Music SEVEN times more valuable to UK plc than first thought Government statisticians and economists have revised their estimates of the value of copyright investment in the UK economy - and found it's worth £3.2bn more than they previously reckoned. Old figures were biased against copyrighted work and crudely undervalued it. The new figure for music investment alone has increased nearly …
So the music industry in the UK is worth more now than what it used to be. Gee, could it be that all this stick bashing crying pirate is utter bullshit and has been blown out of proportions to the actual impact.
Either way I still look at the contracts mucians sign and think they are so loaded in the record companies favour that there near on criminal. How many companies do you know that have marketing departments that can make up there own budgets/go over budget and blame you for it all and make you pay for it as well and call it a service.
Still statisticaly these figures are out of date and economicaly as good as a racing top for last years grand national.
...so if the overall value of the market is much larger than originally thought does this mean the percentage lost to file sharing is even smaller than originally thought?
And if the "entertainment" industry is making so much money why do they keep producing such crappy music and films? Surely there's a bit of cash to spare for an increase in quality.
Be that music, film, literature, painting, sculpture etc; only gains value when it is shared. And by "shared" I really do mean person-to-person, the grease in the gears of human culture not industrial scale stuff or the likes of TPB. I will happily join the queue of the people wishing to kick the seller of hooky DVDs/rip-off toys square in the nuts.
The increasing vice like grip of increasingly draconian copyright laws gets in the way of this and reduces the value. These meeja-morons are going to legislate themselves out of a job.
And artists having second jobs? Well boo-fucking-hoo. Many of us work one job so we have the funds to pursue our passion. Or should we venerate artists above the hoi polloi?
Oh, and one final thing, if the art industry is now worth 7 times more than though; this will be used to claim the infringement is seven times worse and we need laws seven time as tough with fines seven times the size.
I'm sure the pirates will also use these figures to justify downloading copyrighted matrial without paying for any of it. Probably whilst announcing that all movies and music produced these days are crap. If they're so bad though why do they keep downloading this stuff?
I have a strong interest in copyright, I rely on it to protect my work so I can make a living. I'm not a fan of the large collecting agencies which often abuse their position but at the same time there are too many freetards with a massively inflated sense of entitlement.
Just because a piece of media has been produced doesn't mean you have some automatic right that allows you to view it. If pirates don't like the price of something then they should simply not buy it, they need to stop pretending it gives them a moral argument for downloading for free.
The first kind is to do with why people will sing without being paid or what they do for love not money. Most value from play and work isn't monetised and is unpaid, often within the home.
As to the second kind, the music business has been done a significant disservice by it's lawyers chasing after such obviously silly numbers , to the point where nobody in their right minds would take their claims seriously. The economic value of music downloaded, as with all other economic value is what people are willing to pay for it. We will know what that is to the extent it's possible to determine to what extent people will pay how much more for fatter compared to thinner pipes, because the fatter ones carry more music.
I've got no problems with musicians expecting a cut of the genuine monetary value of their work in exchange for legitimisation of this particular use.
So music turns out to be a major contributor to the economy.
You would not think so if you looked at the last 40 years of government policy.
Music is barely taught in our schools. Live venues are treated as public health risk to be closed down or suppressed wherever possible.
The only sector if the industry which receives any serious government support is opera, an alien italien/German musical form from two centuries ago which only public skool oxbridge snobs listen to, and never makes any money. Where were our Civil servants educated?
This does not mean that the music business is getting more income but that the money spent by the music industry on promotion and all the stuff that it has to do to get the product noticed supports and stimulates the wider cultural economy. Also that there are wider benefits to the UK economy simply because of the fact that the UK music industry has such a big slice of the international market.
Why do freetards want to kill the thing they purport to love? Go of and play semantics with that!
Study, after study, after study shows that active downloaders actually *purchase* more physical goods and spend more attending live performances than do "honest folk". Those same people more actively share (i.e. promote) those things they like amongst their friends, driving further sales and attendance.
What that proves is that your precious "freetards" do more than "honest folk" to support the things they love.
November, 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/illegal-downloaders-spend-the-most-on-music-says-poll-1812776.html
April, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music
May, 2002
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-898813.html
July, 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4718249.stm
November, 2007
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2347/125/
I found those in less than two minutes via simple Google search.
You didn't read them though did you? They talk about surveys with statistically insignificant sample sizes. They spout such gems as 'illegal downloaders are ten times more likely to buy music' without mentioning how much they download and don't pay for. They could rip off a thousand times more music than the average person but that's ok because they buy ten times as much as the average person?
It's the usual freetard excuse of "I'm doing you a favour by copying your work for free, it's publicity innit" completely ignoring that it's up to the artist not freetard whether or not the work is given away for promotional purposes.
I might try and go watch a hundred films at the cinema this month. I'm only going to pay for ten tickets but they should be thanking me really because if I hadn't seen the other 90 films for free I might have only paid to see one film this month.
This isn't debating the right-or-wrong of it all, it's about financial support. Two very different things.
I read them, and no, they're not perfect, but they are as close to accurate, and done by independent groups, and some by government organizations, as the studies that support the music/movie industries. Which are ALL done with said industry monies, and are constantly being debunked. In many cases by execs that have left those industries.
Yes, when pirating, absolutely nothing goes back to the industry but it matters absolutely NOT AT ALL whether somebody doesn't pay for $1 worth of copies or $1,000,000 worth of copies, it's still zero income. What matters in supporting the industry is how much money they collect, and the facts still are that massive downloaders still contribute more.
To do the maths, you go buy those ten tickets (for simplicity sakes let's assume a $10 ticket price) and watch 100 films. I'll go buy five tickets and see five films. End result: you've contributed $100 while I've, more honestly, contributed $50. Which one of us is supporting the industry more? Your "stolen" viewing did not actually consume anything and thus did not cost the industry anything. And again, financial support, not honesty, is the crux of this debate.
I am curious. Do you support the movie/music industry's desires to stop/ban/illegalize the sale of used CD & DVDs?
So you're casting aside the moral argument because you don't have a leg to stand on?
Your whole argument about contributions is flawed. Just because you buy more of a product you don't have the right to take even more for free. Whilst not every download equates to a lost sale it's completely disingenuous to suggest none of them are lost sales. If you're low on money one week and desperately want to see a new film are you going to wait till pay day or just pirate it if the option is there?
I've got no problem with the secondhand market as people are still paying for content, even if none of that money makes it back to the artist. This is because it still maintains the idea that music, movies, etc have monetary value (unlike piracy) and also because the secondhand market's size will always be dictated by the size of the firsthand market.
No, I'm not throwing the moral argument away because that's not what the original guy I responded to was talking about, and it's not what I've been talking about. You made it that way. I'm not talking about rights, morals, or laws. His comments, and mine, were completely about financial support, right or wrong, one way or another.
And financial support is what the *IAAs have been arguing. That piracy is morally wrong-wrong-wrong *because* it costs them money. Because it costs jobs. Because it means artists aren't earning as much. THEY tried using the morals game based on finances, but every single study done on the subject, that the *IAAs did not fund (hey, that I've seen at least, I'm open-minded enough to accept corrections), repeatedly shows that they are full of it up to their eyeballs. Because AT WORST piracy has no statistically significant effect on sales of individual music CDs or movies, and at best helps the industry as a whole as people discover new interests.
For a personal example, to play on both my arguement and yours regarding the secondhand market; I'm in America, the last dozen or so CDs I've purchased were all via eBay (most CDs were used, but a few were actually new items). Every one of those was never released in North America, so the industry/artists had made their choice not to sell to me, but I was a naughty boy and decided to throw some money into the industry whirlpool anyways. Some of those I originally found a single song on YouTube (another bastion of piracy according the the *IAAs), some I heard on European-based internet radio. But from there, everyone of them was a pirate act to listen to the album, delete the download if I didn't like it, went looking on eBay if I did like it.
There's been more than one time that I've tried purchasing a CD from Amazon UK, or a UK retailer, only to be told I couldn't buy it because it wasn't authorized for North American sales. It's an extremely confusing thing to try comprehending why I should feel bad about trying to give my money to people determined to not take it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
