Piracy in the age of digital media

[Snickerdoodles]

Can you give more details? Why would the majority of your readers download stolen versions?

[IdiotWithPencil]

The problem here is that studios are deadlocked into these streaming services because of the state of the industry. They have absolutely no control over Netflix's/iTunes'/etc policies.

of course they don't the clients do, studios are product services are transport, the trasports clients aren't the producers or suppliers it's the consumer, the ones with the power to change it are the consumers, sadly studios will need to either put their foot down or find a new system if they want these services to change.

A donation box MIGHT work, but I kinda doubt it would--especially if the fans never leave the piracy sites to visit the studios' website and find the donation box in the first place.

already has happened before 2018 animator dormitory project had over 20 million dollars raised thanks in part to a YouTuber telling pirates to donate to stick it to crunchy. I'll let you guess what happened

pirates have money they will gladly give it to the studios or services if they are good, nothing more nothing less

Like I said, piracy is a very complex problem. There might not be any straightforward solutions to it...

it isin't a problem it's a tool that will for ever be in the clients favor, we lose piracy we lose control over the industry and are under the whims of idiots in suits.

[Darth_Biomech]

If piracy would be bad, the industry would've suffered for that. Instead we have films that make billions in the revenue and games like Witcher III that make loads of money while being completely DRM-free (not to mention the whole indie game explosion). Honestly, the whole debate is this all over again:

I am of the opinion that copyright and IP rights should be abolished completely for legal persons. Actual people should own their actual ideas, from now till death and not a minute longer, and companies should only have a non-exclusive (Or exclusive only for a very limited time, like say 5-10 years) permission to use them in their products. So if you want to write story about Superman you should go to Jerry Siegel, not DC, and if you would want to have Stormtrooper outfits in your fiction you'd go to John Mollo and not LucasFilm Disney.

[Snickerdoodles]

Actual people should own their actual ideas, from now till death and not a minute longer

Authors will get murdered so that their works will enter the public domain.

[ImmortalDreams]

I googled myself and my work, and my books were available on multiple pirated e-book websites. There were more downloads listed on those sites than the legitimate sales I had gotten. These pirated ebook websites get taken down from time to time, so I don't know if the ones I found in 2017 are even still around. I also once tried to post my novels as free audiobooks on youtube one time, hoping that I could get watch time as a trade off. At least everyone got free books, and I got a benefit too, right? Some time later I googled myself again, and found someone hosting my audiobook videos as mp3 downloads... I don't even get watch time that way. It was just really inconsiderate, considering I was trying to make everyone happy and compromise. I'm not against internet piracy in certain circumstances. I've watched my share of otherwise unavailable shows over the years too, so I don't mean to be a hypocrite. If it really hurts others, especially creators struggling to make it through each paycheck, then I'm not cool with it. There was a time when I didn't care about or even think about who I might be hurting by reading/watching pirated content, then I got pirated. Bad karma, maybe?

[Darth_Biomech]

Or they could be murdered right after sighing a contract so they couldn't back out of it or demand to change it.
Both scenarios are ridiculously unlikely and won't happen in a real word, because murder is a crime and most people aren't psychopaths.

[Luminosophy]

It signals, that monopoly is bad and the consumers demand independent creators. Like here on tapas we can chose where our money goes and buy the things we want, instead of being foced to buy an all-inclusive bundle for 1000 shows we don't even want.

I want to agree, but I've seen the antithesis to what you're talking about time and time again on any creator's pages who had the audacity to charge even mere cents for their work. Insults like 'how dare you', 'lol why should we pay for u to doodle shit in 5 minutes', 'it's not fair for us who cant afford it', iced with threats to acquire and disseminate the work. I don't think consumers can tell the difference between 'big corp' and independents, because they seem to feel that asking for any payment for a service is a grievous offense.

[DukeOfOool]

Yeah I've seen that too, but I think these people aren't real fans anyways, more like looters trying to get as much free content as they want, maybe they even feel entitled to get it. They won't make a difference, as they didn't pay anyways. In the worst case they'll pirate, but if they're more likely to just jump to another free comic.

So this is more a conflict between the paid comics, the comics which get financed by donations and add revenue and how the consumers move between those two.

[Snickerdoodles]

Or they could be murdered right after sighing a contract so they couldn't back out of it or demand to change it.
Both scenarios are ridiculously unlikely and won't happen in a real word, because murder is a crime and most people aren't psychopaths.

A dead contract-signer has backed out of the contract in the most definitive manner possible. Good luck getting them to deliver.

And murder doesn't seem unlikely when we're talking about IPs worth millions or even billions of dollars. People get killed for less all the time.

[thedude3445]

It annoys me that the items I legally purchase in digital form are sometimes inaccessible to me when that service goes down or even if I move countries. All of my digital movies on Vudu? Can't even use them in Japan! All those games I got on Desura? Those are gone forever lol, not that I particularly cared I guess.

The slight movement towards DRM-free digital purchases with things like GOG and Gumroad is the real future, I think. The slow acceptance that piracy and bootlegs are going to persist no matter what and the only thing the big companies can do is make their paid content easier and safer to access than the awful free piracy websites. I at least trust that my digital movies on Google or Microsoft will remain for decades to come, but the fact that I don't have a copy of them on my own PC tends to make me leery.

[DiegoPalacios]

People get killed for less all the time.

Remember when a Voltron "fan" attempted to blackmail the studio that worked on it to make a ship cannon?......

For a ship......a SHIP!!!!!!!!!!......i can see a weirdo like that one going further.......

[ArthurAleksei]

Just to be clear, I'm not defending Netflix or it's counterparts, but I think there is definitely an issue when piracy sites like KissAnime.Ru make money off pirated anime and give nothing back to the creators (I'm not saying all piracy sites do this).

Interestingly enough though, I've heard that streaming sites started as a way for the studios to make money since nobody wanted to by DVDs anymore when you could just watch the movie for free on a piracy site. I don't know how true this is, and haven't looked into it.

[ArthurAleksei]

My point about the donation box concept is that, while it could work very well for a well-known studio, smaller studios would have a much harder time making money that way. Yes, a small studio can do it, but not all.
Maybe I'm wrong--I hope I am.

[ArthurAleksei]

@rajillustration:
I think there's exceptions to when piracy is OK, when it's to protect works that are disappearing or are inaccessible because of outdated technology--but overall, piracy is not OK, and people tend to think that because it's OK sometimes it's OK all the time.

Good point. You see this kind of reasoning all the time: X is okay because sometimes Y, so that means X is okay when there is no Y (dunno if that made sense )

[IdiotWithPencil]

Interestingly enough though, I've heard that streaming sites started as a way for the studios to make money since nobody wanted to by DVDs anymore when you could just watch the movie for free on a piracy site. I don't know how true this is, and haven't looked into it.

Netflix started out as a DVD sales company, you called and they would ship the DVD's to your house later they went digital, more of an evolution that a desperate attempt, also blockbuster was still making bank when Netflix started, so I don't know where the DVD sales dipping came from but I would need some evidence to believe it =0

My point about the donation box concept is that, while it could work very well for a well-known studio, smaller studios would have a much harder time making money that way.

they have the same level of trouble getting picked up by a publisher/streaming service, so being "hard" is no excuse when the current system is just as hard and more unfair for the studios in question

I think there's exceptions to when piracy is OK, when it's to protect works that are disappearing or are inaccessible because of outdated technology--but overall, piracy is not OK, and people tend to think that because it's OK sometimes it's OK all the time.

the problem with this is that it gives too much power to corpotions, services like netflix and Amazon prime have no real competition outside of exclusive content (not original but third party) and this makes it so that people have to pay for inept services for the product they want, so what does one do when they don't have the money or want to deal with the hassle? they either cheat the system (have afriend pass and account or a copy of the season) or they pirate.

The only people it hurts is the independent artists and small studios working under them that now won't make as much profit, and therefore won't get funded enough the next time they go to make a book or a game or a movie.

if they are on netflix they are hardly independant, streaming buys licenses I.E they pay the studios for their product, the studios already made a profit even before you watch their series.

They barely care because they have insurance that covers theft (and they destroy copies they don't sell anyway--all of the physical items you buy--they only make so many of them, and what doesn't sell, gets buried in the desert like ET the video game)

corporations do this specifically so that they don't go to JAIL, it isn't destroyed they can get into legal and financial problems since the numbers won't add up (Inventory is placed as an active wich is cash that the company has if you can't sell the inventory then the Active is erroneous and you can get in serious legal trouble). they don't do it cause they don't care they do it so the feds won't kick them into jail for doctoring their financial report. Also in some countries, they give them a tax break from the sales, but that's another can of worms

[rajillustration]

I used to work in Barnes so that's not actually how returns work. It's actually more to do with a contract the publisher signs with the creator of the work. They sign a contract that says the publisher can sell the book or comic for X amount of copies over a period of Y amount of years. When that contract is up, then they have to sign a new contract in order to continue publishing the book anew.

That's why they destroy copies that don't sell. In fact, some publishers don't even want you to send the book back. We destroyed many of the cheap paperback romance novels that didn't sell from certain publishers by ripping off the covers (the little harlequin style ones), and that includes some comics publishers as well. If people wanted a book that was out of print, we could not order any through Barnes because it could only sell currently published books--you would need to search used book stores and Amazon.

Part of the reason that the access is restricted is because the owner of the product wants to drive up demand so they can actually make money off of their IP. If they make enough, if enough people buy it legally, then the publisher company will actually sign them on for hopefully a more expensive contract, making it more accessible in more forms for us, the consumers.

[IdiotWithPencil]

They sign a contract that says the publisher can sell the book or comic for X amount of copies over a period of Y amount of years. When that contract is up, then they have to sign a new contract in order to continue publishing the book anew.

the same difference they are getting rid of it for financial reasons (get rid of unsalable assets so they can make/get more liquid and actual assets) if they have a surplus of useless inventory they need to get rid of it or the financials, specifically the general balance, will come into question (my dad works in a tire production plants if the tire is more than 6 years old it is destroyed and written off the finances else they would come into question and have more inventory than is actually liquid), and I had to study this for my finance class,

TLDR unsalable Inventory cost the company money and inflates the numbers, destroying it saves money and makes the numbers go back to what they actually are.

the thing of artificial demand is really not the point of the destruction of inventory if they wished to make artificial demand they could do it in millions of other more cheap and effective ways (inventory destruction is still a loss in the books and really isn't helpful for demand).

[nostalgicroxas]

I also once tried to post my novels as free audiobooks on youtube one time, hoping that I could get watch time as a trade off. At least everyone got free books, and I got a benefit too, right? Some time later I googled myself again, and found someone hosting my audiobook videos as mp3 downloads... I don't even get watch time that way. It was just really inconsiderate, considering I was trying to make everyone happy and compromise.

This specifically makes me think I'd want the mp3. YouTube requires buffering and ads and data loads and all this other stuff + making a playlist or clicking through to make things load and work, with potential ads in between listening. It is far easier, especially in 2017, to download the mp3's and listen to them on a drive to work off your phone/mp3 player equivalent. I don't need to mess with going to YouTube -> to either someone's playlist that might be out of order, or find which playlist I stuck it in, and again ads in between, and again, buffering.
Now yes, ads and watch time are what you are posting it for, but that specific instance, you aren't thinking of the consumer and how they would rather or use it. Do people listen to audiobooks on YouTube? Probably. But there will be lots who would prefer the mp3, or would just take the the url to a YT->MP3 conversion site, save it piecemeal and listen to it later on as much as they want.
The response is what studios and such do, trying to think what the pirater's and consumers will want and do, and staying ahead of them. Don't want a physical CD because you'll just buy it and rip it off to get the mp3 files to stick on your mp3 player? Studios start offering the mp3's themselves for sale. Same idea for you to do - make your own mp3 files and list them for people to grab for either $ or free.

[yumeryuu]

I remember when I was a kid and we all got in trouble for using NAPSTER in the late 90s because Lars Ulrich from METALLICA had a fit.

[fleurravenbooks]

that's tough question , while yes companies like that are greedy, there are a lot of people that needs to get paid, but i don't mind if you use some random site to watch movie/anime since company is pretty big to notice(i mean if you don't have money you wouldn't pay them at all )
Maybe if they would give you option do download show (idk if they do it tbh)