Congratulations, copyright infringers: You are the five per cent

Provide a good service at a fair price and piracy will mostly disappear

I don't pirate mateial on principle. I am quite happy with the idea that content producers should be fairly remunerated. I buy plenty of content when I think the terms are fair. However, I am not prepared to be conned and if I think that the restrictions (eg DRM, regional encoding etc) or price aren't fair, I shall continue to pirate material and not feel the slightest twinge of guilt.

Whether Mr Orlowski or the content providers think that is right or not is no concern of mine. Provde a fair service and I shall use it. Don't and I'll have your stuff for nothing whether you like it or not.

Content providers have had the whip hand for a long time but now the boot's on the other foot. Adapt or die dinosaurs.

#DRMfail

I was recently given a box set of a kids series. For much greater convenience of presentation to my young daughter, I wanted to play it on my laptop. #DRMfail: it wouldn't work at all. 3 months' later I've got round to cracking the DRM on 2 of 7 DVDs. Would've been a damned sight easier to torrent them!

DRM is to blame

You know what? If there was a service out there, that offered a non-DRM-encumbered mp4 version of a movie, that I could click, pay a few quid, download it within 30 minutes, and have it available to copy between and watch on whatever device and operating system I wanted, whenever I wanted, forever? Sorta like the way mp3's work? I'd pay for it.

But there isn't. So I don't. Sorry, I'm not going to rent a time-limited single-device-limited Windows-only internet-connection-required stops-working-if-we-go-bankrupt movie.

If it's only 5% they're bloody lucky, I'd say. I would have estimated it as more like 10%, with far more again being willing to pay a reasonable price and pirating when that's not an option.

The rise in legal useful services in the UK will almost certainly be a factor here, but as a film and music enthusiast who uses everything from Amazon through emusic to Bandcamp to get music and Netflix/Lovefilm through Film4OD/CurzonOnDemand for home viewing, I maintain the opinion that if I've checked half a dozen services and accounts to try and legally get at the product I'm seeking and the rightsholders have decided that I shouldn't be allowed paid access to it, then they lose nothing if I end up getting it elsewhere. (EG I'd happily pay up to £10 just for streaming access to Sky Atlantic, but Sky won't let me get that unless I switch to them as a provider - so they can sit and swivel, and those content creators who decided that giving Sky the exclusive rights to their contents get money from me only when they release their stuff on DVD. It's a net loss for all of us, but if they will insist on being bloody stupid there's only so much I can do....)

I happily pay for content, but I don't understand what sane individual would think that there's a difference between "Captain Underpants, in the UK, watches DL copy of eg current Big Bang Theory episodes, then buys boxset of that season 6 months later when it's released" and "Captain Underpants, in the UK, waits until that boxset is released 6 months after broadcast and buys it when it's released". They get the same money, at the same time, in both cases. If they want my money sooner, the way to do it is to give me DRM free access to paid-for episode downloads, at a reasonable price. The music industry eventually accepted this and, surprise surprise, is now reporting steady increases in digital music sales. I look forward to the day that the film and tv industry catch up.

I see bitter people...

Ahhh...the sounds of bitter people who are too scared to copy anything in case they get into trouble... and feel that `it's not fair` that others do.

If I can copy something for nothing I will....and that's that. If it makes you feel better to call me a freetard then fill your boots. Go ahead and intellectualise all you like, I'm still not paying for films or music unless I decide it's worth it, to me (and I do buy films and movies on the rare occasions that I feel they are worth it, to me).

But feel free to get as angry and incensed about it as you like, and then pop out and buy an album or something to calm yourself down, knowing that you've done the right and noble thing.

It's amazing that only 5% of us are at it! In fact I don't really believe that, if we all paid for what we consume we'd be impoverished, e.g. you'd have to be a millionaire to fill an iPod. And the 'legitimate' income streams denied to the distributors isn't somehow wasted, it all goes back into the economy in other ways, not many paytards seem to acknowledge this (OK, some might go on recreational drugs). Hopefully it will stay this way and the intransigence at Westminster will continue. I reckon most of their disinterest is down to them not having the first fucking clue about how the Interwebs work, their ignorance is certainly apparent when they have to discuss it (cf. DEB). That and the fact the PM's wife isn't a performing artist (to whom could I be alluding?).

Audible.co.uk have got it right.

As an avid fan of audio books, I have to say that Audible have got this digital 'try before you buy' thing nailed.

As a full member they allow you to download and listen to the book for anything up to 12 months and if you didn't enjoy it you can simply request a refund or return of the credit or exchange for another title.

I have around 100 titles in my library and so far audible have swapped or refunded around 15 books for me, sometimes months and months after I had read them and was either bored stupid by them or gave up halfway through. No hassle, no questions just a straight forward exchange or refund.

THIS is how it should work with films too. Too many times I've been told about this 'wonderful' film which looks OK in the trailer, only to want to walk out after 20 minutes through boredom...*anything Hollywood usually). In such cases punters should be able to swing by the booking office and get a partial refund or ticket exchange for something else.

http://www.audible.co.uk/mt/glg

Do you produce work yourselves?

How many of you people saying you pirate, actually produce creative work yourself?

I used to rip stuff off, left, right and centre then I started writing my own music and producing my own images, I don't hope to sell any of them but when they get ripped off and copied without permission, things I don't agree with done with my work, I hate it. I don't mind giving it away providing it's left in the state I gave it away in.

I'm not squeaky clean, I still pinch the odd song from online when I fancy it but I no longer rip off whole albums, games or movies. I don't like my work being ripped off, so I don't do the same to anyone else's.

A couple of things

I'm pretty damned sure that Orlowski is only kept around as some sort of El Reg equivalent of Jan Moir or Richard Littlejohn.

Anyway, ad hominem attacks aside, I pay for my content. Only seems fair, really. However, downloading and bittorrent for me fills a very useful hole, in that if a disc gets scratched or broken, I can get another copy. That said, there are those who blatantly abuse the system and I know of one person who has at least 3tb of movies knocking round. He doesn't know what to do with them all, the silly sod.

I strongly fail to see why I should sell out for something twice when I've already bought the rights to watch the content. Also, format shifting shouldn't be illegal either. Just my thoughts, you don't have to agree, naturally.

Don't feed the beast

The large media companies who make all those movies and albums are the same companies that have bought out all the newspapers and TV stations, which feed everyone crap news and essentially keep the public in the dark about the major issues in politics and society. When was the last time you saw some really good investigative reporting, uncovering corruption in government, or abuses by corporations? 10 years ago? 15?

That's around that time they started cutting everyone's budgets for investigative journalism (and even fact-checking), and gave us pablum instead. Investigative journalism and fact-checkling work is far more time-consuming, expensive, and more likely to piss off potential advertisers than the simplistic sloppy news-tainment that passes for news nowadays.

More importantly though, this fosters an ignorant public. The real problem here is that Big Media has effectively undermined democracy.

To quote James Madison:

"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

Source: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch18s35.html

When you give Big Media your money, you build their resources and power, and continue to reward them for eliminating a "free press".

Pirating media can be an effective form of protest against this, but only if pirates leave messages behind on comment boards, stating things like "You took our journalism, so I take your music"; "you harm our democracy, so I harm your profit margin".

BTW: Freetards are people who choose a free item over a paid item even when the price of the free item, in terms of time needed to get the free item to work properly, outweighs the monetary price of the paid item. A Freetard is someone who wastes more time than it's worth, just to get the item for free. Not everyone who chooses the free option is a freetard.

Andrew you say research on economic damage gives mixed outcomes. I'm afraid this is not the case. The research findings are neatly divided along the lines of who paid for them and who conducted the studies. If funded by the media lobby they find horrific damage and if funded by the digital rights movement they find none.

What little independent research exists tends to find that revenue models have merely shifted.

Something rarely taken into account is the deliberate strategy to undermine the first sale doctrine which permits resale of physical content such as dvds. This is achieved by a shift to digital rental or purchase where the media is crippled via drm to prevent transfer / gifting etc. There have been few calculations of how much the content industry has made from this shift but it would likely compensate for loss of revenue through infringing downloads.

So many of the comments here are excusing downloading things for free because they can't get a legal (paid) copy for a few months after they can get the illegal download. Some news for you - you will not actually die if you have to wait 6 months longer to see a particular series or film!

I am disabled so visiting the cinema to see a film isn't really practical, sitting in the same (uncomfortable) seat for more than 2 hours would cause me a lot of pain that would last for days after. So I wait until any film I want to see is on Sky, or released on DVD, and watch it then. I watch probably as much if not more than anyone else here, i just watch much of it time shifted by 6 months or so.

I won't argue that the current system is great, it's stupid & unfair. But demanding that you get whatever you want when you want, and using that to justify not paying for something, is also unfair. One question for all the people that think it IS fair to copy - how much would be produced if only ONE person paid then everyone else copied from them?

Home grown food is killing family restaurants...

...and it's illegal!

One reason why...

...Blighty is falling out of favor internationally due to their failure to properly prosecute hackers and pirates. Cybercrime is only going to get worse in the UK and their releations with the rest of the world will continue to deteriorate.

problem with the stats...

the sad fact is, 90% of all internet users have NO CLUE about computers and 'net... they either just have it for their children to use, and the phone package deals, or just for email & Facebook etc.. they dont bother with knowing what all the other stuff is!! a friend mine said he had lost his internet - turns out he had somehow changed settings and lost the IE icon... that is all...

that leaves the 10%, half of which only vaguely know stuff.. and the top part of that is guys like me, who repair stuff, and help out the others for a fee.... :)

Download != Lost Sale

I read "Because *you* believe that *you* are entitled to benefit of the work of others." ..and it made me smile...what a benefit...where do I pay?

Oh, and just because someone may have downloaded something doesn't mean that they'd actually have gone and bought it in the first place. That's crazy person logic.

When someone in the media industry decides to offers digital movie downloads in a format that plays on my Linux XBMC based HTPC, then I will consider switching to a legal service.

Simple as that.

karma

When I was a youngster in the late 80's, I remember hearing a couple of catchy tunes on the radio, went to buy the album or tape, only to find the rest of the rest of the album was shite. Could you return it? No.

Or when your favorite tape got chewed up by your Walkman, or get screwed up by being next to a magnet. At the time I though the music industry were a bunch o criminals, and if only there were a way I could get back at them.

Seems karma has come around to them these days.