US Protect IP and Stop Online Piracy Acts

[Duke87]

I refuse to believe that piracy actually hurts the economy. Hurts the owners of the content, absolutely (for any big name, anyway - small timers can actually benefit and usually understand that), but hurts the economy as a whole? If someone pirates an album rather than spending $10 to download it legally, that $10 doesn't go up in smoke. They spend it on something else instead. Money still moves around, just in a different direction. So, the "save American jobs" bit is bullshit.

This legislation is quite destructive and is demanding censorship... never a good thing.
The problem is that Hollywood is a major special interest lobby in Washington, and as long as that remains the case we are going to see stuff like this which protects them but hurts the American people in general.

[bugo]

I refuse to believe that piracy actually hurts the economy. Hurts the owners of the content, absolutely (for any big name, anyway - small timers can actually benefit and usually understand that), but hurts the economy as a whole? If someone pirates an album rather than spending $10 to download it legally, that $10 doesn't go up in smoke. They spend it on something else instead. Money still moves around, just in a different direction. So, the "save American jobs" bit is bullshit.

This legislation is quite destructive and is demanding censorship... never a good thing.
The problem is that Hollywood is a major special interest lobby in Washington, and as long as that remains the case we are going to see stuff like this which protects them but hurts the American people in general.

What if somebody pirates an album, likes the music, then spends $50 for a concert ticket and $40 for a shirt?  That money would have not been spent if not for the piracy.  But the fascist RIAA doesn't care about concert ticket or t-shirt sales.

[J N Winkler]

What if somebody pirates an album, likes the music, then spends $50 for a concert ticket and $40 for a shirt?  That money would have not been spent if not for the piracy.  But the fascist RIAA doesn't care about concert ticket or t-shirt sales.

Content providers' lobbying on this issue seems cynically designed to exploit economic illiteracy.  For example, the recording industry likes to toss around a figure of $74 trillion (several times total world GDP) that it allegedly loses through piracy.  This is a nonsense since there is no way they would be able to earn $74 trillion if they were somehow able to compel pirates to pay full list for everything they download--a large chunk of the audience would just go up in smoke, driven away by prices higher than they are willing to pay.

That said, I am not so sure that the game will finish with the content providers accepting a certain level of ongoing parasitism from pirates.  I can envision a scenario where a majority of Internet users voluntarily agree to some measures to prevent free-riding (but nothing nearly as draconian as what is currently proposed) in order to prevent or relieve long-term content droughts.

[mjb2002]

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/media-and-entertainment-companies-add-support-to-proposed-antipiracy-legislation/ link from the New York Times.

I'm just going to let you read the article.  then express your opinions.

Will it help the Hollywood studios and record labels?

OR

Will it hurt sites like YouTube, Facebook, Google, Flickr, Photobucket, etc. where if there is a hint of copyrighted material they must pull it and report it.

I'm kind of not happy that the politicians (both parties) are going to push this through, I'm not sure if it will destroy the internet as a whole or if it will enhance these hollywood moguls profits.

If it does what Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc think it does, We won't be able to post many road trip photos or videos anywhere.

Your thoughts?

It is gonna only hurt We the People and help the Big Record Labels and their bloodsucking lawyers.

These two bills need to be killed right away!

[DAL764]

What if somebody pirates an album, likes the music, then spends $50 for a concert ticket and $40 for a shirt?  That money would have not been spent if not for the piracy.  But the fascist RIAA doesn't care about concert ticket or t-shirt sales.

I'd go so far as saying that many, many artists have actually earned more money thanks to tickets and merchandise sold to people that illegally downloaded their music than the money the lost due to illegal downloads. I remember a couple of cases from small indie bands, here in Germany, that had an album for sale, were on tour, and barely got 50 people at their shows. So, they decided to put their albums on their Facebook pages, for free so that more people would actually listen to them, and bam, soon they were playing in front of 300-500 people, sold plenty of merch, and were far better known than previously. And there's no doubt in my mind there's plenty of bands in the US, UK, Canada or wherever, that are pretty much the same.
Word of mouth after offering free legal stuff can pay off big time, but obviously, RIAA or whoever ignore that, because they don't get their cut of merch sales or ticket sales (at least I think so, don't know how similar the RIAA is to the German GEMA).

Heck, I know I got into Volbeat (Danish Metal/Rockabily band) thanks to acquiring their first album second-hand, got hooked, and have bought 3 albums since then, plus 2 shirts, expenses I would never have made without the second-hand album, and I know from word of mouth that quite a few other people in my area got hooked on them as well.

[J N Winkler]

This short, to-the-point piece on one of Slate's blogs sets aside the free-speech considerations and looks at the lack of economic justification for SOPA and Protect IP:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2011/12/15/the_non_problem_of_online_piracy.html?wpisrc=slate_river

[english si]

There's also the matter that people who pirate stuff wouldn't watch/listen to it if it wasn't free - especially if it was a tip off from a friend, or an interest due to writer/performer/producer (more on the video front there than audio) and see whether they like it.

And there must be a large amount of youtube/downloading that is basically functioning like a catch up TV service/DVR, or a way of saving you the time of ripping CDs/DVDs (and Vinyls, tape, VHS) to .mp3 and .avi (or whatever file type you want), rather than actually trying to swindle a company out of money (and stopping them swindling it out of you).

Plus there's the "watch it before the rest of the country"/"actually be able to watch it" issues - the Internet is international, and TV isn't so much - you don't get some shows here that you get there, and vice versa. Some shows here (eg Glee, which is the only show from America that is being heavily advertised at the moment) are billed as "just after the states" (on GMT, the States gets it at 2am Wednesday morning, the UK gets it at 9pm Thursday). Sky, in the end, for the finale of Lost, aired it simultaneously with the States at silly-in-the-morning, then repeated it in their regular slot. Given US primetime is graveyard time in the UK, why can't channels air stuff in the early hours that DVR users/catch up users can watch the day after, rather than illegally downloading it, and keep the UK primetime viewing, that the people who want to watch it earlier wouldn't do anyway, but if they have several easy options of watching it legitimately, then they won't go to the internet and you can still get a bit of ad revenue from them.

[formulanone]

What if somebody pirates an album, likes the music, then spends $50 for a concert ticket and $40 for a shirt?  That money would have not been spent if not for the piracy.  But the fascist RIAA doesn't care about concert ticket or t-shirt sales.

Nothing personal, but for forty bucks, I'll buy 2-3 albums before I buy the overpriced shirt!

[J N Winkler]

There's also the matter that people who pirate stuff wouldn't watch/listen to it if it wasn't free - especially if it was a tip off from a friend, or an interest due to writer/performer/producer (more on the video front there than audio) and see whether they like it.

Yes--this is an important consideration from the economic point of view.  There are others, too:

*  The parasitic loss from piracy tends to be heavier for more recent stuff simply because it is more readily available.  In general, a TV show has to be either fairly recent or highly popular in order for there to be usable torrents for downloading it illegally on a "set and forget" basis.  It is, for example, much harder to find a high-quality torrent for The Pretender (a niche NBC TV show first aired in the mid-nineties) than it is for, say, Breaking Bad (now in its fourth season).  It is similarly easy to find torrents (though not well-seeded) for The Rockford Files because that is a highly regarded classic 1970's TV show, but not for the first two seasons of Kojak (also 1970's).  Moving back to the 1990's, it is far harder to find good torrents for Renegade (Stephen Cannell trash TV, the kind whose fans have to stay in the closet), which was syndicated on cable from the start and is hard to find even in DVD now, than it is for The Pretender or, for that matter, Kojak.

*  If a torrent of reasonable quality is not available for the pirated content, it may be possible to get it through an eMule distribution or by grabbing links from a commercial file transfer service, but pirating content in either of those ways is actually more work than getting hold of a legal copy.  It takes forever for files to finish downloading across the eMule networks, and with the commercial file transfer services you generally find that the good-quality links (which allow you to download complete AVIs rather than RAR fragments) disappear fast due to DMCA take-down, and even if you have good links in hand, you still have to put up with CAPTCHA entry, mandatory timeout, download limits, etc.  Plus, if you need complementary content like subtitles, you may find yourself out of luck, especially for the older and less popular stuff.  Many TV shows just don't have subtitles available in many foreign languages.  Some TV shows don't have English subtitles for some seasons that can be pirated--for example, the pirate world has no English subtitles for The A-Team season 4, The Rockford Files seasons 1, 3, and 4, etc.  These are limitations that can be largely overcome by getting hold of legal copies either through purchase or through the nearest well-stocked public library.  (Even the legal copies have their limitations, however.  For example, the most recent DVD release of Renegade has no closed captions at all, despite the show having been required to have captions when it was broadcast on cable.  This is because the bargain-basement DVD publishers tend to license only audio and video, not subtitles.)

Put simply, I think TV piracy is self-limiting and in most cases is effectively time-shifting.  The content providers that have the strongest claims for economic loss through piracy tend to be the ones making original content available through premium cable without advertising support, followed closely by the basic cable providers who still rely on advertising support to finance original content.  This is not to say that piracy doesn't cause problems in content provision.  Piracy does not prevent the actors and writers on TV shows from getting paid, but it makes it more likely that TV shows will be either cancelled outright or face per-episode budget restrictions because people who can get hold of high-quality TV rips through torrents will have no incentive to pay for premium cable or sit through ads in initial broadcast or on legal secondary release channels such as Hulu.com.  In the case of some specific TV shows, notably Stargate Universe, it has been suggested that they have been cancelled because a large share of the viewer base came in through torrents and so could not be used to sell ad time.

And there must be a large amount of youtube/downloading that is basically functioning like a catch up TV service/DVR, or a way of saving you the time of ripping CDs/DVDs (and Vinyls, tape, VHS) to .mp3 and .avi (or whatever file type you want), rather than actually trying to swindle a company out of money (and stopping them swindling it out of you).

For TV shows I think this is definitely true--for movies the case is less clear, though you could try to frame an equal-harm argument on the basis that getting your dinner at a McDonald's with a Redbox nearby ($1 cost/day rental through Redbox, paid for with a $1 coupon from the McDonald's) does no more harm to the content provider than getting an AVI or MKV of the movie illegally through a torrent.

Plus there's the "watch it before the rest of the country"/"actually be able to watch it" issues - the Internet is international, and TV isn't so much - you don't get some shows here that you get there, and vice versa. Some shows here (eg Glee, which is the only show from America that is being heavily advertised at the moment) are billed as "just after the states" (on GMT, the States gets it at 2am Wednesday morning, the UK gets it at 9pm Thursday). Sky, in the end, for the finale of Lost, aired it simultaneously with the States at silly-in-the-morning, then repeated it in their regular slot. Given US primetime is graveyard time in the UK, why can't channels air stuff in the early hours that DVR users/catch up users can watch the day after, rather than illegally downloading it, and keep the UK primetime viewing, that the people who want to watch it earlier wouldn't do anyway, but if they have several easy options of watching it legitimately, then they won't go to the internet and you can still get a bit of ad revenue from them.

That is one option that can be tried.  Part of the problem is that services which offer this functionality (like Hulu Plus) require paid subscriptions and the rates, unrealistically, assume perfect enforcement of anti-piracy laws and therefore you pay to get the content, with ads, subject to regional licensure.  Americans can't see stuff through BBC iPlayer, while Britons can't see stuff through Hulu.com.  It has been suggested that a large number of Americans abroad keep up with US TV shows by pirating them because they are not broadcast locally, second-day release services like Hulu.com won't stream to their local IPs, and DVD releases appear months or even years in arrears.

[agentsteel53]

you could try to frame an equal-harm argument on the basis that getting your dinner at a McDonald's with a Redbox nearby ($1 cost/day rental through Redbox, paid for with a $1 coupon from the McDonald's) does no more harm to the content provider than getting an AVI or MKV of the movie illegally through a torrent.

possibly a valid argument, but RedBox would likely still have to pay for the content which it buys from the provider, and then gives away for free (through the use of the promotional coupons). 

therefore, the question is, does RedBox pay the content provider a per-rental fee, or a fixed fee for the title as a whole?

if it's a fixed fee, then indeed there is no harm done to the content provider, whether RedBox rented the title N+1 times, or if RedBox rented only N times and the N+1st was a pirate.  if it is per-rental, though, then there is a difference.

[J N Winkler]

possibly a valid argument, but RedBox would likely still have to pay for the content which it buys from the provider, and then gives away for free (through the use of the promotional coupons).

Since it is McDonald's that provides the coupons, I think the likeliest scenario is a cost-sharing arrangement where McDonald's bears a fair share (possibly the majority) of the cost.  Both parties benefit:  Redbox gets profit from consumer inertia (failure of the consumer to return the DVD within one day, which causes rental fees to accrue on a daily basis), while McDonald gets to market meals on the basis of added value.

therefore, the question is, does RedBox pay the content provider a per-rental fee, or a fixed fee for the title as a whole?

I don't know enough about the video rental business (or any agreements Redbox may have made with the film studios) to say for sure.  But the traditional video-rental business model is that the rental shop pays more for each copy than an end consumer would pay for a more or less identical copy.  The premium the rental shop pays buys the film studio's consent for that single copy to be rented out multiple times.  Once the rental shop makes its "nut" on that copy, all future rentals contribute directly to the bottom line.

There is reason for doubting that this applies to Redbox because, unlike traditional video rental places, they allow you to "buy" the rental copy if you allow additional-day charges to accrue for 25 days.  This puts the cost of the rental around $25, while my understanding is that $80 is a more normal cost (to the rental shop operator) for a rental DVD.  The film studios have also tried to shut down and squeeze out Redbox for reasons which are never clearly spelled out (at least to me) but seem related to product dilution.  I can't imagine them going to that trouble if they were part of the film distribution system on the same terms as the traditional video rental businesses.

if it's a fixed fee, then indeed there is no harm done to the content provider, whether RedBox rented the title N+1 times, or if RedBox rented only N times and the N+1st was a pirate.  if it is per-rental, though, then there is a difference.

But end consumers are not required to take cognizance of business-to-business relationships; that is just not how markets are structured.  A more powerful counterargument is that piracy gives the pirate the unearned non-monetary but nevertheless economically real reward of having the content on terms far more flexible than offered by the Redbox/McDonald's distribution channel.  No need to buy a McDonald's meal (which is a real hardship if you are not into fast food), no need to go physically to a Redbox location which has the film in stock, etc.

[Duke87]

What if somebody pirates an album, likes the music, then spends $50 for a concert ticket and $40 for a shirt?  That money would have not been spent if not for the piracy.  But the fascist RIAA doesn't care about concert ticket or t-shirt sales.

This is absolutely true of small-time bands and they usually recognize this. I have heard bands live on stage tell people to go download their music illegally, and I own a CD that has a message printed on it encouraging the owner to share it with their friends.

It's not so much true of famous artists since they are not in need of additional exposure. It can still happen that somebody may spend money as a result of piracy, but it's probably more common in such cases to just pirate something which otherwise might have been purchased.

[Scott5114]

What if somebody pirates an album, likes the music, then spends $50 for a concert ticket and $40 for a shirt?  That money would have not been spent if not for the piracy.  But the fascist RIAA doesn't care about concert ticket or t-shirt sales.

This is absolutely true of small-time bands and they usually recognize this. I have heard bands live on stage tell people to go download their music illegally, and I own a CD that has a message printed on it encouraging the owner to share it with their friends.

It's not so much true of famous artists since they are not in need of additional exposure. It can still happen that somebody may spend money as a result of piracy, but it's probably more common in such cases to just pirate something which otherwise might have been purchased.

What's funny is it often works the other way in people's consciences. I know a couple people who absolutely insist on not pirating some small bands' works, figuring they need every dollar in record sales to keep going. But big artists–what's $10 to Nickelback anyway?

The more I read about SOPA the more it pisses me off. Streaming copyrighted content is a felony under SOPA. I have a friend who likes to draw, and sometimes she'll borrow someone's tablet and demonstrate her techniques over the streaming website Livestream. To make things more interesting since she's kind of shy sometimes and not that talkative, she plays music in the background. Under SOPA she would be a felon. Does that make any sense to anyone?

[Takumi]

The markup hearing was scheduled to resume today, but it's been delayed until Congress returns to session next year.

[Stephane Dumas]

I spotted the following from Gizmodo
http://gizmodo.com/5870241/presented-without-comment-every-single-company-supporting-sopa-the-awful-internet-censorship-law

All the Companies Supporting SOPA, the Awful Internet Censorship Law–and How to Contact Them

Who's officially on the record backing what could be the worst thing to ever happen to the internet? All of these companies listed below. Don't take our word for it–this list comes straight from Congress. Just FYI.

If you want to get in touch, we've provided a contact list below. Maybe you want to let them know how you feel about SOPA.

[SSOWorld]

anyone notice that GoDaddy is on that list -.- 

[corco]

Yep, and I am actively exploring a change in webhosts as I type- I can't give money to a company that wants to shut down the internet

[Scott5114]

Yep, and I am actively exploring a change in webhosts as I type- I can't give money to a company that wants to shut down the internet

Let me know what you find. I'm planning on getting a new webhost for unrelated reasons (I need someone that supports HTTPS/SSL and my current host doesn't).

[J N Winkler]

News on the SOPA/Protect-IP front:  the White House has sounded a discouraging note.

http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2012/01/14/sopa_and_pipa_white_house_criticizes_internet_anti_piracy_legislation_as_lawmakers_delay_votes_.html

This is (as the article notes) not an instruction or encouragement to throw out the bills altogether, which is the solution the Electronic Frontier Foundation and some other groups on the Internet side of the debate want.  However, it is a preliminary indication that the content providers are no longer having everything break their way.

This blog post by Matthew Yglesias (Slate's economics editor) makes the point that there is a nonzero socially optimal level of copyright infringement:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/01/14/obama_administration_comes_out_against_sopa_and_protect_ip.html?wpisrc=slate_river

[Zmapper]

Wikipedia will be shutting down Wednesday for 24 hours in protest of SOPA.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2012/01/most-people-probably-havent-paid-much-attention-to-thehuge-corporations-waging-war-in-washington-over-legislation-designed-to.html

[Alps]

Wikipedia will be shutting down Wednesday for 24 hours in protest of SOPA.

I look forward to Wiki Wednesday. I hope they continue their valuable, important protest.

[Stephane Dumas]

There more infos about it
http://kotaku.com/5876355/the-vote-on-the-bill-to-kill-the-internet-has-been-delayed?tag=sopa
http://kotaku.com/5876582/how-to-exploit-wikipedias-shutdown-wednesday?tag=sopa

[Zmapper]

Sorta off topic, but notice the text of your second link, Stephane.

"Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales issued a "student warning" on Monday, urging people in shool to "do your homework early.""

Looks like spell check will be going down in protest. 

[SSOWorld]

Wikipedia will be shutting down Wednesday for 24 hours in protest of SOPA.

I look forward to Wiki Wednesday. I hope they continue their valuable, important protest.

So you're saying you support SOPA?

[hbelkins]

Wikipedia will be shutting down Wednesday for 24 hours in protest of SOPA.

I look forward to Wiki Wednesday. I hope they continue their valuable, important protest.

So you're saying you support SOPA?

No, I think he's saying he's not a fan of Wiki.