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EU Piracy Report Suppression Raises Questions Over Transparency

jagdtigger
3 hours ago, NowThatsDamp said:

Okay I know this news company said that, but is there any actual evidence of this blocking?

Spoiler

"At first I was willing to give the Commission the benefit of the doubt that the study had simply fallen through the cracks, since the responsible department underwent significant restructuring in 2014, after the study was commissioned.

However, now all available evidence suggests that the Commission actively chose to ignore the study except for the part that suited their agenda: In an academic article published in 2016, two European Commission officials reported a link between lost sales for blockbusters and illegal downloads of those films. They failed to disclose, however, that the study this was based on also looked at music, ebooks and games, where it found no such connection. On the contrary, in the case of video games, the study found the opposite link, indicating a positive influence of illegal game downloads on legal sales.

That demonstrates that the study wasn’t forgotten by the Commission altogether.

They also failed twice to meet the deadline for responding to my freedom of information request.

One cannot avoid the suspicion that the Commission intentionally suppressed the publication of publicly-funded research because the facts discovered were inconvenient to their political agenda."

 

Source: https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/09/21/eu-paid-report-concluded-piracy-isnt-harmful-tried-hide-findings/#.tnw_3gHvv239

I know it's not blocking but im replying to your first comment.
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4 hours ago, NowThatsDamp said:

The average blockbuster movie only nets 15 million dollars after roughly 400m in production costs, meaning 5% loss of sales equates to ~ 21m off your net profit (415m * 0.05).

 

I have hard time believing those numbers since highest budget film ever (according to Google) had a budget lower than 400m.

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On 9/22/2017 at 12:40 PM, ChineseChef said:

There is also a 3rd.  The "I would buy it, but there is no legal way to buy it in my area"

True, I hadn't thought about that.

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On 9/22/2017 at 9:13 PM, Lurick said:

But their record breaking sales year over year could have been even more record breaking year over year without piracy!

https://blog.thecurrent.org/2014/02/40-years-of-album-sales-data-in-one-handy-chart/

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/recorded-music-sales-by-format-2015-12?r=US&IR=T

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-the-music-industry-2011-2?r=US&IR=T

 

 

Quote

 

10 years ago the average American spent almost 3 times as much on recorded music products as they do today.

26 years ago they spent almost twice as much as they do today.

 

 

 

 

Quote

The music industry is down 64% from its peak.

 

Income from record sales has been diving since 2000. Anyone who thinks the internet piracy has nothing to do with that is intentionally ignoring the facts for fear it undermines their beliefs.

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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why piracy?

DRM

Hardware restrictions (like requiring a specific chip to play vids from some places)

money (people need money to eat and do things rather than spend on entertainment, besides the companies already earn so much)

 

Some companies have already gone bankrupt due to piracy (some game studios) but never EA based studios or other big distributors.

 

Its these big companies that make life difficult for everyone. The best DRM really is multiplayer, a lot of pirated games cant be played online and that sorts of makes it like an expensive demo as campaigns do take a lot of budget too.

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4 minutes ago, Nicholatian said:

All sounds great until you recall the EU study finding that it does exactly the opposite for video games… and we kind of already figured this out ourselves when you think about it. People who pirate generally aren’t potential customers in the first place. They’re just assholes.

 

If you want to minimise incentives for people to pirate, there are many ways to go about that. The first would be removing DRM from your title as much as humanly possible (the pirates already do this and yes, it incentivises people).

 

By the way, the “companies already earn” argument is nonsense. Remember that the biggest expense of almost any company around is human labour. Companies having millions or billions of dollars so they can pay for the livelihoods of all of their employees suddenly doesn’t sound so unreasonable now, does it? They stand to gain nothing from hoarding up wads of cash in a corporate vehicle, besides a safety net at best… Taxes are hell to pull out of a corporation in many jurisdictions, especially the US.

im not against pirating, but compared to videos and songs, games are affected the most when pirated because of the different rates that the developers/content makers get compared to the cost of the product.

 

If you've seen companies like EA and apple, i dont think they pay their employees well, they both release overpriced products, they both have very large bank accounts and a lot of assets, they can afford to pay their employees much better but they dont. EA and sony complain about piracy a lot yet have the biggest accounts.

 

What im saying is that the biggest complaints are the least affected by piracy. Some of the smaller studios that went out of business because of piracy barely ever complained. This is why many small studios move to MMO and ingame purchases.

 

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1 minute ago, System Error Message said:

im not against pirating, but compared to videos and songs, games are affected the most when pirated because of the different rates that the developers/content makers get compared to the cost of the product.

 

If you've seen companies like EA and apple, i dont think they pay their employees well, they both release overpriced products, they both have very large bank accounts and a lot of assets, they can afford to pay their employees much better but they dont. EA and sony complain about piracy a lot yet have the biggest accounts.

 

What im saying is that the biggest complaints are the least affected by piracy. Some of the smaller studios that went out of business because of piracy barely ever complained. This is why many small studios move to MMO and ingame purchases.

 

 

I wouldn't care about DRM if they actually provided some after sales service and actually produced a polished product that works as intended, (Looking at you ubisoftcock).     Also these companies charging full price for a Beta, then releasing DLC at stupid prices while there are still problems with the original release.

 

 

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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Just now, Nicholatian said:

Big guy vs. little guy argument, yeah. Pity me. As a manager of a game development studio, I’m going to call bollocks on that.

 

First of all, there are no “different rates” that any of us can attest to when it comes to building video games. A composer of a given caliber is going to want the same amount of money from any studio, regardless of their stature, as is a programmer, artist, or what have you. Why on earth would they? Employees and corporate fanboys are by and large mutually exclusive – one party has an obsession, the other has a career. Also identical are the tariffs everyone in the supply chain collects: Nintendo doesn’t care how big you are, they still want 30%. Same with Steam. ESRB doesn’t care how big you are, and if anything they may give lesser studios a break like the IARC does for games budgeted at less than $200K. In the abstract, the only cost difference is bureaucracy, and as it turns out small companies have to pay a lot less in that than guys with the big guns do.

 

You have no idea how much EA or Apple pay their employees, and you’re just as clueless about a basic capitalist concept known as supply and demand. How much people get paid is dependent on those two factors, and it has absolutely nothing to do with worker entitlement to being paid better “just ‘cause”. If you want to get paid more, learn skills that are more valuable. Stay in your lane when it comes to other people’s business until it personally affects your livelihood, and we’ll all be a lot better off, OK?

 

So far you’ve had no evidence for your claims, but I’ll go ahead and ask: is there anything empirical that demonstrates “the biggest companies are least affected by piracy”? Same question for the “smaller studios that [...] barely ever complained”. The vast majority of businesses in general fail because of poor management, and it’s no surprise given they make all of the decisions in a business. If you’d like to look at a different section of the reasonings, you can see here what the external factors all were. Don’t see piracy anywhere on that graph, but you’re welcome to show me otherwise.

I may not have a clue how much EA pay their devs now, but in the past it was absolutely terrible, 

 

The main point is that the biggest piracy complaints arent game studios, its the video and music industry. Download a recent movie and your ISP may warn you, download a recent game and your ISP doesnt care.

 

Supply and demand is something i am fighting against, its one of the problems that have ruined gaming in the sense of GPU supply.

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24 minutes ago, Nicholatian said:

People who pirate generally aren’t potential customers in the first place. They’re just assholes.

While there are those that will pirate no matter what.  There are those that would have possibly purchased the game, but didn't.  Whether that be financial restrictions, the inability to purchase said game where they live etc.

29 minutes ago, Nicholatian said:

If you want to minimise incentives for people to pirate, there are many ways to go about that. The first would be removing DRM from your title as much as humanly possible (the pirates already do this and yes, it incentivises people).

Very true, pirates generally get around DRM rather quickly.  At this point, DRM largely punishes the paying customer, and no one else.

31 minutes ago, Nicholatian said:

By the way, the “companies already earn” argument is nonsense. Remember that the biggest expense of almost any company around is human labour. Companies having millions or billions of dollars so they can pay for the livelihoods of all of their employees suddenly doesn’t sound so unreasonable now, does it? They stand to gain nothing from hoarding up wads of cash in a corporate vehicle, besides a safety net at best… Taxes are hell to pull out of a corporation in many jurisdictions, especially the US.

I don't have any issue with companies making money, I don't think that any of us have any issue with that.  What I have an issue with is some of the practices that these companies use.  No one likes feeling nickeled and dimed, and a lot of these companies participate in practices that makes many consumers feel just that.

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4 minutes ago, Nicholatian said:

I guess, but nonetheless quantifying that is pretty much a Herculean task. So it’s a wash for who would’ve or wouldn’t’ve… I doubt the pirates themselves even know, honestly.

11 minutes ago, Cinnabar Sonar said:

Agreed

6 minutes ago, Nicholatian said:

The absolute best way to communicate to these companies that you don’t approve of their shit is to stop funding them. Take your money elsewhere, and they will either shape up or ship out. It’s pretty clear that they don’t care as long as they’re getting paid… and I wouldn’t necessarily blame them for that. It’s a pretty human thing to do minimum-input for maximum-output – respectable or not, you can see that attitude in executives just as much as Walmart associates. But in the end, you decide to shop at Walmart or not. You decide to buy their games or not. Decisions aren’t always easy or cheap to make.

Whoever said that I don't do that?  I have very much not purchased a game due to me not agreeing with a companies practices. 

I'm just saying that the "big bad companies" isn't something that was just made up.  Even if it's quite silly, CEOs don't sit on piles of gold.

25 minutes ago, Nicholatian said:

You have no idea how much EA or Apple pay their employees

I would imagine that it would be a decent wage, if not employees would find work somewhere else. 

Especially because, while I do not know how much they get payed, I do know how much time goes in to making assets, writing code, composing music, etc.  The answer is a lot.

 

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5 hours ago, mr moose said:

Income from record sales has been diving since 2000. Anyone who thinks the internet piracy has nothing to do with that is intentionally ignoring the facts for fear it undermines their beliefs.

I have to wonder how much of that is because of people buying replacement records/tapes/CDs?  Whereas now they buy it once and never have to buy it again, so long as they don't lose their account or fail to make backups.

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4 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

I have to wonder how much of that is because of people buying replacement records/tapes/CDs?  Whereas now they buy it once and never have to buy it again, so long as they don't lose their account or fail to make backups.

and streaming

and youtube

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6 hours ago, Jito463 said:

I have to wonder how much of that is because of people buying replacement records/tapes/CDs?  Whereas now they buy it once and never have to buy it again, so long as they don't lose their account or fail to make backups.

I've thought the same,  but if there is a significant number, then that would make those figures even worse. Having a percentage of revenue not being sales on latest release records means that the drop in revenue includes what should have been a boost in sales due to said duplicate purchasing.

 

However, we typically only see a drop in sales/revenue of a product to this degree when there is an evolutionary change to that products need/design,  we still consume the same quantity of music (in fact it has been suggested more people are consuming music now than ever), it's just that in order to maintain sales they have had to drop the price,  which (in the music industry) can only indicate the emergence of a new supply chain that is cheaper.  which when you consider there is only one supplier and they don't compete with themselves then this can only indicate piracy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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6 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

and streaming

and youtube

Streaming has been taken into account (it's in the graph for it's contribution to revenue).  Streaming from conventional players (pandora, last.fm, spotify etc) only really started to take off in 2007-8. and these guys pay royalties for the music, so apart from not being early enough to cause the problem (which started in 1998-2000) the revenue still comes from there.  Youtube is a little different but I believe most tracks have to pay royalties.

 

What these graphs show is that delivery/medium has not really effected the industry (given in many cases digital content has increased total sales), The issue is the revenue from each sale is significantly less.  If you want to buy Black sabbath you have to get it from EMI,  it doesn't matter whether you stream it, buy the CD or get it from itunes, the money goes to EMI, they are the only supplier.  So if they have to lower their price when they are the only supplier in order to gain sales, it means that people are no longer willing to pay for it.  Given disposable income has only gone up and music consumption has gone up, then the only indicates an alternative to legitimate purchase.

 

There is an argument that people might only stream enough to pay royalties for half a record (I.E they only listen the lead track a few times), however not only are the revenue drops across the board (all distributions) but at 64% this really only indicates a major shift in consumer purchasing.

 

 

Don't get me wrong though having been a music enthusiast for the better part of 3 decades now.  When I started messing around with bands and recording Duran Duran were popular and no one made fun of them.   I like the fact that piracy brought record prices back to a reasonable level.  It was getting stupid when a latest release could be as high as $40 for basic CD.  But now they are about $20 for a CD and if you want the carrot extras and the box etc, then they are $30-40.  It was like a spur in the side to get a wanted change that only the industry previously had control over.  However in principal (and being paid $100 for 6 hours work behind the desk) I have issues with the severity of the direction the industry went.  

 

 

 

 

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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On 9/26/2017 at 10:38 AM, mr moose said:

Income from record sales has been diving since 2000. Anyone who thinks the internet piracy has nothing to do with that is intentionally ignoring the facts for fear it undermines their beliefs.

I'm sorry, but that's some serious "post hoc ergo propter hoc" bullshit :P

Many things have been going on since 2000 (and before), and attaching any causal effect to piracy just because of Napster's birthday is as solid as assuming Trump's presidency caused the recent hurricanes, since he took office in 2017...

 

But it's more than correlations not meaning causation (time series with trends are a fantastic source of spurious correlations): the link between piracy and different measures of performance for the music industry has been the object of several research projects, none of which managed to prove such a link. They simply cannot reject the null hypothesis of no effect. Part of it may be due to the difficulty of coming up with any empirical exercise with the power to identify such causal effect. Yet the fact remains that researchers have done their best to try to estimate an impact for piracy, and have failed to do so.

Therefore, it is actually the claim of an obvious impact of piracy on the music industry what needs "intentionally ignoring the facts for fear it undermines their beliefs": it may fit into your pre-existing beliefs, but the evidence is simply not there.

 

You may ask whether any explanation has been put forward for these trends? Certainly, there are some: it's much harder to reject an impact of technological change, as a whole. The reason why an individual effect for piracy can be pinned down boils down to the net effect of piracy being a negligible part of the effect of technology. First, piracy has both a negative and a positive effect: some people may pirate music they would have otherwise bought (let's say, if the cost of piracy was somewhat higher - piracy was always possible since the invention of the cassette), which drives the negative effect. However, others may try music they wouldn't pay for through piracy, and eventually decide to buy music (plus attending concerts and other ways of spending money on artists that data on record labels will typically ignore). And then there's a lot of people who wouldn't have bought without piracy and don't buy with piracy wither, but may download some stuff. That group inflates the downloads numbers (and the crappy lobbyist guesstimates of "foregone revenue"), but are irrelevant for the industry's trends. overall, as I said, existing studies can't reject the net effect to be zero. However, there are more channels through which technology has damaged large record labels: it has reduced the cost of producing good quality records, and it has almost eliminated the cost of producing copies of master records. Consumer habits have changed as well, and people consume music in a different way than they used to, to some extent. Streaming is a large part of the story in more recent years as well, and while streaming may pay a royalty (not the case for millions of Youtube uploads which linger without copyright strikes), the revenue thus obtained needs not be equal to the lost revenue from sales.

Essentially, technology has depreciated the capital stock of record labels: it used to be very costly to produce decent master records, and to mass-produce retail copies of these masters, and subject to large economies of scales. Owning the necessary equipment, being big (in volume), having the financial ability to pay for recording costs in advance, all gave these companies a large bargaining power in the past. As these advantages were made less relevant by technological change, their business position has weakened. Couple that with a business that steered towards disposable pop stars decades ago and you'll start to see how they were particularly vulnerable at the turn of the century: 20 years ago, they had a reasonable expectation to sell tons of Britney Spears' CDs to the people who are embarrassed about owning them today. But who needs to own CDs, or even MP3s. of the summer's one hit wonder no one will care about in 5 years? Gangnam Style can accumulate millions and millions of Youtube view without selling a single album to the same people - it's a more suitable way to consume "perishable music".

 

It's also important to emphasize that we are talking about record companies when we say "the music industry": while the early 2000s accentuated negative trends that were already developing for these companies, the situation was more ambiguous for the artists themselves. Sales went down, but they always got a small share of sales anyway; at the same time, merchandising and especially concert revenue increased. Since artists get a much larger share of concert revenues than record sales, their income didn't go down as it did for companies. These prompted companies to try to shift their business model towards so-called "360 contracts", which consisted in higher shares of album sales for artists, in exchange for giving record company a share of concert tickets and other sources of income as well. This had a limited impact, since, as mentioned, technology also made it possible for more artists to rely on smaller labels, or even record and distribute by themselves (at least those not aiming at truly mass market reach).

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I really have to question that RIAA graph. That supposes a really significant amount of people have the technical ability, and willingness to download music illegally, and then subsequently not purchase any music at all. I'm sorry, but that rings incredibly false. I'm not saying it's difficult, but as members of this forum, I'm sure we all know the average person wouldn't be able to download a picture from Facebook, let alone know how to torrent something.

And telling from the data, and what skews the results, is the nature of the format itself. Notice that when you could get singles/EPs, sales were lower. Once the record industry started limiting your ability to find and purchase singles, and forcing albums down your throat, their sales grew immensely. Once people could grab what they wanted with the advent of Napster, Morpheus, KaZaa, getting a full album made little sense. Now, with Spotify, iTunes, etc... the a la carte has placed sales back in line with actual demand.

It's not that pirating has taken away those sales, it's that they were never there to begin with. By forcing people to pay higher prices for albums with songs they didn't want, it inflated their sense of real demand. It's no different than Rogers having issues with their TV subscriptions; rather than realize their customer base doesn't want to pay for a package full of channels they don't actually utilize, it seems as if there is something to blame when their sales go down. 

DRM and ease of access, portability, an album for that one song you want....ultimately, piracy is a market correction. Consumers want reasonable prices, choice, and convenience. If piracy gives these things ahead of the maker of the product/service, then they better learn quick before they lose out. The music and movie industry were far too slow to react to a changing consumer base. They might have lost customers forever by allowing them to taste the convenience of piracy.

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22 hours ago, mr moose said:

Streaming has been taken into account (it's in the graph for it's contribution to revenue).  Streaming from conventional players (pandora, last.fm, spotify etc) only really started to take off in 2007-8

well the early 2000s was also Apple's introduction to the digital marketplace, and with iTunes store they did introduced at the same time the "you don't have to buy the whole album if you want just a couple songs, now you can just buy the on you want!" (and the crowd goes wild!) 90c per track and in the following years iTunes becomes the biggest digital music store in the world

One day I will be able to play Monster Hunter Frontier in French/Italian/English on my PC, it's just a matter of time... 4 5 6 7 8 9 years later: It's finally coming!!!

Phones: iPhone 4S/SE | LG V10 | Lumia 920

Laptops: Macbook Pro 15" (mid-2012) | Compaq Presario V6000

 

<>EVs are bad, they kill the planet and remove freedoms too some/<>

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In my country we pay piracy tax.

Every time we buy HDD, USB, CD, etc... there is small piracy tax added to the cost because these items are sold with assumption that they will be used for "illegal" content.

Yet, piracy is obviously against the law and people have to pay anyway.

Actually, until recently, it was only illegal to upload, downloading for personal use was a gray area until EU started pushing really hard on our laws.

 

So, piracy tax remains but we no longer are allowed to pirate.

The question is... who benefits from this tax? Definitely not the media creators...

 

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3 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

snip

 

I don't think you read the articles I linked.

 

If you are looking for absolutes in evidence you won't find them on any side. 

 

To me you just said, I can't find absolute evidence there fore it's BS and piracy has had no effect.

 

The reality is the evidence ( as it's presented in all the data they can collect) points to a cause that is somewhere in consumer spending. 

 

 

1 hour ago, suicidalfranco said:

well the early 2000s was also Apple's introduction to the digital marketplace, and with iTunes store they did introduced at the same time the "you don't have to buy the whole album if you want just a couple songs, now you can just buy the on you want!" (and the crowd goes wild!) 90c per track and in the following years iTunes becomes the biggest digital music store in the world

Because:

23 hours ago, mr moose said:

There is an argument that people might only stream enough to pay royalties for half a record (I.E they only listen the lead track a few times), however not only are the revenue drops across the board (all distributions) but at 64% this really only indicates a major shift in consumer purchasing.

 

 

The above articles and research has taken most of that into account. It's even in the adjusted graphs under downloads.

 

The major point is that music consumption is up, more content is being consumed but revenue is down.  This means that in order to maintain sales in a market with no cash boundaries and no supply/demand issues, the price had to be dropped to maintain sales.   That realistically only points to alternative market.  The only alternative to buying legitimate music is pirated music. 

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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