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Is Piracy In the Consumers' Best Interests?
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Apr 22, 2006 08:51 AM
from the cheap-dates dept.
from the cheap-dates dept.
moviemodel writes "Warner Home Video in China are beginning trials of 'simple pack' DVD releases at $1.50. They state they are doing this as a test to see if they can recover a market lost to pirate DVD's at 75c each. They also sell higher priced and more complete DVD sets as 'silver' and 'gold' packs. Maybe this marks the beginning of movie industry realism and long hoped for shift in business models, forced by piracy. Perhaps they can take it on as a better model for movie downloads worldwide, facing the same problem of competition from pirated movies. Is such a model viable in the long term?"
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Warner Bros. to Sell Movies Over BitTorrent 319 comments
martinmarv writes "The BBC is reporting that Warner Bros. is to sell movies over BitTorrent. Disappointingly, the pricing is set to be about the same as the DVD, even though the download will only become available at the same time as the DVD release, and can only play on one machine. In distributing films via download, Warner will join the ranks of MovieLink and CinemaNow. Perhaps they should wait to see how their $1.50 experiment works out first?." From the article: "Other Hollywood studios are now likely to launch similar services. They believe movie fans will prefer to pay a reasonable price for a legal downloaded movie rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film. "
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Less risk. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Less risk. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would you even buy the movie in the first place then? Just go rent it for $3.50 (or whatever) at your video store. You're certainly not the market they're aiming for if you don't collect movies and watch them multiple times... or do you use that excuse to justify pirating them via BitTorrent or Usenet?
Re:Less risk. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because of the bonus features, of course!
Who doesnt want to see mind numbingly repetitive out-takes and deleted scenes that no one wants to see? what about the countless hours of commentry by random nobodies.. "oh yeah this is the bit where i was in the back doing nothing important and i dropped my pen, so if you turn up the volume REALLY LOUD you can just about hear it hit the floor!"
Hell, i'd pay twice what you pay in the theatre for that..!
Parent
Re:They already have a website for these. (Score:4, Funny)
* The truth about finding cars (and yes, even your DRM crippled Holywood Movie) for under $500!
OMFG! What a bargain!
* How to instantly locate hundreds of DRM crippled Holywood Movies being sold right now in your area
Broker? Blockbuster?
* How to track down DRM crippled Holywood Movies that have been repossessed or siezed by the government
Seized from evil creatures with peg legs, steel hooks for hands, and eye patches?
* How you can find your DRM crippled Holywood Movie on the Internet
Hell, I do this already(netflix, not BT or USNET like you criminals thought!)
* How you can make anyone selling DRM crippled Holywood Movies drop their price by thousands!
At gunpoint?
* And much, much more!
Do tell!
Parent
Better than nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Better than nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Which just goes to show ya exactly how overpriced DVDs are. CDs as well.
Think about stuff from the catalog too, say Chaplin's City Lights ($22) or Badfinger's No Dice ($17), whose costs were paid off decades ago and so aren't relevant in justifying the cost of the disk. In fact, under the copyright laws that were in effect the first time I ever saw/heard most of the stuff in the catalog they should be in the public domain already. As far as I'm concerned Congress has breached their contract with me when it comes to these.
KFG
Parent
Re:Better than nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
On a similar note, a friend once mentioned that our local Wal-Mart has a $5 bin of DVDs. I don't shop Wal-Mart ordinarily (for oh, so many reasons) but this brought me in. Older stuff, but since I don't go to the theater very often (or watch much TV) they're all new to me. So for five bucks each I bought a few "new" movies. I know, it's still going to a bad cause (two bad causes in this case) but at least it wasn't $17 or $22.
Probably took Wal-Mart's considerable clout to get the studios to release even their old stuff that cheap. Concerns of true piracy and illegal downloading aside, I think some market realities are catching up to the movie people. Besides, here in the U.S. with gas fast approaching four bucks a gallon (with five on the horizon), heating bills through the roof, and everything else getting more expensive by leaps and bounds I know that I, for one, have less disposable income to blow on $22 movies (over twice what our local iMax charges!)
As another poster pointed out, how many movies are just so good that you'll watch them multiple times, justifying the expense of buying the disc? Not many. There are some, to be sure, but not many. The vast majority of new releases sold are crap. The studios know they're crap before the first scene is shot, which is why so many movies go direct to disc nowadays. They'd never make it in the theaters. Heck, if the gross rake-in figures you hear are anywhere near correct, I don't think a lot of theater releases are in the black either.
But that's okay. At seventeen bucks a disc, they'll just make it up in the DVD market.
Parent
P.S. (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps the difference between me and most Slashdotters is that I have actually been alive through those 50 years.
To me these breaches are not historical breaches of contract with the public, but actual breaches with me.
I was made specific promises that specific works would enter the public domain at a specific time.
They did not.
This is the breach, not merely that copyright law was modified.
KFG
Parent
Spot on (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, I feel like I'm in the same exact situation. I've expressed my dissatisfaction with the Sonny Bono Indefinite Copyright Extension nastiness. [wikipedia.org] The retro-active part makes me particularly furious
I've used the term "breach of contract" in many discussions. Is it possible to file a class-action lawsuit against Congress for Breach of Contract?
I'm quite certain that the lawyers would have a field day with that. The original contract was negotiated by representatives of the people, and I'm also quite certain that they'd argue that the terms of said contract were re-negotiated by representatives of the people. The whole "representation" thing creates a nasty grey area - we citizens aren't allowed to opt-out of laws we don't like.
In the words of Ed Howdershelt: [mauricereeves.com] "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order."
Looks like we're exhausted the first two
Parent
you got that right! Being around to see things cha (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh ya, my all time *favorite* "random courtesy roadblocks". WTF is up with that?? Remember back in school we were taught only supremely evil and totalitarian bad places like east germany and whatnot had those sorts of roadblocks (Your papers please!) and how wrong and illegal it would be here?
Man, there's a bunch. You are right, people of a younger age don't have any frame of reference on some of these subjects outside of an academic one.
Now here's one I keep trying to maintain a frame of reference on, the great depression. It's hard, but I try, I keep it in the back of my mind when I look at economic news andd geopolitical events. I wasn't around then, but my parents and aunts and uncles, etc, were, and I distinctly remember the stories they told me about it and how amazingly fast things can change and how utterly bogus the stock market/government currency manipulators are when it comes to hosing the population with their congames. Keep promising them just this huge something for nothing deal until they are all sucked in, then WHAMO, drop the hammer and walk off with all the REAL wealth leaving the peons holding the bag with worthless paper. Seems they pull this stunt on a big scale every other generation or something, because it takes that long for people to "forget" those "leaders" main skill set is *lying*. They are professional grifters.
Parent
If they're serious about it, then it is (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is the IPod so popular? Affordable tracks and
But for some reason I expect this to be some PR stunt, showing that in China you can't even get the market back when you go down to 1.50 bucks. One reason COULD be that the average Chinese doesn't have those 1.5 bucks to spend on DVDs. Why do you try it in China, why not in the US? Or Europe? Or some other country where people actually (still) have the money to actually buy content?
Re:If they're serious about it, then it is (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:If they're serious about it, then it is (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:If they're serious about it, then it is (Score:4, Funny)
Oh great, another dupe...
Parent
Re:If they're serious about it, then it is (Score:5, Insightful)
Your plan would work in the US. Unfortunately, the article is talking about China. These are two very different markets. And as deep44 mentioned, when you're competing with 75 cent versions, 5 bucks is still too much. $1.50 seems like a very reasonable number for this trial run.
Parent
75 cents!?! (Score:5, Informative)
Walking into the supermarket tonight I bought "V for Vendetta" for five RMB, currently thats about 60 cents. He's obviously a tourist.
It really is that bad here - but ive noticed that some studios are already doing this. Ive seen 60 RMB ($7) movie packs that are what we would see in the states - but who the hell would think of buying that when the best movies are not only cheaper but on every corner and more convenient. That said I have seen some maor releases (Harry Potter for one IIRC) that were on sale for only 20 kuai ($3) but still - when I can get it for 60 cents and its just around the corner.....
Its funny, a few weeks ago there were (almost) no bootleg DVD's for sale in Beijing. Apparently the government randomly declares "No Illegal Wares" weeks like twice a year. Who knows. The more I stay here the more it makes sense - and that is the scary part
Parent
Killing copyrights is in their best interest (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Killing copyrights is in their best interest (Score:5, Insightful)
And we all know how much they know about marketing and hyping, and how little about art.
In fact, killing copyrights would even put those artists out of business who still create art. They're few, they're well hidden on the 'net and you have to search them, the studios won't throw them at you.
And as a bottom line, we, the ones who enjoy their art, would be the loosers on this one.
Copyright isn't the problem. The problem is that the balance is off. Copyright came into existance to create a balance between those who produce, those who distribute and those who consume content. The balance is way off. But that doesn't mean we have to throw the right out, we just have to put it back into balance.
Parent
Re:Killing copyrights is in their best interest (Score:4, Insightful)
Copyright has its right to exist. When someone creates something, he puts time and money behind it, develops it and he should have a chance to earn money that way.
What? Copyrights don't have rights, individuals have rights. Anyhow, if someone wants to make money from a creation, try giving a concert - not monopolizing the distribution channel and microregulating how every individual on the planet copys information at their disposal. If you want balance, then let content flow freely and charge for content related services. Content doesn't have a natural limit in supply vs demand, content related services do.
Parent
Re:Killing copyrights is in their best interest (Score:3, Insightful)
As you say, the amount of service you can provide behind some content is limited. You can only make so many appearances, you can only give so many concerts. What would keep a studio from ripping me off?
Let's say I write THE song of the century and go on tour as "The Opportunist". Now, Phony Records puts up some studio gang and has them go on tour as "The
Re:Killing copyrights is in their best interest (Score:4, Insightful)
The big rightsholders (in the case of copyright) made two fundamental errors in their long-range planning. One, they failed to understand that advances in communications and processing technology would render their grip on their distribution channels useless. Utterly useless, and so far as music is concerned that cat will never get put back in the bag. Even if they could, by pressing some magic switch, turn off all peer-to-peer activity right now, there are a lot of people that have already downloaded so many tracks they'll never need to buy another CD. So, if the studios want any sales at all they'd best start learning to play nice. What, they're going to have to behave like any other manufacturer that wants to stay in business by treating its customers with respect because those customers can now go elsewhere? Oh my, the humanity, the humanity!
Two, they are finally starting to realize that what they have to offer are luxuries not necessities, for people with disposable income. Since Americans have traditionally had plenty of disposable income they were able to ride pretty high on the hog. Well, that particularly gravy train is slowing down and will probably come to its last station soon. The media companies (the "big rightsholders") certainly didn't help matters by buying laws like the DMCA, which have had an additional detrimental effect upon the economy. They shot us all in the foot with a
Better to have no copyright at all than the mess we have now. But the grandparent was right: there was a balance that was struck between the perceived needs of the creator of an original work, and everyone else. Given the pace of change in the modern world compared to when those laws were originally written, if anything the balance should have been tilted a little more towards the public domain. Instead, it has been dramatically shifted in favor of the major copyright holders.
Parent
Why not here? (Score:3, Interesting)
The key word is "contribution margin" (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, to make a CD costs, say, 10 cents. That's the difference between pressing this single CD and not pressing it. Material cost, if you want. Because the artist played, whether the CD exists or not, the hype runs, the pressing machine is standing there with the master ready to press, the workers are there, all
Piracy is what made MS Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Piracy is what made MS Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Piracy is what made MS Windows (Score:3)
This means that people who want to use Dreamweaver and Flash to learn whilst in univeristy or during their spare time can do so with the demo and a quick search on Usenet
Of Course (Score:3, Funny)
Of course (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course is viable. You just profit less. And even that perhaps is not true. I've been in China, where you can get absolutely anything in DVD for about 1 dollar each. In fact, it would be difficult for you to try and get a properly licensed film in China. I know I didn't found any. And there was another difference. I had friends there that had more that two thousand DVDs at home, many of which they hadn't had time to see. They simply bought on impulse, because spending 1 dollar is not something you think a lot about. Of course my friends had higher than average (for China) earnings, but in time more and more chinese families will approach that income level.
My bet is that if you had DVDs priced at 1.5$, film copyright infringement would end as we know it, and the amount of dollars spent in DVDs by the average family would grow. I cannot guess if that increase would be enough to compensate for the much-reduced margin on each DVD, but I would bet it would be better bussiness in the long term.
Add to that the release of DVDs on the same day of first screening (sell the things as people exits the cinema), and you have the film distribution model of the future. Big-screen film watching is a fundamentally different experience than DVD watching, and there is but little market cannibalising between the two of them. Film distributors should start to know that.
That sounds good BUT! (Score:3, Interesting)
That sounds good when you first hear it, until you realize that this is actually going to give the MPAA and their like even more power.
The industry globally adopts such a model, there is even less chance of independent films making decent money. Everyone has to sign with the "big labels" and take a cut of the mass-produced cookie c
Re:Of course (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, it's almost as if you could draw two intersecting lines. One line would represent the number of units people would demand as the price increases. The other would represent the number that manufacturers would be willing to supply as the price decreases. I wonder what it would mean when those two lines intersected.
Parent
Price discrimination (Score:4, Insightful)
Look around and you'll see zillions of clever ways to charge both 50 quatloos and 100 quatloos for the same isolinear chip. One is the "early adopter tax", in which the 100-quatloo folks get the first samples of the chip. Another example is air fares, where expense-account people get on-demand anytime travel but 50-quatloo people have to stay over Saruday.
Price discrimination feels unfair but economists say it's efficient and beneficial. More planes fly, more isolinear chips get built.
Piracy happens when there's no price discrimination. There are people willing to pay $15 for a CD, or at least there used to be. If you insist on selling all your CDs for $15 you miss out on the $7.50 narket and on the people who'd be happy to pay $3 to avoid the hassles of P2P. If you're not blinded by greed and scrambled by drugs you segment the market and put products at all of those price points.
Parent
It depends on quality of disc (Score:5, Insightful)
If they sell discs where the main feature (i.e. the movie itself) is crippled, for example by lower bitrate than on premium edition, by having no English language track, or by having forced subtitles to go with, this won't beat pirates.
If they sell discs with high-bitrate main feature (DVD-9 filled to the brink please), original-language soundtrack available and no UOP gimmicks, they win. Hell, if they do it consistently, they could sell such discs for a whopping $4.30 in Russia and I would gladly buy them over pirated ones [vad1.com]. Besides I throw the box away, anyway, and pack the discs into a wallet to save space right away. Just give me the properly mastered stuff, no frills.
To bad I suspect the cheap licensed edition would be crippled. Then pirates, who care about customers more, get my business.
Re:It depends on quality of disc (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Only if they realize what's *REALLY* going on... (Score:5, Interesting)
OpenSource, GPL, Musicians and Bands offering their music for free MP3 download, Linux - free OS, Blender, Gimp, OpenOffice...all free software that are comparable to commercial versions are a part of a HUGE new revolution that have literally SNEAKED upon the commercial industry, and because of their own onslaught on people...threatening legal users with DRM, SpyWare and restrictions....haunting people down for just being "people" - have brought fire to this revolution.
Because of this revolution, more and more people will witch to free alternatives, and the "biggies" didnt even see it coming for all their own greed and hysteria.
The way we exchange services - will change forever.
monopoly vs piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Lower prices and equal greater profits (Score:3, Funny)
it the economics (Score:5, Interesting)
I think video rental changed that by showing that alot of people would buy a video if it were sold at a lower price, and the studios would reap the profit instead of the people who rented the video. In many ways the video rentals places were stealing money from the studios in the same want online piracy is, and video became priced to compete with that grey area of acquisition.
Now, when we got DVDs the studios got greedy. They jacked the price, but that was somewhat defesible becuase of the added value. What they did do is put unskippable ads, warning, etc that made the DVD less valuable. In most cases, one cannot just put a DVD in and have it play. In addition, if one just wants a movie, it can't be had. The consumer is forced to pay for the extra content. And if the consumer wants to keep the original for backup and watch a compressed version in a more convinent format, for instant putting an entire series of one DVD, that cannot be easily done.
So the economics is this. People who want the DVD product tend to pay for it. People who merely want to watch the film once tend to rent it. People who do not want the DVD product, but want the film, are just out of luck. There is simply no legal way to aquire the film without the baggage.
And so we back to the dawn of video rental. There is no legal way to acquire the product, but there are many grey areas in which the product can be aquired. So the studios are either going to ignore this demand and perhpas not maximize profit, or find a way to tap at least some of the sales. There are limits. DVD DRM is not going away, so person who do not want to deal with 10 DVD for a season are still going to download, but a $1-5 basic edition goes a long way to satisifying the basic market.
This is to cut their piracy losses (Score:5, Funny)
Fictitious losses (Score:4, Funny)
So if I make 100 billion pirated copies of a movie, does that mean they will go bankrupt?
Parent
Stealing or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I clone something (like a nice stereo, for instance - impossible, but for the sake of our conversation), it's not really stealing it. If I make it available to other people (i.e. like sharing my stuff on P2P), that's almost worse than stealing... but if I clone something that I wouldn't have purchased to begin with, that's incredibly easy to justify, because there's no money lost. Again, I wouldn't have gone out to purchase a $25 DVD, whether it could be had for free or not, just like I wouldn't have gone out and purchased a $1200 stereo when my $150 Aiwa that I already bought works great. There's no physical product missing somewhere... I cloned it. Now if I could only clone a Viper...
The ultimate question in my mind is, what is the actual cost of manufacturing and distributing? It's like a $0.03 piece of plastic, the disc that is. Generic packaging like they talk of here can't cost very much. If it gets 15x the people to start buying movies again IN ADDITION to the people who currently pirate them, well... for $3 or $4 per release like some have suggested, I bet they stand to make their money back.
Certainly the music industry won't be far behind in this little "experiment".
Re:Stealing or not? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's certainly an argument that I've used myself; however, it's still illegal, and so if you do indulge in copyright infringement, you have to accept the risk of getting caught and being punished for it.
Just becaues you personally disagree with a law doesn't mean it doesn't apply to you.
The ultimate question in my mind is, what is the actual cost of manufacturing and distributing? It's like a $0.03 piece of plastic, the disc that is. Generic packaging like they talk of here can't cost very much.
Cost of manufacture and distribution of the disc is peanuts. Don't forget, however, that the film on it wasn't free to make. For old films and those that have already recopued their costs the production cost is immaterial, but for newer ones that have yet to break even (they don't all manage to at the box office) it's definitely a factor.
Parent
It worked in Poland (Score:5, Informative)
Starting, in China? Try Poland for years... (Score:3, Interesting)
Meanwhile CDs with latest crappy pop music start far beyond the $20 point and -- SURPRISE!!! -- no one is buying them
Robert
The black market is always a market force (Score:4, Insightful)
As an example, consider the cost of cigarettes in Canada in the late 1980s. Tax rates were so amazingly high that ordinary people were willing to buy cigarettes smuggled in from the U.S. -- exact duplicates of the "legal" product, sold at a fraction of the price. The black market became ubiquitous and socially accepted. It undercut the legitimate market so badly that the government had to lower taxes so there would be a legal product left to tax.
Now consider a product like a movie, where the cost of reproduction is absurdly low -- zero, in fact, if you just download the movie from the Internet. DVDs in the U.S. are priced to compete with that, and I do in fact buy DVDs of films I could easily download. In China, movies are burned to DVD then sold for $0.5. Studios, trying to compete with that, hope that a price point of three times the black market rate will attract buyers to their legitimate product, thereby making the production of ripoffs unprofitable.
Re:How about quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
If I download a ripped movie, I get the movie I want without the crap. It starts the moment I put it in the player.
Right now, I prefer downloaded movies over pressed copies because I'm actually getting a superior product.
Parent
Re:In a true open market (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Piracy-The new business model. (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't pretty much all changes enacted through 'illegal' acts? civil disobedience, revolutions, founding of the United States of America..
Illegal
Parent
Re:Old argument (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya mean like constantly expanding the range of copyright laws so that nothing ever actually goes into the the public domain, so the free money cow never dries up?
KFG
Parent
Huge difference between real property and IP (Score:5, Informative)
That position is very short-sighted. It isn't "theft" to extend copyright laws. The rough analog to the copyrighted material devolving from private property to public property is Congress writing a law that causes your house to be turned over to the city after 100 years. While you almost certainly will be dead when it happens, what public good is enhanced by destroying private ownership?
That's not even a roughly accurate analog. Real property is finite. There is only so much real estate on the planet. Ideas are not. Therefore, scarcity of real property exists without any outside involvement by the state or any other actor. Scarcity of intellectual property is a legal construct designed to provide people who create innovative ideas with the ability to profit from them for a short time, in order to spur the development of new ideas, which are beneficial to society as a whole.
The impetus for creation of intellectual property right flowed from the goal to improve society by providing a carrot to innovators. It was government intervention in economics, not the development of a fundamental right akin to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
While I'm sure the public good can be shown to be "served" by confiscating physical works of art, it still smells like theft to me. Is the case any less obvious with intellectual property that is essentially entertainment?
The public good has not been shown to be served by confiscating physical works of art, which is why in the United States the government can't just come and snatch up that Picasso you have hanging in your den. Intellectual property that primarily serves entertainment purposes is not physical. It is constructed by the legal system, in the same way that any other IP right is constructed. Recorded art in particular is the beneficiary of government largesse.
If there were no way for us to record musical works or create movies, artists would still be able to make money through live performances, because those performances would be naturally scarce, without any government intervention. This is in contrast to the situation we have today, where music and movies are anything but scarce. They are all around us, distributed in a wide variety of forms. Yet the movie and music industry would have the government continue to enforce an arbitrary scarcity that bears no relationship to economic reality. If we were talking about the distribution of physical products like silicon chips or automobiles, we'd call this protectionism - government intervention that serves no party but the big businesses being protected. Ultimately, it doesn't even serve them, given that it only shields them from economic forces that should be causing them to alter their business model.
Copyright coverage for a short time does spur creation of new art, but copyright of any duration is always a tradeoff between the previously-existing natural rights of society at large and the artificially-created rights given to the copyright holder.
"The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but '[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.'" - Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. (1991)
Parent
Re:But what does average Chinese person make? (Score:5, Informative)
$8 for a DVD isn't so bad (assuming the rest of your calcs are correct - I didn't check)
Parent