of the distribution models have changed - broadcast and cable television are pretty dead in the water, but the entertainment industries in general seem to be doing better than ever. And yeah lots of individual artists are still getting raw deals from Spotify and labels etc. as they always have. But industry-wise, in terms of dollar amounts, it seems there's more money to be made than ever before from creating and selling entertainment.

The statement you made that I absolutely agree with is that it's hard to get real world data on this. An individual who is able to get free access to something may be unlikely to ever pay for that same thing.But the answer to the question: "Does piracy hurt the industry's bottom line, or help it on the whole?" is a very difficult question to answer. And we have to consider the even harder stuff to measure. Things like: is a teenager who pirates recorded media more or less likely to buy merch and concert tickets? More or less likely to buy a special edition package with tangible collector items?

At the end of the day, I have no clue.

I also offer all of this being very pro-capitalism and pro-intellectual-property. I don't condone piracy. But if we're just looking at raw data and trying to form our hypothesis, we have to start with the fact that the raw data points to upwards trends on the whole.

Ok, there are not only obscure stuff. More blasts from the past, that really would deserve a better exposure. In term of non-Marvel/DC comics, things from Bernie Wrightson, P Craig Russel, George Besse, Alberto Breccia, Moebius, Druillet, Scuitten/Peeters, and others. In term of letters, once again the almight Lovecraft letters are really jaw-dropping ! For movies, I discovered Vincent Price, Sam Peckimpah, John Ford, Wim Wenders.

So nothing really out of the "normality", but they are no longer marketed and are slowly fading to grey.