| Subject: Piracy |
Author:
Adrian
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Date Posted: 13:20:04 06/11/03 Wed
In reply to:
Pasha
's message, "Re: Fansubs" on 10:52:42 06/11/03 Wed
>This is under the assumption that: fansubs = money
>lost to companies. Is this true though?
I doubt it's that simple.
Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, tried to stop the Record button on VCRs in the early 1980s. Valenti ran a publicity campaign claiming that the ability to record movies from television would open the door to massive piracy and destroy studios' ability to control their intellectual property. He projected millions or billions dollars in losses due to recording VCRs.
In fact, the VCR *stimulated* sales of movie videos. As local video stores were challenged by Blockbuster and later Hollywood Video, the home rental industry raked in billions for movie studios. All this despite the fact that all customers with two VCRs could easily copy the video and distribute it.
As Apple's ITunes service has demonstrated, people are willing to pay for media if it is offered at a reasonable price in an easily accessible method. Music piracy is largely due to consumers' belief that paying $16 for a CD with only one or two good songs is unreasonable. If a good song is priced at only $1, people will buy it legally rather than engage in online spyware and shady transactions.
In the early 1990s, the computer software industry was stimulated by piracy. Many games, applications, and even distributions of Windows owed their popularity to consumer piracy. That piracy fueled distribution and word-of-mouth, which led to business purchases and new buying customers.
As a historical footnote, Jack Valenti failed to learn his lesson from VCRs, and was recently involved in court cases against breaking DVD encryption. Even though unencryped VCR copying stimulated millions for movie studios, the MPAA wants to retain as much control as possible over DVD formats.
The music industry is currently learning that personally attacking millions of pirates is a doomed approach. You can't shut down all file sharing networks. You can't IM every single pirate and expect it to stop.
There are three ways to stop piracy, all of them mostly social solutions:
1) Offer the product legally for a reasonable price in a wide distribution that anyone can reach.
2) Offer premiums, such as superior quality sound, DVD bonus features, etc. that pirates cannot offer. Pirated products are often of poor quality.
3) Develop brand name loyalty. Socially convince consumers that your company deserves to be paid for delivering good products.
The purely technological solution of encryption or shutting down networks will always fail in the end, at least in this country. We don't have Big Brother cameras installed in our living rooms. In a free society, it will always be relatively easy to commit "intellectual property theft". It's not a high priority crime, compared to murder and such.
Neither Jake nor anyone is ever going to stop fansubbing or piracy by individually attacking every pirate. It just won't work. It's only going to make everyone angry at each other, for an unestablished belief that fansubbing costs sales rather than stimulates sales.
Unfortunately, there are people in this country who have weak ethics or weak morals. You can't change them as people overnight. Morality and ethics usually need to be instilled from an early age. It's hard to take a 20-year-old who has no sense of right and wrong and suddenly make him/her moral.
The social solutions are as outlined above. Currently, licensing and better distribution is leading to Solution #1. We really don't see all that much in terms of DVD bonus features in anime yet, but that could pick up in the future. Since anime fans are generally a loyal bunch, Solution #3 is having an effect as well.
It's better to work on legal availability/distribution, premium features, and brand name loyalty.
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