It could be possible that different movies could be popular with different groups. Say, imagine a hypothetical movie really popular with teenagers with Internet access but not enough money for tickets, compared with another movie that is really popular with rural people with no broadband but who visit town in the weekend for fun. We might see differences.
But yeah, for the real interesting questions we would need to get the data for movies that are not available by piracy but are available in theaters.
That's a very generic conclusion, is it related to this article somehow?
> The data covers multiple methods of unlicensed content delivery including Streaming, P2P Torrents, Web Downloads and Stream-ripper sites
We're just assuming that the audience using these sites is the exact same audience as the comparison?
> cinema revenue at the individual premises and film-title level [in the North American market]
I think one audience learns about a new movie on a torrent site and then goes to see it in the theatre. (Another audience never uses torrent sites. Another uses them but rarely goes to the theatre, etc)
If there's statistically significant data about the first audience (as the article claims), that's interesting.
Which is not at all surprising from my personal experience. It's not like people who use torrent sites live in a completely different world from those who don't.
The argument that piracy drives box office sales would surprise me, except in a few cases (e.g. I would believe that some limited release movies might get exposure via piracy causing a wider release) that are more the exception than the rule.
I agree, we aren't "assuming they are highly correlated," as you said.
> The argument that piracy drives box office sales would surprise me
Me too! It would be interesting if it did however; I can imagine a case where a user of an unlicensed site learned about a movie there and wanted to see it on the big screen.
If you read the study they don't argue that however.
> That's a very generic conclusion, is it related to this article somehow?
Indeed, this is at the top of the article (emphasis mine):
> New research from piracy tracking firm MUSO shows that movie piracy is strongly linked to box office revenues. When pirated downloads peak or slow down, movie theater visits show a similar trend. While this may sound counterintuitive, the finding is actually quite obvious. Correlation is not causation and pirates are people too.
I am not sure of your point. What is the significance of that statement if not to say that increases in "unlicensed consumption" don't decrease box office revenue? The fact that they have a positive correlation is kinda the default; one doesn't affect the other and there's likely instead some other cause for the statistically significant correlation, such as popularity.
Sorry for the confusion. Stepping back to my initial reply, you asked:
> That's a very generic conclusion, is it related to this article somehow?
And I intended to answer the question with how their statement is related to the article by pointing out that this statement is written at the start of the article:
> New research from piracy tracking firm MUSO shows that movie piracy is strongly linked to box office revenues. When pirated downloads peak or slow down, movie theater visits show a similar trend. While this may sound counterintuitive, the finding is actually quite obvious. Correlation is not causation and pirates are people too.
I didn't understand your point when you responded by saying:
> Thanks I read the article. From the study:
>> Thus there is a very strong, statistically significant, positive correlation between Box Office revenue and unlicensed consumption
What is the significance of the statement you quoted as a reply to mine? That's what I don't follow.
(Thanks for the time you've taken so far with your replies!)
I assume what they are going for is that if they were inversely correlated it would imply that movie piracy drives down box office revenue (since you could say "the more pirated a movie is, the lower its box office revenue"). Since they aren't, it implies that piracy does not significantly cause reduced box office revenue.
I've brought it up a few times before, but you can read about another study here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 that assuming my previous comment on it was correct found for example that every pirated movie is 0.27 of a lost sale, whereas every pirated video game is actually 0.24 of an extra sale. If 0.27 was actually 1 or more, then a result like the linked study would have been more surprising for example.
I don't think so, this is a study from a marketing company. This is essentially an ad for their services, which monitor activity on unlicensed sites (I gather):
> The combination of Box Office revenue data and unlicensed consumption data would provide a holistic view of film consumption
Sorry for being unclear, by "what they are going for" I meant why TorrentFreak chose to post about this study, not why the study was made in the first place.
Typical home movie night experience with my family:
- Pay to "rent" movie from service A, paying full price.
- Find out service A decides we are not allowed to have HD on our device even though it's 2023 and we have plenty of bandwidth and pixels
- Try renting on service B. Find out that our ISP is throttling service B to 2.5 mbps and we only can watch in stuttering potato quality.
- Give up and search for magnet link. Wait about 30 seconds and we can start watching the high bitrate blu ray rip that looks and runs better than anything we paid for.
And so we research how to set up jellyfin and the *arr suite and use that from then on, plus we can share wuth with the extended family to spare them this negative experience.
To be fair, if you download pirate torrents you frequently get corrupted files that don't play quite right, not to mention you might download some Chinese movie called "Nezha" and really get some other movie called "Ne Zha", on the other hand I am used to buying physical copies of Chinese movies that allegedly have English subtitles and don't (... I want to watch Investiture of the Gods so badly) or the Chinese movies that come from China that were made with DVD+R, printed on with inkjet, and have subtitles that barely make sense.
Definitely. All my friends with eye-patches (a small and dwindling crew) say they just need to be picky (through experience) to know how to sidestep the bad and fake torrents.
After The Pirate Bay and other famous public sites went down, there has been a proliferation of private trackers. These private trackers have high quality stuff. To get an invite, some of the trackers need references and also do personal interviews etc.
> After The Pirate Bay and other famous public sites went down, there has been a proliferation of private trackers. These private trackers have high quality stuff. To get an invite, some of the trackers need references and also do personal interviews etc.
Or alternatively pay, ideally in Bitcoin... after nearly 2 decades of watching Japanese Kickboxing/MMA etc... I found a spot that delivers most of those events (plus way more than I care to watch) and its everything I ever wanted out of a service and gladly renew every year--though I'm incentivized to seed as long as possible in order to decrease membership costs, but I'm usually the last to DL so my ratio suffers since it's pretty niche.
It's like these promotions don't want our money, and go out of their way to make it difficult for non-Japanese platforms tpo show them legally in other markets, so instead we pay a team to curate the recording in various formats (720/1080) and upload it next day or two.
When I was younger half the fun was staying up late, chatting with people from all corners of the World on forums PBP and reacting to a knockout or decision and seeing the sun come up with fights still on the card left and deciding if I can make it to school/work etc... but sadly those days are over and my version of convenience(s) comes from watching something at my leisure at sane hours days/weeks/months later in order to not mess up my sleep cycle these days (I pay a lot more for that by comparison).
To quote one of these die-hards on the forums:
> If I'm the only dude in the PBP on NYE I'm going to have a meltdown. Should be an interesting read when it happens, anyway.
I also have a friend who gets movies this way, they told me they use the servarr suite of software and never have any issue. It accomodates usenet and/or torrents.
The problems I see never show up if I play with VLC (“plays for sure”) but they did show up on debugging videos played on the XBOX ONE which has was been finicky no matter if I was using Plex, Jellyfin and various client software on the XBOX. A few out-of-spec frames din’t bother most players but the XBOX freezes up for two minutes for the slightest anomaly. With Jellyfin and the new Jellyfin client playback is fine unless there is something wrong with the file that I can detect with other tools.
Badly encoded videos are all over the pirate space, frequently they promise lossless audio but skimp on bits for video, for instance.
With that XBOX all the legit video apps (BluRay player, Peacock) have the problem of trying some handshake that cuts off video with my old Samsung TV and pandemic special Denon receiver (decontented POS compared to my old one which has the video output burn out). Power cycling the receiver brings back the picture but it is one more humiliation I face in front of my tech skeptical family.
Really? I only download/stream via torrent occasionally, but I've not run into that in a very long time. Just this past weekend I wanted to watch the first episode of the new season of Loki. Fired up the Disney+ app on my Sony TV. Black screen, no response.
Went into app settings and force closed the app, restarted app...black screen, no response.
Rebooted TV and opened Disney+ app. Black screen, no response.
Eventually just switched inputs to the laptop sitting under the TV stand. Clicked Popcorn Time icon (I leave VPN always on for this laptop). Clicked Loki. Clicked episode. Within 1 minute the show was playing.
This is one reason why I keep this as an option. Other times I admit I just can't be arsed to subscribe to yet another service to check out a show I heard about. Not claiming any moral high ground. I just don't want to pay for another streaming service when I already have paid access to 3 (at least until they offer something I know I want to watch for a month's subscription at minimum.)
And it is only Spotify making money in that arrangement. Music industry long ago came to terms with not making money from album/song sales, but use them as promotion platforms for Live Events, Merch and whatnot.
Not saying your statement about Movie industry is inaccurate - yes, one (or few) super convenient platform(s) to contain all movies to rent/buy with high quality and reliable delivery would be amazing - but one flat price for streaming everything ala Spotify is not going to work for movies.
> Music industry long ago came to terms with not making money from album/song sales, but use them as promotion platforms for Live Events, Merch and whatnot.
Piracy killed the profits in record sales and created a bimodal distribution for musicians wherein you're either Taylor Swift or the equivalent, or a struggling indie.
> Piracy killed the profits in record sales and created a bimodal distribution for musicians wherein you're either Taylor Swift or the equivalent, or a struggling indie.
Let's not pretend that record labels weren't massively warping the playing field for decades before the internet took off; or that piracy hasn't helped indie artists get discovered / blow up. There are studies on this, and the ones that weren't sponsored by record labels are pretty consistent in showing your statement to be false.
Record labels bled musicians, sure. Piracy just all-out stole their music - I doubt you'll find any documented instance where a musician was actually paid for their music by a kind pirate.
Events, festivals, concerts should not be the only way a musician should hope to recoup some of the effort they put into creating music.
> Piracy just all-out stole their music - I doubt you'll find any documented instance where a musician was actually paid for their music by a kind pirate.
That happens literally all the time. That's why there are studies about it.
If you want to argue with the various study authors and find flaws in their methodology; go ahead. But the idea that no one who steals music would ever then pay for that music is absurd; on par with denying the moon landing, or that Azerbaijan exists.
> Events, festivals, concerts should not be the only way a musician should hope to recoup some of the effort they put into creating music.
I don't disagree in the slightest, but once again, the blame for that situation is squarely on the record labels. Bandcamp conclusively proved that independent musicians can make money from album sales, without the predatory industry machine, even as piracy continues unabated.
People don't want to pay for convenience and features. Look at how many people are screaming about the price of the services out there. Streaming services provide a ton of content and it is all pretty easy to use. The problem the studios have is that people are used to below market pricing for content as a side revenue but their side revenue ate away their main stream revenue.
> In order to combat piracy, you need to out innovate them in terms of convenience and features.
To be entirely fair, I think we ahvae reached a parody with Hollywood and Streaming services in terms of content: sure, some comic book movies requires 500 million to make and require studios to pump things up and a bloated marketing tour, but A26 is a perfect example of something being made for low budget, word to mouth and often quickly on streaming services that rivals most stuff in the theaters.
After this year, I've been to the movies more times since I was a teenager, I really don't feel like I missed much during that time: I'm still incredibly out of touch with what comes out and other than Oppenheimer I don't think I watched anything that had much of a budget.
As for piracy, it'll never go away, some of us just refuse to comply with these norms and find ways around geo-restrictions and IP bans half the fun, hence why these communities still thrive before Netflix started to self-canobolize itself.
PS: Last season of Black Mirror made me regret being in the loop, after COVID there was so much more to work with than it's entire existence, but this was perhaps the sign that Charlie Brooker needs to reach for fan-art scripts and should help get them green-lit.
I don’t know of anyone who has such a negative experience as this. But also I don’t know many people who are such snobs about the bitrate of the movies they watch. With that said I imagine you skip all but the last step and are just trying to rationalize why you do so.
You forgot "have thousands of independent nodes deliver the content to me at a bandwidth rate so high it'd constitute a DDOS attack if the protocol didn't have a way to manage data requests"
I subscribe to just about every streaming service there is and the problem I encounter is the movie I want to watch isn’t on any platform. Hell a few of the movies I’ve wanted to watch recently weren’t even available to rent or purchase on any platform.
Indeed; we had promotional credits from Amazon so tried it out on a movie my son wanted to watch. If there was colorbanding and macroblocking as bad as what we watched in an encode from the IRC release group I used to participate in, the release would have not passed QC. Though to be fair, the details in low-motion scenes were far better because there's only so much you can do with a 480P TS.
I've read a story before, telling how Paulo Coehlo (probably from Coehlo himself) was friendly with the scene translating his books to russian, which in turn opened a market for his books in Russia and Eastern Europe later on.
Take Cyberpunk 2077 for instance, it was leaked not long after it's launch; most people (even here) called it trash and gave up on it due to the bugs. Then after grinding away at it for 2+ years CDPR just sold more than 25 million copies after the last expansion. [0] That is ~25% of it its total sales.
While it's unlikely to determine exactly how much of an effect it had, it certainly wasn't zero. Consider also the massive community modders had greater access and CDPR garnered lots of new info (and code) from this source.
It maybe its a niche to the communities I've been around, be it in tech/games/music, but this a norm not an exception. Paywalled/DLC BS is a recent phenomon and its entirely off-putting, I didn't get PL this time around (I just don't have time to game) I did like how much of an impact it has made not just for the game, but the genre itself.
Why does it seem that way to you? I have not quite noticed that.
I think when you are younger, there are movies that profoundly affect you. When you get older, and you have seen a lot of movies, its rarer to get the same kind of feelings. But that's just a part of growing up, it isn't a problem of censorship. I wonder even if, upon re-watching now, you'd think Fight Club is really the pinnacle of edginess and a profound art you attribute to it now, or if maybe you were just young when you watched it. And I also wonder if there are some great, profound works being made now that, for whatever reason, you have simply missed or felt the need not to see. Is "American History X" really leagues above "How To Blow up a Pipeline" in terms of "uncomfortable and ugly topics"? What about "Beau is Afraid"? Is that one censored by the modern zeitgeist? What about the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, Ruben Östlund, Harmony Korine, or Nicolas Winding Refn? Trying honestly, its hard for me to pinpoint what in particular you might think is censored these days. People are definitely still making good, uncomfortable movies.
Edit with a few more directors making really great, messed up things at the moment: Julia Ducournau, Gaspar Noé, Rick Alverson, Boots Riley. Have you watched any Cronenberg lately? Lars von Trier? Haneke? What about recent Verhoeven films?? What about Paul Schrader? Bong Joon-ho?
If these people are being censored, well, they are still definitely making some Art within those restrictions.
Movies have gotten worse, without question. Big budget movies now are consistently cliché ridden rehashes of proven IP because studio execs don't want to take any chances. This behavior really took over in the early aughts, and you can look at the top 10 movies for each year to see the slide from ~2004-2010.
I do agree that lack of risk-taking and sameness are affecting the music and movie industries. But it’s entirely possible movies “feel” worse because… there’s more of them. Maybe Sturgeon's law is at work, and the more movies we make, the more shit we get.
It's not wrong if you don't care about art, or the legacy of the time. They're aiming for repeatable mediocrity, which is more profitable, but 50 years down the line nobody will remember the profitable trash, but they'll remember the art that was made before it.
Not sure I subscribe to your definition of art. Making a movie that has a hundred million people watching it when it is released is art in my view. Most "art" even from the 1970s is utterly forgotten by now, for example, while certain blockbusters endured.
But that is how it has always worked. Movies in the past just seem better because you only remember the good ones. I would argue it was even more egregious in the past because under the studio system they used to quickly crank out huge numbers of formulaic movies that no one really though about after they had a theatrical run.
I think blockbusters got too expensive to make (relative to economic conditions) so now the money men don't want to take any chances when funding a movie. Everything needs to be designed by committee and run through a hundred focus groups; this kind of process can never produce true art, only soulless LCD slop. But it maximizes the chance of a movie not being a commercial flop, and that's what's important to the movie industry right now. This is the same reason we barely get anything besides remakes, reboots, adaptations and "cinematic universes". The movie industry in recent years is very averse to risk.
People who reject qualitative artistic appraisal of movies will reject that any such trend exists, and will say that everything is fine by the empirical metric of box office returns. They're missing the point; the reason movies are being made like this is because it's the least risky way to make a movie. Of course box office returns are going to look good, that's the point.
I don't know what the "Top 10 Movies" are.. Is this just, like, box office sales? How could one even judge one set of ten movies against another?
If the problem is simply, "I have to look too hard to find good things," or "ugh, they are making another Minions movie," then, congratulations, you are a hipster. But that's not really a problem, you just have good taste!
There is certainly a lot of truth to this. The first time you see some basic plot twist, it seems profound. This applies to life philosophy too, the first time you here about nihilism, stoicism, Buddhism, etc, they all seem profound. Later, you begin to view them as part of a pattern you are already familiar with.
Later in life, it's far rarer to find a quote or concept that actually changes your life view at least a little bit.
Certainly mainstream cinema is not so great for challenging and interesting movies, but there are plenty of great international and "independent" movies being made. As well as quite a number of interesting and challenging TV projects.
I've got someone in my family that surfaces this stuff for me which is lucky. Since I don't go out of my way to dig it up.
Last movie I saw in theaters was The Revenant in 2015, and before that ... maybe the first Hobbit? Agreed that current movies suck, mostly Marvel crap and rehashes ... Local to me we have: Taylor swift movie, a new Saw movie, a new Exorcist movie, a new Paw Patrol movie. Lame.
I think it's the profit motive that has ruined this medium. Most movies are just investment vehicles for the studios -- it's telling that when they're mentioned in the news, it's rarely the plot / storyline, but almost always the budget and ticket sales that are talked about.
Seems like most of the big blockbusters are extremely formulaic -- the studios take what made money before, and rehash it over and over again until it stops making money. A really good example of that was one of the silly superhero movies - the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Somehow, a fresh take on the tired genre made it to production, and audiences reacted enthusiastically, because it was somewhat new -- and what followed? Two carbon-copy sequels that didn't work nearly as well as the first one.
Of course that's within the constraints of big-budget studios that make movies as a high-return investment vehicles. Where else could you throw a hundred million dollars and get a 200% return?
I'm sure art films still exist, independent films still exist. People still make movies because they have something to say, and that's the medium they want to speak through. Maybe the way to encourage that is to fund more art schools and subsidize independent filmmakers.
Movies like that are often only canonized as "good" in retrospect, after there's been time for them to marinate in the wider culture and have some consensus form around their significance and general quality. Around the time of American History X, your local theater probably would have been showing Antz, Rush Hour, The Rugrats Movie, and There's Something About Mary.
If you came of age around 1999 you may have unusually high standards. Besides Fight Club that year also had Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, Boys Don't Cry, Three Kings, Go, and American Beauty.
On top of that were big name sequels Star Wars: The Phantom MenaceAustin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Toy Story 2, the TV adaption South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and the well marketed low-budget horror The Blair Witch Project.
[edit]
Somehow didn't manage to fit Office Space in that list. It would probably be near to the top of many other years lists, but 1999 was just silly.
> It seems these movies would no longer be "allowed" to be made
It may seem that way but I doubt it. I have faith in and trust artists, writers and film-makers to think outside the box. It's their job, and passion to do that. There will always be "safe", bland movies and TV among the good stuff.
There’s some economic idea I heard a long time back whenever I hear about piracy, where basically the argument for allowing piracy of digital goods is “well, the majority of digital pirates lack the income to be honest customers in the first place; even if you managed to stop 100% of digital piracy, you’re not going to find any residual revenue.”
I don’t know how I feel about it, but it always intrigued me.
In Spain is legal to download and share but people often pay for it anyway.
As Gabe Newell said the best way to combat video game piracy is by offering consumers better service than what they might receive from pirates. Piracy is not a pricing issue, but rather a service problem.
Everyone I know who used to pirate music, now just subscribes to Spotify or whatever. So definitely not the case there.
On the other hand, not one person I know who used to pirate Photoshop, has ever then personally paid for it once they started making money. (Their employer often did, though.)
Movies/TV are somewhere in the middle. I think a lot of people pirate because the content they want to watch is spread out among so many services that need separate subscriptions. You can't pay for all of them all the time when you go for months without touching some of them, but constantly canceling and resubscribing is madness.
Also dealing with the nonsense that Netflix won't display high-quality resolution on all external displays, etc.
>On the other hand, not one person I know who used to pirate Photoshop, has ever then personally paid for it once they started making money. (Their employer often did, though.)
Hi! Nice to meet you. With the much derided (on HN) monthly plan, I have been paying for Photoshop (and its cohorts) for my own personal use without an employer paying for it. I even have a paid for version of Office. In fact, I no longer have any software illicitly obtained. It's either a fully paid version or something offered for free. Why? Because I can afford it in direct counter to your argument.
Well, they also still bought CD's they liked back then. Usually their favourite bands, or whatever. Even in the Napster/LimeWire days when everyone was doing it they always still seemed to buy their favourite artist's new CD's when they came out.
I'm not sure that's true. I think that large software packages like photoshop have become way more available for people to pay for with subscriptions. I never paid for it and never would pay thousands of dollars for it, but now it is included in a $30 a month subscription from Adobe that I got mostly for Acrobat.
The only practical way for a high school student to get photoshop was to pirate it when I was a kid. My parents weren't going to shell out thousands of dollars for something like photoshop or autocad.
Speaking for myself, I don't use Photoshop often enough for $30 / month to be worth it. I wouldn't have been able to justify thousands of dollars either, but if I could pay a couple of hundred for a perpetual license with an upgrade discount when new versions come out that would get my business.
> Everyone I know who used to pirate music, now just subscribes to Spotify or whatever. So definitely not the case there.
Sure, people can ascend through income classes, but there’s always a new cohort of broke young people. I imagine young adults today are pirating plenty as well.
I think there is probably few percent of revenue to find but person pirating 10 $60 (or now $70) games is not going to buy 10 games when they won't be able to pirate them.
They might save up to buy one $60 game. Or wait for it to go on sale and buy it for $30
On flip side, seeing some DRM-ridden game often just makes me throw it on wishlist and buy in a year or two when they remove it and game is now half the price.... not like I have time to play all the games I want anyway
That was true for me the years I wore an eye patch. Now I have the money but turn to piracy occasionally for convenience. Make it easy for people to pay and consume content and piracy goes down.
To model this, start by considering an abstract price vs demand curve - as price goes down demand goes up. Since we are looking at a digital good, supply is effectively unlimited (actually the marginal cost of offering a file for download which is zero until you’re too big for “free” options like google drive or imgur etc). So if we offer our digital good at the low low price of 0£, everyone who is interested in our product will “buy” it (ignoring discoverability and marketing, this happens with technical books all the time). However, if you raise the price to £5, some percentage of those who are interested will no longer be willing to buy. Perhaps money is tight and that’s their lunch, that means the opportunity cost of buying the digital good is lunch. Those people are never going to buy, at practically any price, so piracy is the only way to reach that segment of the market. The question is how big that segment is and whether there exists some price point that will get them to buy while continuing to provide incentive for you to offer the good.
There is also an interesting sidebar on the overhead of doing a transaction for any non-zero amount vs giving something away for free. The gist is that if you could do a (micro)transaction for $0.01 cheaply enough, you would be able to capture more of that market by lowering your overhead for offering the good.
This is also related to the idea that the optimal amount of fraud is not zero [1].
This has been true for 20+ years. The biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders on content.
All the crying about piracy is greed: nothing more, nothing less.
These media cartels are going the way of the dinosaur anyway, both with AI generation supplanting them in the next decade (Alexa, generate a crossover episode of SVU and the X-Files), and 'piracy' being normalized with each new generation.
>All the crying about piracy is greed: nothing more, nothing less.
I always assumed it was about control, given how media companies constantly attempt to provide alternative methods of distributing media, though only within their very narrow definitions, and how they fight so hard against anything that breaks their control. CSS, Sony's CD root kit, HDCP, etc etc etc
"All the crying about piracy is greed: nothing more, nothing less."
I disagree. Big movie studios can write off piracy, but independent movie studios, with much smaller budgets, can't. It's the same in the music industry.
I knew lots of independent artists in the early 2000s that basically had no career after Napster because nobody would buy their music anymore (but those same people continued to download/listen to it). They also couldn't tour to make a living, because large companies control all of the major venues.
Piracy has forced independent artists to go to large studios to make a living, contributing to the enshitification of the current state of music (and movies).
Small movie studios, if they make good content, people will go and pay to see.
It's no different. If people pirate it, word of mouth spreads and people will go and see it.
No one really buys music anyway, artists make most of their money from shows.
Sharing is normal behavior, the whole concept of piracy as stealing is bananas. No one has a right to charge for every single copy of something in existence, not when it can be easily duplicated. It's entirely at odds with human nature.
"No one really buys music anyway, artists make most of their money from shows."
In the 90s, artists COULD make money from music. Especially independent artists. Piracy changed all that and forced artists to only make money from shows, which are controlled by large companies.
I disagree. Piracy didn't have the negative affect you think it did. Study after study shows piracy only helps to boost sales.
Those artists are blaming piracy when really it's more likely to do with a shift to streaming and those artists not having the skills to have a strong online presence once physical media started dying out.
There's a strong correlation between the death of record stores and these independent artists starting to lose money.
And besides, in modern day we have more independent artists than ever making money.
I think this is making the mistake of conflating piracy with lost sales; there is only so much money to go around, and saying that a pirated view is lost revenue is missing the point that that person was never going to pay for that particular content anyway.
From a music perspective we have too much music; we have decades of history to stream, and each year more and more is released - ultimately only a few people will be able to sustain themselves with streaming revenue, and indipendent acts will need to survive with live acts and merch until they break through (or accept that they arne't going to become superstars).
Because the potential upside is so huge, many people are willing to gamble on that, much as people buy lottery tickets. Most people will be disapointed.
"I think this is making the mistake of conflating piracy with lost sales; there is only so much money to go around, and saying that a pirated view is lost revenue is missing the point that that person was never going to pay for that particular content anyway."
Piracy isn't theft. It's counterfeiting, which is much worse than theft. If we allowed everyone to counterfeit the dollar and use it, the value would head toward $0 over time. It's the same with all digital goods.
Where else should we apply this logic? If a large company uses GPL/Gnu software in their proprietary application, should we say that there was nothing lost because they wouldn't have shared the code anyway?
When AI gets good enough in the future, should companies be allowed to use the likeness of someone for free? After all, nothing of value was lost, right?
"From a music perspective we have too much music; we have decades of history to stream, and each year more and more is released - ultimately only a few people will be able to sustain themselves with streaming revenue, and independent acts will need to survive with live acts and merch until they break through (or accept that they aren't going to become superstars)."
Streaming is only the norm because of piracy. It's the same with software. Everyone is making software a service. Why? You can't pirate it. This was pretty easy to predict 10+ years ago.
No lol. The crying and greed of the corporations that think the world ends if someone downloads a movie that they either did pay for, will pay for in the future, or would not have paid for anyway. The 'lost sale' fallacy.
Surely you didn't really let those "you wouldn't steal a car" propaganda films get to you?
Popular things that people want are stolen more often... so what? Correlation is not causation.
Piracy is theft, but it's pretty minor shouldn't be a felony and the harm is a dollar or two at most for movies and music per user and shouldn't be harshly penalized and thus probably isn't worth the studios or attorneys time to bother with.
Piracy is not theft, it does not take away the item from it's "owner" or rightsholder. It's not even using a paid service without paying, because privacy is provided for free or in exchange for ad revenue by different people than who provide the paid services. Really, the only thing digital piracy is is digital piracy; consuming content that it's rightsholder would want you to pay for before accessing.
The issue of course is for the studio, any piracy is sign of a huge problem they need to clamp down on (leaking potential revenue). And easy to blame missed numbers/targets. And they have money, and usually a coherent voice.
Where for the audience, any amount of piracy which doesn’t visibly and reliably kill new movies they want to watch is perfectly fine. Even desirable.
Piracy is not theft. Theft requires the owner be deprived of the thieved property. Piracy does not do that. If a pirate duplicates a work, no lawful owner of a physical copy, nor rights holder, is deprived of that work. The rightsholders still have it. They can still legally duplicate it and sell it.
Piracy is copyright infringement, which is a completely separate legal and moral concept.
My question to you is - if I could duplicate a physical object you own, with no harm or deprivation suffered by you, should that be a crime?
Assault isn't theft either but Piracy and Assault are still both crimes. Somebody who sells say photographs is _harmed_ by you just using your phone to take a picture print it out later without paying them anything. It's their livelihood.
However, whether is the crime of piracy worth the current penalties? No. They're excessive and that's what the parent was saying.
Piracy is depriving the content owner the value of their creation. I don't understand how people justify piracy vs just not watching the content. It is clear there is value derived by watching (or you wouldn't consume the content), and you are not paying the owner, you are in fact taking from the owner.
There can be harm, as piracy can theoretically reduce demand for the premium non-pirated products
Reduced demand leads to reduced income/revenue. If someone did some action that directly definitively reduced your income, bringing you from say 130k to 110k, that would 100% qualify as "harm or deprivation".
When I see threads like this, it just makes me think that we need copyright reform.
It's like the film industry has had its way for too long, and we need to change a few of the rules to make content consumption a little more consumer friendly.
Otherwise, consumers are going to keep pulling out their eye patches if we continue to let the content industry believe they are in 100% control of where, when, and how you consume their content.
I was watching a Patrick Willems video this week, and he made a point about what happened during the pandemic with movie streaming. That the direct to stream films actually did way way worse than you'd imagine.
I thought that say the Pixar movies he gave examples of would have done better than they did, but actually, No. He says that because they were placed alongside everything else... they didn't do as well because the marketing wasn't the same.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadBut yeah, for the real interesting questions we would need to get the data for movies that are not available by piracy but are available in theaters.
> The data covers multiple methods of unlicensed content delivery including Streaming, P2P Torrents, Web Downloads and Stream-ripper sites
We're just assuming that the audience using these sites is the exact same audience as the comparison?
> cinema revenue at the individual premises and film-title level [in the North American market]
I think one audience learns about a new movie on a torrent site and then goes to see it in the theatre. (Another audience never uses torrent sites. Another uses them but rarely goes to the theatre, etc)
If there's statistically significant data about the first audience (as the article claims), that's interesting.
No, we are assuming they are highly correlated.
The argument that piracy drives box office sales would surprise me, except in a few cases (e.g. I would believe that some limited release movies might get exposure via piracy causing a wider release) that are more the exception than the rule.
> The argument that piracy drives box office sales would surprise me
Me too! It would be interesting if it did however; I can imagine a case where a user of an unlicensed site learned about a movie there and wanted to see it on the big screen.
If you read the study they don't argue that however.
Indeed, this is at the top of the article (emphasis mine):
> New research from piracy tracking firm MUSO shows that movie piracy is strongly linked to box office revenues. When pirated downloads peak or slow down, movie theater visits show a similar trend. While this may sound counterintuitive, the finding is actually quite obvious. Correlation is not causation and pirates are people too.
> Thus there is a very strong, statistically significant, positive correlation between Box Office revenue and unlicensed consumption
> That's a very generic conclusion, is it related to this article somehow?
And I intended to answer the question with how their statement is related to the article by pointing out that this statement is written at the start of the article:
> New research from piracy tracking firm MUSO shows that movie piracy is strongly linked to box office revenues. When pirated downloads peak or slow down, movie theater visits show a similar trend. While this may sound counterintuitive, the finding is actually quite obvious. Correlation is not causation and pirates are people too.
I didn't understand your point when you responded by saying:
> Thanks I read the article. From the study:
>> Thus there is a very strong, statistically significant, positive correlation between Box Office revenue and unlicensed consumption
What is the significance of the statement you quoted as a reply to mine? That's what I don't follow.
(Thanks for the time you've taken so far with your replies!)
I've brought it up a few times before, but you can read about another study here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 that assuming my previous comment on it was correct found for example that every pirated movie is 0.27 of a lost sale, whereas every pirated video game is actually 0.24 of an extra sale. If 0.27 was actually 1 or more, then a result like the linked study would have been more surprising for example.
> The combination of Box Office revenue data and unlicensed consumption data would provide a holistic view of film consumption
Kidding aside, is it that surprising that the theatre viewing rate matches the home viewing rate? Both are just the same indicator of popularity.
My friend tells me that in a decade of seedbox usage, my friend has had maybe 3-5 lemons with data corruption.
Edit: Clarified that it’s my friend who has a seedbox.
Or alternatively pay, ideally in Bitcoin... after nearly 2 decades of watching Japanese Kickboxing/MMA etc... I found a spot that delivers most of those events (plus way more than I care to watch) and its everything I ever wanted out of a service and gladly renew every year--though I'm incentivized to seed as long as possible in order to decrease membership costs, but I'm usually the last to DL so my ratio suffers since it's pretty niche.
It's like these promotions don't want our money, and go out of their way to make it difficult for non-Japanese platforms tpo show them legally in other markets, so instead we pay a team to curate the recording in various formats (720/1080) and upload it next day or two.
When I was younger half the fun was staying up late, chatting with people from all corners of the World on forums PBP and reacting to a knockout or decision and seeing the sun come up with fights still on the card left and deciding if I can make it to school/work etc... but sadly those days are over and my version of convenience(s) comes from watching something at my leisure at sane hours days/weeks/months later in order to not mess up my sleep cycle these days (I pay a lot more for that by comparison).
To quote one of these die-hards on the forums:
> If I'm the only dude in the PBP on NYE I'm going to have a meltdown. Should be an interesting read when it happens, anyway.
The problems I see never show up if I play with VLC (“plays for sure”) but they did show up on debugging videos played on the XBOX ONE which has was been finicky no matter if I was using Plex, Jellyfin and various client software on the XBOX. A few out-of-spec frames din’t bother most players but the XBOX freezes up for two minutes for the slightest anomaly. With Jellyfin and the new Jellyfin client playback is fine unless there is something wrong with the file that I can detect with other tools.
Badly encoded videos are all over the pirate space, frequently they promise lossless audio but skimp on bits for video, for instance.
With that XBOX all the legit video apps (BluRay player, Peacock) have the problem of trying some handshake that cuts off video with my old Samsung TV and pandemic special Denon receiver (decontented POS compared to my old one which has the video output burn out). Power cycling the receiver brings back the picture but it is one more humiliation I face in front of my tech skeptical family.
Went into app settings and force closed the app, restarted app...black screen, no response.
Rebooted TV and opened Disney+ app. Black screen, no response.
Eventually just switched inputs to the laptop sitting under the TV stand. Clicked Popcorn Time icon (I leave VPN always on for this laptop). Clicked Loki. Clicked episode. Within 1 minute the show was playing.
This is one reason why I keep this as an option. Other times I admit I just can't be arsed to subscribe to yet another service to check out a show I heard about. Not claiming any moral high ground. I just don't want to pay for another streaming service when I already have paid access to 3 (at least until they offer something I know I want to watch for a month's subscription at minimum.)
Doesn't that sound like you're doing it very wrongly?
In order to combat piracy, you need to out innovate them in terms of convenience and features.
Music piracy is almost a non-issue because it is way more convenient to get music via Spotify and streaming.
Not saying your statement about Movie industry is inaccurate - yes, one (or few) super convenient platform(s) to contain all movies to rent/buy with high quality and reliable delivery would be amazing - but one flat price for streaming everything ala Spotify is not going to work for movies.
Piracy killed the profits in record sales and created a bimodal distribution for musicians wherein you're either Taylor Swift or the equivalent, or a struggling indie.
Let's not pretend that record labels weren't massively warping the playing field for decades before the internet took off; or that piracy hasn't helped indie artists get discovered / blow up. There are studies on this, and the ones that weren't sponsored by record labels are pretty consistent in showing your statement to be false.
Record labels bled musicians, sure. Piracy just all-out stole their music - I doubt you'll find any documented instance where a musician was actually paid for their music by a kind pirate.
Events, festivals, concerts should not be the only way a musician should hope to recoup some of the effort they put into creating music.
That happens literally all the time. That's why there are studies about it.
If you want to argue with the various study authors and find flaws in their methodology; go ahead. But the idea that no one who steals music would ever then pay for that music is absurd; on par with denying the moon landing, or that Azerbaijan exists.
> Events, festivals, concerts should not be the only way a musician should hope to recoup some of the effort they put into creating music.
I don't disagree in the slightest, but once again, the blame for that situation is squarely on the record labels. Bandcamp conclusively proved that independent musicians can make money from album sales, without the predatory industry machine, even as piracy continues unabated.
To be entirely fair, I think we ahvae reached a parody with Hollywood and Streaming services in terms of content: sure, some comic book movies requires 500 million to make and require studios to pump things up and a bloated marketing tour, but A26 is a perfect example of something being made for low budget, word to mouth and often quickly on streaming services that rivals most stuff in the theaters.
After this year, I've been to the movies more times since I was a teenager, I really don't feel like I missed much during that time: I'm still incredibly out of touch with what comes out and other than Oppenheimer I don't think I watched anything that had much of a budget.
As for piracy, it'll never go away, some of us just refuse to comply with these norms and find ways around geo-restrictions and IP bans half the fun, hence why these communities still thrive before Netflix started to self-canobolize itself.
PS: Last season of Black Mirror made me regret being in the loop, after COVID there was so much more to work with than it's entire existence, but this was perhaps the sign that Charlie Brooker needs to reach for fan-art scripts and should help get them green-lit.
Do you mean A24?
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
1. Look up which of the five streaming services have the film. 2. Give up as I'm not subscribing for one movie.
Take Cyberpunk 2077 for instance, it was leaked not long after it's launch; most people (even here) called it trash and gave up on it due to the bugs. Then after grinding away at it for 2+ years CDPR just sold more than 25 million copies after the last expansion. [0] That is ~25% of it its total sales.
While it's unlikely to determine exactly how much of an effect it had, it certainly wasn't zero. Consider also the massive community modders had greater access and CDPR garnered lots of new info (and code) from this source.
It maybe its a niche to the communities I've been around, be it in tech/games/music, but this a norm not an exception. Paywalled/DLC BS is a recent phenomon and its entirely off-putting, I didn't get PL this time around (I just don't have time to game) I did like how much of an impact it has made not just for the game, but the genre itself.
0: https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/mustafa-mahmoud/cdprs-game...
Movies like American History X, Fight Club, or What's Eating Gilbert Grape.
It seems these movies would no longer be "allowed" to be made, or perhaps the modern zeitgeist censors them away.
I just want to celebrate and encourage bona fide art and see more of it in the world.
And I would gladly pay for my family to access this higher quality art.
She couldn't get past the ugliness of the content to see that it was 'a good movie' about bad things / people / situations.
Alien 3 is also one of those, I think. I love it, but it's dark and dreary and hopeless - in fact, because of that.
I think when you are younger, there are movies that profoundly affect you. When you get older, and you have seen a lot of movies, its rarer to get the same kind of feelings. But that's just a part of growing up, it isn't a problem of censorship. I wonder even if, upon re-watching now, you'd think Fight Club is really the pinnacle of edginess and a profound art you attribute to it now, or if maybe you were just young when you watched it. And I also wonder if there are some great, profound works being made now that, for whatever reason, you have simply missed or felt the need not to see. Is "American History X" really leagues above "How To Blow up a Pipeline" in terms of "uncomfortable and ugly topics"? What about "Beau is Afraid"? Is that one censored by the modern zeitgeist? What about the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, Ruben Östlund, Harmony Korine, or Nicolas Winding Refn? Trying honestly, its hard for me to pinpoint what in particular you might think is censored these days. People are definitely still making good, uncomfortable movies.
Edit with a few more directors making really great, messed up things at the moment: Julia Ducournau, Gaspar Noé, Rick Alverson, Boots Riley. Have you watched any Cronenberg lately? Lars von Trier? Haneke? What about recent Verhoeven films?? What about Paul Schrader? Bong Joon-ho?
If these people are being censored, well, they are still definitely making some Art within those restrictions.
People who reject qualitative artistic appraisal of movies will reject that any such trend exists, and will say that everything is fine by the empirical metric of box office returns. They're missing the point; the reason movies are being made like this is because it's the least risky way to make a movie. Of course box office returns are going to look good, that's the point.
If the problem is simply, "I have to look too hard to find good things," or "ugh, they are making another Minions movie," then, congratulations, you are a hipster. But that's not really a problem, you just have good taste!
But there are great movies still being made. You just have to look fairly hard. The last few years have seen some brilliant films like:
* Everything, Everywhere All At Once
* Nobody Knows I'm Here
* Portrait Of A Woman On Fire
* Argentina, 1985
* The Banshees Of Inisherin
Later in life, it's far rarer to find a quote or concept that actually changes your life view at least a little bit.
I've got someone in my family that surfaces this stuff for me which is lucky. Since I don't go out of my way to dig it up.
Seems like most of the big blockbusters are extremely formulaic -- the studios take what made money before, and rehash it over and over again until it stops making money. A really good example of that was one of the silly superhero movies - the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Somehow, a fresh take on the tired genre made it to production, and audiences reacted enthusiastically, because it was somewhat new -- and what followed? Two carbon-copy sequels that didn't work nearly as well as the first one.
Of course that's within the constraints of big-budget studios that make movies as a high-return investment vehicles. Where else could you throw a hundred million dollars and get a 200% return?
I'm sure art films still exist, independent films still exist. People still make movies because they have something to say, and that's the medium they want to speak through. Maybe the way to encourage that is to fund more art schools and subsidize independent filmmakers.
On top of that were big name sequels Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Toy Story 2, the TV adaption South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and the well marketed low-budget horror The Blair Witch Project.
[edit]
Somehow didn't manage to fit Office Space in that list. It would probably be near to the top of many other years lists, but 1999 was just silly.
It may seem that way but I doubt it. I have faith in and trust artists, writers and film-makers to think outside the box. It's their job, and passion to do that. There will always be "safe", bland movies and TV among the good stuff.
I don’t know how I feel about it, but it always intrigued me.
If you wouldn't prohibit piracy, it would become normal and the people who could pay stop paying too.
As Gabe Newell said the best way to combat video game piracy is by offering consumers better service than what they might receive from pirates. Piracy is not a pricing issue, but rather a service problem.
Everyone I know who used to pirate music, now just subscribes to Spotify or whatever. So definitely not the case there.
On the other hand, not one person I know who used to pirate Photoshop, has ever then personally paid for it once they started making money. (Their employer often did, though.)
Movies/TV are somewhere in the middle. I think a lot of people pirate because the content they want to watch is spread out among so many services that need separate subscriptions. You can't pay for all of them all the time when you go for months without touching some of them, but constantly canceling and resubscribing is madness.
Also dealing with the nonsense that Netflix won't display high-quality resolution on all external displays, etc.
Hi! Nice to meet you. With the much derided (on HN) monthly plan, I have been paying for Photoshop (and its cohorts) for my own personal use without an employer paying for it. I even have a paid for version of Office. In fact, I no longer have any software illicitly obtained. It's either a fully paid version or something offered for free. Why? Because I can afford it in direct counter to your argument.
The only practical way for a high school student to get photoshop was to pirate it when I was a kid. My parents weren't going to shell out thousands of dollars for something like photoshop or autocad.
Sure, people can ascend through income classes, but there’s always a new cohort of broke young people. I imagine young adults today are pirating plenty as well.
They might save up to buy one $60 game. Or wait for it to go on sale and buy it for $30
On flip side, seeing some DRM-ridden game often just makes me throw it on wishlist and buy in a year or two when they remove it and game is now half the price.... not like I have time to play all the games I want anyway
There is also an interesting sidebar on the overhead of doing a transaction for any non-zero amount vs giving something away for free. The gist is that if you could do a (micro)transaction for $0.01 cheaply enough, you would be able to capture more of that market by lowering your overhead for offering the good.
This is also related to the idea that the optimal amount of fraud is not zero [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913
All the crying about piracy is greed: nothing more, nothing less.
These media cartels are going the way of the dinosaur anyway, both with AI generation supplanting them in the next decade (Alexa, generate a crossover episode of SVU and the X-Files), and 'piracy' being normalized with each new generation.
I always assumed it was about control, given how media companies constantly attempt to provide alternative methods of distributing media, though only within their very narrow definitions, and how they fight so hard against anything that breaks their control. CSS, Sony's CD root kit, HDCP, etc etc etc
I disagree. Big movie studios can write off piracy, but independent movie studios, with much smaller budgets, can't. It's the same in the music industry.
I knew lots of independent artists in the early 2000s that basically had no career after Napster because nobody would buy their music anymore (but those same people continued to download/listen to it). They also couldn't tour to make a living, because large companies control all of the major venues.
Piracy has forced independent artists to go to large studios to make a living, contributing to the enshitification of the current state of music (and movies).
It's no different. If people pirate it, word of mouth spreads and people will go and see it.
No one really buys music anyway, artists make most of their money from shows.
Sharing is normal behavior, the whole concept of piracy as stealing is bananas. No one has a right to charge for every single copy of something in existence, not when it can be easily duplicated. It's entirely at odds with human nature.
In the 90s, artists COULD make money from music. Especially independent artists. Piracy changed all that and forced artists to only make money from shows, which are controlled by large companies.
Those artists are blaming piracy when really it's more likely to do with a shift to streaming and those artists not having the skills to have a strong online presence once physical media started dying out.
There's a strong correlation between the death of record stores and these independent artists starting to lose money.
And besides, in modern day we have more independent artists than ever making money.
From a music perspective we have too much music; we have decades of history to stream, and each year more and more is released - ultimately only a few people will be able to sustain themselves with streaming revenue, and indipendent acts will need to survive with live acts and merch until they break through (or accept that they arne't going to become superstars).
Because the potential upside is so huge, many people are willing to gamble on that, much as people buy lottery tickets. Most people will be disapointed.
Piracy isn't theft. It's counterfeiting, which is much worse than theft. If we allowed everyone to counterfeit the dollar and use it, the value would head toward $0 over time. It's the same with all digital goods.
Where else should we apply this logic? If a large company uses GPL/Gnu software in their proprietary application, should we say that there was nothing lost because they wouldn't have shared the code anyway?
When AI gets good enough in the future, should companies be allowed to use the likeness of someone for free? After all, nothing of value was lost, right?
"From a music perspective we have too much music; we have decades of history to stream, and each year more and more is released - ultimately only a few people will be able to sustain themselves with streaming revenue, and independent acts will need to survive with live acts and merch until they break through (or accept that they aren't going to become superstars)."
Streaming is only the norm because of piracy. It's the same with software. Everyone is making software a service. Why? You can't pirate it. This was pretty easy to predict 10+ years ago.
I disagree. Dollars are only useful for their value. Movies, music, and games are enjoyable to "use".
You mean the crying and the greed of the people that don’t want to pay to see movies right
Surely you didn't really let those "you wouldn't steal a car" propaganda films get to you?
Piracy is theft, but it's pretty minor shouldn't be a felony and the harm is a dollar or two at most for movies and music per user and shouldn't be harshly penalized and thus probably isn't worth the studios or attorneys time to bother with.
Where for the audience, any amount of piracy which doesn’t visibly and reliably kill new movies they want to watch is perfectly fine. Even desirable.
Piracy is copyright infringement, which is a completely separate legal and moral concept.
My question to you is - if I could duplicate a physical object you own, with no harm or deprivation suffered by you, should that be a crime?
Assault isn't theft either but Piracy and Assault are still both crimes. Somebody who sells say photographs is _harmed_ by you just using your phone to take a picture print it out later without paying them anything. It's their livelihood.
However, whether is the crime of piracy worth the current penalties? No. They're excessive and that's what the parent was saying.
Reduced demand leads to reduced income/revenue. If someone did some action that directly definitively reduced your income, bringing you from say 130k to 110k, that would 100% qualify as "harm or deprivation".
It's like the film industry has had its way for too long, and we need to change a few of the rules to make content consumption a little more consumer friendly.
Otherwise, consumers are going to keep pulling out their eye patches if we continue to let the content industry believe they are in 100% control of where, when, and how you consume their content.
I thought that say the Pixar movies he gave examples of would have done better than they did, but actually, No. He says that because they were placed alongside everything else... they didn't do as well because the marketing wasn't the same.
I know what to do! Put ads via stickers all over them right before we sell them! Surely this will decrease theft!