File-Sharing Habits Unhindered by Criminal Crackdown

[Andy Chalk]

File-Sharing Habits Unhindered by Criminal Crackdown

A lot of people just don't see anything wrong with casual copyright infringement.

Generally speaking, most people conform to the dictates of the law because the law proscribes bad behavior: don't kill, don't steal, don't set stuff on fire if it doesn't belong to you, that sort of thing. But the effort to lump file-sharing into the "thou shalt not" pile through the imposition of new laws and harsh criminal penalties is proving to be a tougher sell, particularly among younger people.

The Cybernorms research project at the Lund University in Sweden has found that after a "moderate drop" in the rate of piracy among Swedes aged 15 to 25 in 2009 following the implementation of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, rates have stayed relatively flat at around 60 percent. The reason, according to researcher Marcin de Kaminski, is that young people don't actually see anything wrong with piracy.

"As a part of our research regarding cybernorms we try to understand and describe informal social control," he said. "Our results show that young people feel no pressure from neighbors, friends, relatives, teachers etc. to refrain from file sharing. A higher degree of pressure or social control would most possibly have a clear impact on habits and practices regarding file sharing."

The number of people who take part in file-sharing on a daily basis has actually risen slightly, from 18 percent in September 2009 to 20 percent in January 2012, and the biggest effect of the criminalization crackdown appears to be a rise in the use of anonymizing services: over the same period, the number of people using virtual private networks to mask their activities has risen by 40 percent.

"Without support for repressive efforts in social norms the effects tend to result in a feeling of increased risk or danger - rather than [the activity being repressed] actually being considered wrong," Kaminski added.

Laws can change, in other words, but until attitudes fall in line, not much else will.

Source: TorrentFreak [http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-prospers-despite-tougher-laws-120522]


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[The_Emperor]

I have found with a lot of people I know, the harder you crack down the higher they raise the finger. For instance I think a lot of people will want to pirate Diablo 3 because they are dissatisfied with the DRM

Same when you force someone to watch unskippable anti piracy ads like we have in Britain at the start of dvds, Some companies have even resorted to an unskippable "we just wanted to say thankyou for buying this it supports blah blah"

being pumped full of ads and unskippable bs at the start, drm on games, you dont wonder why people find downloading better, if you know what to look for you can find higher qual blu ray stuff you dont need a blu ray player to play on your pc, hook it up to a 1080p projector, BAM, home cinema.

plus it's free which is hard to compete with.

NOW IM NOT SAYING ITS RIGHT

You can go "but its naughty and poor artists are starving etc" but at the end of the day what does society teach us? Rip people off as much as you can without them noticing or you going today because its what is going to happen to you anyway might as well get something for free

and thats the real reason for piracy. you dont make money or save money from being honest.

 

[DeepComet5581]

OF COOOUUUURSSSEEEEE!

If you try and restrict people from using their products legitimately, then they are going to be less inclined to use legitimate products in future.

Take Diablo III. People who bought the game had to deal with Error 37 and Error 3006 for the first couple of days. People who pirated it got to play it there and then because the crackers managed to create a sort of dummy server for pirated copies to use, or something along those lines.

I can still get onto TPB, as my ISP has not blocked it, neither have they opted to.

Also, the MPAA and RIAA come up with bullshit figures to justify their 'crackdown' on piracy. If you believe the figures, piracy has left Digital Media industries with greater Annual Losses than Greece's national debt and with negative job numbers. It would also mean than an iPod Classic could fit $8,000,000,000 worth of pirated material on it.

At no point will this kind of counter-intuitive nonsense work.

 

[Worgen]

Its not really hard to understand why people don't see a problem with file sharing, its kind of like lending your friend a dvd or something, plus since its not a physical thing, it means our minds don't really think of it as stealing. The difference in perceived value of something digital vs something physical is very different, if you steal a physical thing then there is one less of them, if you steal a digital thing then your not really stealing it, your just copying it.

 

[Zachery Gaskins]

The difference in perceived value of something digital vs something physical is very different, if you steal a physical thing then there is one less of them, if you steal a digital thing then your not really stealing it, your just copying it.

That's like being given excellent service at a restaurant and then not tipping (or accurately, telling the waiter he should be happy he's making $2.75 an hour as it is, since anyone could do his job). Now say that to a game developer.

Remember, it's not theft, it's fraud.

Piracy is telling game developers (and young people wanting to be game developers) that you really don't think their skills/creativity has value. If you continue to treat them like ass, keep expecting games that look and play like ass, and at some point people will stop making games.

"But why do I have to tip the stripper?"

#andimout

 

[Cyberjester]

Makes sense, companies releasing products that actively conflict with their usage (D3, AC2, etc) or overcharging (any DVD out today), or insane copyright laws (Waltzing Matilda is an Aussie song, created by an Aussie, copyrighted in the USA as an original composition as soon as the author died and Aussie Olympic organisers had to pay this USA company in order to play the song.) all lead to users having a dim view of the megacorporations that own most IP. Then when IP cases go to court, some student is fined 50 million USD for downloading 5 songs.

How about television shows? Broadcast in the USA one day, everywhere else a week later? That's the optimum time mind, used to be months, years or never. Or price fixing depending on where you live? 20USD for Battlefield 3 in Russia, 60 in the USA, 100 in Aus. Price fixing because the prices are the same in that country no matter where you get it from. Region locked DVD's which won't play unless you buy a DVD player as well, conveniently sold by the same parent company that is selling you the DVD. Laws like SOPA which will censor everyone outside the USA. Region locked websites like Hulu which won't allow anyone outside of an area to view or listen to their content.

Digitally locked content (D3 is another great example) which will only work at certain times. Companies like Steam (Everything they sell) or Amazon (Kindle) offering digital content for lease only. You no longer purchase games, you rent them until the servers go down, you die, you get bored with the game, a volunteer admin working for the company bans your user account on a website. Bands releasing albums as digital only with bad quality (128kbps mp3), then releasing the album later on CD (Radiohead, their manager said something to the tune of "Pirates weren't going to pay for it anyway so why should we play nice", funny since most fans had bought said dodgy quality album).

Singers blasting copyright since they don't have enough money to buy a house, yet they've had numerous gold selling songs and a best seller CD (some lass over in London). She's made millions, but only gotten around two hundred thousand out of that. And production costs for a CD aren't nearly that high. On the topic of music, as soon as Warner Music bought a company which had bought a company which had bought a company which owned the rights to an 80 year old Australian folk tune (Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree), they immediately sued a popular band (Men At Work, song was Down Under) because two bars sounded similar. They won, of course. I think Happy Birthday is copyrighted, hence why you're not likely to hear it in movies, they'll use "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow" instead.

As a personal anecdote, when Pan's Labyrinth first came out it didn't show in Australian cinemas. The first I saw of it was on a pirate rip I got off a friend of a friend. Bad visual quality, eh sound, no subtitles (not a Spanish speaker D, and it was the best movie I had seen in ages. Years later I managed to get a hold of an official DVD and I must say it's vastly improved. But took me years.

I know some people who are pirating on principle of it now.

 

[Athinira]

That's like being given excellent service at a restaurant and then not tipping (or accurately, telling the waiter he should be happy he's making $2.75 an hour as it is, since anyone could do his job). Now say that to a game developer.

You shouldn't be pointing fingers at the people who aren't tipping, you should be pointing fingers at the restaurants that only pays their waiters $2.75. Tipping is not a requirement by law. It might be a custom or good courtesy (because of the mentioned terrible habits of paying waiters low and expecting them to earn through tips), but it's not required.

Remember, it's not theft, it's fraud.

Wrong. It's Copyright infringement. A totally seperate issue, and has nothing to do with either theft or fraud ) In fact, selling copyrightet material is not even counterfeiting, because a counterfeited product is an imitation (although many still label it so).

Piracy is telling game developers (and young people wanting to be game developers) that you really don't think their skills/creativity has value. If you continue to treat them like ass, keep expecting games that look and play like ass.

Wrong. Piracy is a way of telling publishers (not developers, unless those two haeppen to be the same, which is sometimes the case) that you like their product enough to use it, but don't like the way it is distributed.

Now of course there are a lot of people who just pirate because they can and because they're just greedy and expect everything for free. Assholes are everywhere in this world, no surprise there, but there is also plenty of people who pirate when they feel unfairly treated by buying legitimately, for example:
- DRM, like activation limits, getting your Steam/Origin account closed for whatever reason.
- Pricing, like generally high prices, having to buy something else to use the product that comes with an extra high cost etc. One important one to note here is digital products being more expensive than a real copy. When you pull something like that, people will consider you the publisher - as being a greedy bastard, and if the publisher can be greedy, so can users.
- Distribution, like people who refuse to install Origin for example because they simply don't trust EA and their software.
- Delays/Waiting time, like movies that take too long to go from Cinema to DVD/Blue-RAY for example. As a general rule of thumb, people are impatient and want to play/watch/listen/read their entertainment as fast as possible. This is the reason why people pre-order a product they are looking forward to, even though they haven't seen any reviews of the thing yet. Same reason also that a lot of people like to download leaked products that haven't hit the market or the cinemas yet.

 

[draythefingerless]

Im glad to see that despite the fighting effort of the idiotic greedy at top, the masses will always speak louder than them in the end. Fuck you Copyright law. Fuck you. And this is coming from someone who makes games. Fuck you.

 

[sethisjimmy]

I love the ironic relationship between the mass publicity of the "war on pirating" and the increase in pirates.

 

[evilneko]

Many people my age and younger treat piracy as a glorified free rental/demo. They'll pirate something and if they don't like it, toss it. If they do like it, they usually go buy a legit copy. This is probably the reason pirates buy more media than non-pirates: they already know what's good and can spend more effectively.

Trivia: the entire US anime industry owes its very existence to piracy. Perhaps this is why they're rather less strict in enforcement.

 

[1337mokro]

Liberties violated, questionable legislation passed, censorship enacted and shady political practices continue to go on behind the peoples backs.

Result: Nothing!

It's so delicious when all the effort put into this results in nothing at all. It gets people pissed that it's happening and continues to happen because now it is proven to have 0 effect and businesses wasted billions of dollars chasing a pipe dream of getting pirates to pay for their products in the process pissing of all their legitimate customers.

Karma, it's delicious.

 

[ARCTIC_EAGLE]

most of the game companies are actually responsible for torrenting. Just as an example, Ubisoft puts always on DRM so if you don't have internet you can't play so it just makes sense to torrent (then you'll actually get to play), cracks also bypass a lot of the background DRM crap.

 

[MrTub]

most of the game companies are actually responsible for torrenting. Just as an example, Ubisoft puts always on DRM so if you don't have internet you can't play so it just makes sense to torrent (then you'll actually get to play), cracks also bypass a lot of the background DRM crap.

Doesnt help that they make so shitty games where mp doesnt even work. Example HAWX 2, You cannot connect to anyone, so I had to download tunngle(Kinda like hamachi) and use the lan feature for to play mp...

 

[kouriichi]

They spend more money fighting piracy then they would make if piracy didnt exist >.>;
Its quite sad really. Perhaps they should look into making CHEAPER games.

Games cost less > Less Profits lost when game is pirated > More people can afford. Look at minecraft. It was made for nothing, in a mans free time, using Java. Its now one of the most popular games of all time, constantly talked about, and spans several platforms, bringing in STUPID piles of money.

Minecraft was pirated. You can go download a copy right now. Why was this not an issue? Because the game cost nearly nothing to produce, nearly nothing to purchase, and is an amazing value for (what is now) $26. It was cheaper then that for most of its production, but it STILL sells like hotcakes. I mean, nearly 6 million sales? And another million+ on the console?

Most pirates are pirates because they feel, "$60 is to much", "Im broke", or "Its not Worth it, and i wasnt going to purchase it". Eliminate 2 of them right from the start by making games cheaper. They have the ability to. Digital distribution cuts out nearly all distribution costs other then servers.

I think they really dont want piracy to be gone. >.>; They just want to be in control of the user base. DRM, policies that let them monitor what you do and have on your PC. Its not about fighting piracy, its more about keeping the consumer in line and under control then fighting piracy.