back to article 'Shame on the register to post wrong informations'

Heard the one about The Pirate Bay being ripped off? This week there was a lovely story of the Swedish scofflaws being annoyed by clone sites. Many of you enjoyed the wedding-cake sized dollops of irony in this, but some furious freetards didn't. El Reg has got it all wrong, they insist. MarKo1 is a newcomer to the Reg forums …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I think they understand

    I think pirates understand but they just live in fantasy land.

    I think Ferrari's are over-priced and that their Biz model is all wrong so I should just be able to take a new Ferrari and use it for as long as I want without paying for it... Why should Ferrari be able to charge so much money for their cars when I don't have enough to pay for one? This is unfair and so I'll just take what I want. /S

    1. SleepyJohn
      Go

      Re: I think they understand

      When you can download a Ferrari direct from the Pirate Bay to your 3-D printer and knock it out for the price of an old banger then Ferrari WILL have to change its business model, just as the Media Industry needs to now. When commodities can be manufactured by anyone for virtually nothing, those with a brain cell or two will give them away free in order to tempt you into buying an associated valuable service.

      This is the reality, and many people are making huge fortunes on the internet by understanding it. Even your ISP makes money by offering you a better service than you can get for free sitting in your car outside the neighbour's unsecured WIFI. And as for Google - they give you information for free that a few short years ago would have been quite literally priceless - a dozen Ferraris could not have bought it.

      Supermarkets have been doing it for years - what do you think a 'loss leader' is?

      The reason the American Media Industry cannot grasp this simple concept is that their 'business model' is based on that of a gormless street-corner drug-peddling gang: there is only one rule - anyone who tries for a freebie gets their legs cut off. I have seen more intellect in a chicken.

      The state-of-the-art incompetence displayed by the US Media Industry in its abject failure to grasp the incredible opportunities presented by the Digital Revolution will be quoted to future generations as a near perfect example of how not to do it.

      1. h4rm0ny

        Re: I think they understand

        "When you can download a Ferrari direct from the Pirate Bay to your 3-D printer and knock it out for the price of an old banger then Ferrari WILL have to change its business model"

        Ahhh, car analogies. Is there any better tool for someone who wants to shift an argument into a woolly metaphor where they can gloss over actual details?

        Once again, someone has deliberately focused on delivery and reproduction costs, rather than development costs. You could spend a year writing a piece of software and that software could then be reproduced and distributed for fractions of a penny. And by your logic, it should then be free because it only costs that tiny amount to reproduce and distribute. And once again, a pro-piracy apologist has set themselves up to say that they should be the one who decides how much things should cost rather than seller and buyer actually agreeing on the price through negotiation (aka the Market). The arrogance of people who declare that they should set prices when they had no involvement in producing the thing is astonishing.

        Always we come back to two things: an a priori assumption that they are entitled to the results of someone else's work and a belief that they represent the customers rather than the people who are actually paying the money for products and whom the pirates freeload along with.

        1. SleepyJohn
          Go

          Re: I think they understand

          READ this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/01/paulo-coelho-readers-pirate-books

          Here is a snippet: "Bestselling Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho is joining in with a new promotion on the notorious file-sharing site the Pirate Bay, and calling on "pirates of the world" to "unite and pirate everything I've ever written".

          Coelho has long been a supporter of illegal downloads of his writing, ever since a pirated Russian edition of The Alchemist was posted online in 1999 and, far from damaging sales in the country, sent them soaring to a million copies by 2002 and more than 12m today."

          Musicians and other writers are seeing things similarly: give songs/ebooks away free and build up a large market for much higher profit-margin items like paperbacks, T-shirts and concert tickets. Many software vendors give their products away free then charge for maintenance and improvement. The more freely available a product is the more people will use it and the more people will pay for it to be maintained or improved.

          If a Ferrari becomes effectively free then a lot of people will download Ferraris and thus create a large market that the experts (the makers) can mine for maintenance, customisation and so on. If a product costs nothing to make and distribute then it effectively ceases to be a product and becomes an advert - effortless free publicity.

          For intelligent digital entrepreneurs, making money out of this model is a no-brainer. For those mired in materialistic nineteenth century marketing concepts, it is a death-knell. For those criminal parasites who have always lined their pockets by ruthlessly preying on an artist's inability to market and distribute, it is the end of the road.

          1. SleepyJohn
            Go

            ... and this from Techdirt

            "We recently wrote about Paulo Coelho convincing his publisher, Harper Collins, to run an experiment, in which they offered up nearly all of his ebooks for just $0.99 (the one exception being his most famous book, The Alchemist). In the comments, we had an interesting discussion, in which someone suggested that even dropping the price by 90% would mean it was unlikely that he got 10x more sales to make up the difference. Others pointed to similar experiments -- such as those by Valve, in which dropping prices by large amounts increased sales by much, much larger percentages.

            Paulo himself contacted us to share some of the initial results -- pointing out that, according to Amazon, the sales of a bunch of his books increased between about 4,000% and 6,500%. Yes, that's multi-thousands of percent increases. I would think that more than made up for the difference in price... "

            There are a lot of people out there and the more you can reach the less you have to charge in order to do very nicely thank you. I wonder what percentage increase the 12 million extra Russian sales represent, courtesy of a free download? It is a new world, and it is there for the artist's taking. We must not let the Luddites, or the MAFIAA close it off to us, through either stupidity or criminal self-interest.

            1. h4rm0ny

              Re: ... and this from Techdirt

              "We must not let the Luddites, or the MAFIAA close it off to us, through either stupidity or criminal self-interest"

              No-one is. Copyright law doesn't stop anyone from distributing copies or allowing others to distribute copies, for any work they are the copyright holder for. So the example of the author you keep citing... There is no body or legal authority *trying* to stop him using that model. He's perfectly free to do so. Your implication that copyright law restricts him is utter straw-manning.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: ... and this from Techdirt

              Very true... sales increased 6000+% and they STILL lost money at the end of the day after processing the orders.

          2. h4rm0ny

            Re: I think they understand

            "If a product costs nothing to make and distribute then it effectively ceases to be a product and becomes an advert - effortless free publicity"

            That only works if the thing you're advertising is worth more than the advert itself. It's non-sensical to give away something of siginficant value to advertise something that is not. E.g. how exactly does someone getting an exact digital reproduction of a movie from somewhere I'm not getting paid for it help me when the product I'm trying to sell is an exact digital reproduction. Your example is a Brazillian author who found sales of a physical print book increasing in a market where he had no presence (Russia) because of file distribution. You miss so many things in this. Firstly, copyright law doesn't stop anyone from doing this at all. If you really are touting this as a better business model, fine, you are free to distribute your work this way. So is Paulo Cohelo. So is anyone else. If it's that much better as a business model you don't *need* any changes to copyright law, just go ahead of legally distribute your books. What you are arguing for is that other people should have to use one particular business model, i.e. a reduction in choice. Secondly, this example is from over a decade ago when people still wanted physical media - he was happy because physical sales went up. That's not going to be as true today when eBooks are becoming popular and it's going to be even less true in the future as digital versions of books become the preferred option. And it isn't true today when music, movies and software are pretty much preferred in digital format. Once someone has the iso of a DVD, they gain nothing more buy actually going out and buying the DVD. The products are the same, unlike a print book and a bad scan over a decade ago being read on a desktop or 1997 laptop which actually are different experiences. Also what's true of an author who is unknown in a country is not going to be true of a current popular movie, etc.

            Your whole car analogy remains only that - an analogy in which you arbitrarily state that selling services and maintenance will recoup cost of investment and make more profit than actually selling the cars. In your analogy that is true, *because it is your analogy and you can say that's how it is*. It doesn't mean that the economic model actually works for any given product. Yet you want to force people to use that model without their consent. If I write a novel and anyone who wants it takes it for free, then I'm not going to make a lot of money on maintenance or offering support and I'm not interested in advertising *myself*. The only thing I'm interested in is advertising the novel. So I'm hardly going to want to give away the novel as an advertisment for itself am I? Because I am not a Brazillian author trying to break into a market where I am unknown and capitalise on print sales vs. ereader technology from the 1990s. And you do realize that without copyright, *anyone* can sell the physical copies of the books, movies, software, etc. without giving the creators a penny for it?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I think they understand

        When you actually pay for a good or service you can have it. Otherwise you go to prison.

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