How much does piracy really cost companies?

Its billions of imaginary $$... I didn't have the money to buy those games when I was younger... so its impossible to say that its money they should have.
The money does not exist.
 
j@w said:
Piracy costs nothing, since it is duplicated not stolen.
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Khanya said:
Never conceived it that way!
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SpoOkie said:
Why hello Julius Malema.
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He does however have a point. Not every pirated copy translates into a lost sale, I'm willing to bet that the majority of copies do not translate into lost sales. Also if people could not afford it in the first place they would never have gone out and brought the product to start with if you could not copy it. If the companies really wanted to they could make the copy protection much harder or even used a system similar to Steam. Just because it got copied does not mean you would have made a sale.

How many times do people simply download something, try it and then delete it. Some people are collectors and hoard the stuff for l33t points but never actually use it. I myself on many occasions have downloaded something just to try it only to wipe it after a few minutes after I have found a freeware or opensource solution that is less bloated and works much better.
 
Getting quite bored with Record labels and film studios moaning about piracy. The record has been broken for quite some time now.
 
I think it does cost them millions, but they have so much money they dont really realize it. just like when South Park did an episode on piracy. all the celebs were still living lavish lives and had expensive stuff but they ha dot settle for second best, like Britney Spears had to settle for the second best jet... they stil have a lot of money!
 
K3NS31 said:
Also, many TV companies in the states put up the episode on their own website for streaming the next day. (e.g. Chuck)

Edit: Oops, forgot to quote the msg I was replying to - it was the guy earlier who said Americans wouldn't pirate series cos they get to see them when they come out.
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That would be me :p
 
I would be happy to pay R200 a month to be able to download like you can on piratebay (Miro) they make it so easy to use. I want to watch a series when I want to watch it and not a year behind, and most of all without 20 minutes of adverts. Series and movies should collect revenue by showing branded items in the movie. I am sure SA breweries would pay for a Hansa beer to be shown in a blockbuster movie, or Kellogs branded breakfast in a kids movie.
 
DreamKing said:
lower their selling prices ..... :p
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true,i will always be a digital pirate:twisted:

ok the facts of life--we pirate all the time and we do this so much that we sit with gigs of things we will never use and all it does is go into storage on our tera drives:D

We hope that there will come a day when we will be using it,but we never get there as there is always something new or better out there and we just keep doing it to ourselves.WE are truly a strange bunch of x generation.

Now a real pirate like #&$%# he sells this stuff and this is where the line gets drawn:D
 
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Would be interesting to see a correlation graph between piracy and income, would show that many people pirate simply because they cannot buy the product at the advertised price. Especially students and schoolchildren will never buy expensive software suites. Also good point about Avatar that I read about here, the movie has record breaking sales on DVD, and yet if I remember from a few myBB articles, its also the most pirated movie for months... this piracy thing sure is killing them studios...
 
Khanya said:
Never conceived it that way!
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I wouldn't advise thinking of it in that manner since it's a bit of an oversimplification.

I agree that it's duplicated, not stolen. But that doesn't mean the copyright holder, artist, studio, developer, etc. don't lose out at the end of the day. I don't think they lose nearly as much money as the BSA, RIAA, and MPAA would have us believe but I also think that there are folks out there who would've bought the movie/album/song/software if it wasn't so easy to get it for free.

The question remains: How bad is the damage really, because the numbers being fed to decision- and policy-makers have been shown to be inaccurate time and again.
 
Heres a thought, how about making software affordable and we wouldn't have to pirate, or has greed played its final part ?
 
Why don't they calculate how much money is saved by piracy? It's a LOT cheaper especially for a large company...
 
the people who used to pirate sh*t loads.. why did you stop? did you start to understand the business world or something?
 
the term piracy was specifically coined by the film, music and software distribution industry in order to make the public believe that not doing as they demanded constituted some infamous capital offence. If they had a better crasp of terms they may have coined mutiny instead. As far as I see things the unauthorized copying of material is a problem if one of 3 things accompanies the distribution (a) the person effecting distribution is appropriating commercial rights of the material - selling pirated property and plagarism (b) the property being distributed is not what it purports to be and is (even if by way of modification) malware of some sort (c) the user of the software which has knowingly been acquired unlawfully uses the software in order to make significant commercial use of the software or uses the software for further conduct which is substantively unlawful (using unpurchased photoshop to distribute child pornography).

In all of those cases another offence or reason to involve commercial crime law enforcement exists. Major DVD pirating operations which sell such DVDs to the public are a serious problem but that is a commercial crime issue and I would venture that in every instant these operations are connected to crime syndicates. P2P unlawful distribution actually can put the real pirates out of work in the same way the prohibition of 20s opened every boozer to being a client of the mafia.
Your serious commercial crimes people should have a software and content piracy desk and the meanest commercial crimes lawyers imaginable should head prosecuting where prosecution emerges but unless a matter is at serious commercial crimes no thought as to it piracy should even take place.
 
I think the people that are REALLY complaining are people like DSTV , the stuff they pay (huge amounts for we are told) has already been seen , so they eventually show it here , and it is old news , it has no pulling power . So in the end they cant sell decoders and so it carries on . I recall the movie 300 , there was a copy of it available on the net same time as the film was released , it still sold millions .

Personally i feel that some people blame poor sales on piracy , when the truth is , people dont want their *** . When it comes to gaming , the market is being flooded with crap , so no-one wants to spend R300 on a game that is not worth it . They will try it out , if they like it , they buy it . Perfect example is Battlefield 2 , the game had a demo which you could play online , it hooked a lot of people it was that much fun , so they went out and bought it . sure you could get a pirated game i am sure , but it was just not the same as playing the real thing online, lagging to death, buggy as hell , lots of stat padders but man it was fun , flying the blackhawk and raining down pain on the masses :) .

Just goes to show if your product is good enough piracy will actually help market your game/product , better than any advertising , same with World Of warcraft , there are heaps of illegal realms , but not all of the stuff works and there are problems , play the real thing with a legal copy and then you see the difference . But dont blame the world and piracy because your film is teh_suck or your game crap .
 
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The studios need to wake up to the fact that making annoying adverts at the beginning of a legitimately bought or rented DVD is not going to stop this. And stop telling me, "you wouldn't steal a car" etc. - no I wouldn't steal a car, because that takes away from someone something that is theirs. All those people with their head in the clouds moaning about pirates answer me this question - have you ever lent (or borrowed from) someone a book, dvd or CD? If you have, then surely you're a pirate since the publisher of that book did not receive money from you? Make it easy and affordable for people to pay and they will (or at least most will imho)...
 
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Excellent article and I fully agree, people will just do without the media if they couldn't get it pirated. Content sharing is the future, Companies must just learn to use it to their favor.
 
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