Beware illegal downloaders: Data is being collected on you to crack down on piracy in

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Stang

I know that you can get around this somewhat by using a VPN or DNS service, but then you are entering a grey area. Why the hoops? I've got my money here to spend on your content - let me spend it!

And boom, there it is.

Game of Thrones, the most pirated TV show in Canada, is unavailable to the Canadian audience without a prohibitive associated cost.

There's no other method of attaining the show without spending 70 dollars just for the opportunity to pay for the channel. No online streaming, and no pay-per-use pay model.

The people that are pirating that show are the same people who would otherwise be buying it if they could. Given access, people will spend their money.

Steam is the ultimate applicable example here. Digital content management that is easy to use, fairly priced and easier than pirating. There's no mystery why it's so successful. It's harder to pirate games than paying the reasonable fee of owning them, forever.

[arsenal]

Originally Posted by pylon

Duplicate the car with your magic machine, and see how fast VW slaps you with a gajillion dollar lawsuit.

Seems to be working ok in China.

http://www.chilloutpoint.com/science...verything.html

[bradster57]

Originally Posted by pylon

Just because a $7500 Rolex is only worth $75 bucks to you, it doesn't make it's market value that. It is worth what the intended customer is willing to pay.

I am not the intended customer and would never pay $7500 for the Rolex. If I magically duplicate the Rolex and take it, is it really revenue lost for the store?

I would imagine that some of the piracy that takes place is for movies/tv/software that consumers would not have purchased in the first place but they will take it for free.

[pylon]

Originally Posted by arsenal

Seems to be working ok in China.

http://www.chilloutpoint.com/science...verything.html

Besides the obvious safety issues, there is a reason they cannot sell these garbage death traps with gun powder used as airbag propellants in any other country but China. Their government allows, and promotes piracy, and intellectual property theft.

Citing China as a model of copyright laws, is like citing Hitler as an example of patriotism.

Yes.... I godwinned this thread.

[AR_Six]

Originally Posted by pylon

Duplicate the car with your magic machine, and see how fast VW slaps you with a gajillion dollar lawsuit.

That is not the point. The point is, what is the thing that is lost? What is the damages and how can you quantify them? If someone steals your pink VW, your loss is calculated by the value of the pink VW. If it were conceptually possible for someone to steal your pink VW while not depriving you of said pink VW, your loss would be nil, from a "theft" standpoint. You still have your pink VW, how can you claim it was stolen?

As Yen points out, what is actually lost is the potential for you to sell your pink VW to the person who duplicated it with their magical machine. If we, for the sake of the example, assume that there WAS no opportunity to sell the pink VW to that person, the value of THAT loss is also quantifiable at nil.

However, this is a tougher argument to make - obviously the person who copied the VW placed some value on it, or why would they have copied and driven it away in the first place? They clearly feel they're better off with it than without it. However, a purchasing decision is a binary equation - either you would've bought it at the going rate, or you wouldn't have. In this case, it's not that hard to show you wouldn't have paid $20,000 or so for a car you don't like. In the case of a movie, would you have rented it? Maybe. It's all speculative.

[GreatWhiteEbola]

Originally Posted by pylon

Duplicate the car with your magic machine, and see how fast VW slaps you with a gajillion dollar lawsuit.

It's VWs machine.

[Burninator]

Originally Posted by The Yen Man

Bad analogy IMO, but if you want to use it, then it's actually like you having a magic machine that duplicates the beetle for free and then put out there with the keys in the ignition.

The real loss isn't the fact that the beetle is gone. Its the opportunity cost associated with the fact that a paying customer can get the beetle for free rather than pay your dealership for one.

What about the cost of the design of the original beetle before being copied?

[AR_Six]

Originally Posted by pylon

Just because a $7500 Rolex is only worth $75 bucks to you, it doesn't make it's market value that. It is worth what the intended customer is willing to pay.

Actually, it's worth what a purchaser would pay in an arm's length scenario. Intention has nothing to do with it. If you can come to me and say "here are 50 examples in the last 3 months where purchasers bought this Rolex, and all paid between $7200 and $7700", you would have established that the fair market value of the Rolex is somewhere in that range. However, if you set MSRP for a product at, say, $100,000, and no one bought it at that price because no one was willing to spend that much, you have zero case for saying that the fair market value of that product is $100,000.

[pylon]

Originally Posted by GreatWhiteEbola

It's VWs machine.

Did VW willingly give you the password to start the machine and make free Beetles?

[WilderPegasus]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Stang

You can even extend this into rights for Flames games. Why can't someone buy a season subscription for all Flames games and watch them in HD over the internet. No blackouts, no geoblocks, etc. Instead, the consumer is forced to buy a cable package that subsidizes a bunch of other crap channels and keep afloat another outdated business model. The networks and the cable companies know that live sports is one of the only reason a lot of us even keep cable, and if an alternative existed where you could truly pay for what you watched, they'd be hooped.

That's why the cable companies own the channels that own the broadcast rights to sports in this country. They can continue to grab money from an antiquated model by monopolizing regional tv rights. They even took it a step further by buying the Maple Leafs to ensure that they would never lose broadcast control of their games.

[oilyfan]

Originally Posted by bradster57

I am not the intended customer and would never pay $7500 for the Rolex. If I magically duplicate the Rolex and take it, is it really revenue lost for the store?

I would imagine that some of the piracy that takes place is for movies/tv/software that consumers would not have purchased in the first place but they will take it for free.

Now to be fair the intrinsic value of the Rolex derives some of its value from the fact that is a luxury item and that not everyone can afford it.

[AR_Six]

Originally Posted by Burninator

What about the cost of the design of the original beetle before being copied?

Doesn't factor in. You, in the abstract ether, have a fixed (and unknowable at the time of design) number of buyers who will purchase the product you're designing at the price you'll end up setting for it. That will generate $X revenue. Whether you make a profit depends whether $X revenue exceeds all of your costs, including design costs.

$X is unaffected by people who are not in that fixed but unknowable number of buyers. In the Pylon example (let's assume the person desgining is the person selling and there aren't intermediaries, for the sake of simplicity), the guy who had no interest in a pink VW is not among the fixed list of prospective buyers.

There are a whole bunch of realistic factors that could weigh into this hypothetical which is why it's a terrible example. I.e., you could note that a reduced cost to the point where a particular buyer WOULD pay the reduced price (i.e. on a "what it's worth to the buyer" metric) quantifies the loss. However that assumes infinite supply of the product which is appropriate in a digital movie context but not in a manufactured product (like a pink VW bug) context.

[polak]

Originally Posted by pylon

Did VW willingly give you the password to start the machine and make free Beetles?

The machine isn't VW's. It's a public machine that can duplicate ANYTHING.

A proper comparison would be your friend, lending you HIS VW that he OWNS and letting you run it through the public duplication machine, which again, can duplicate ANYTHING.

[GreatWhiteEbola]

Originally Posted by pylon

Did VW willingly give you the password to start the machine and make free Beetles?

VW is making the Beetles. In my world VW has a machine that makes free Pink Beetles for everyone, yaaay!

[HOOT]

Originally Posted by GreatWhiteEbola

It's VWs machine.

It must double as a time machine since most of VW's design concepts come from the 70's.

[Jimmy Stang]

Originally Posted by WilderPegasus

That's why the cable companies own the channels that own the broadcast rights to sports in this country. They can continue to grab money from an antiquated model by monopolizing regional tv rights. They even took it a step further by buying the Maple Leafs to ensure that they would never lose broadcast control of their games.

You're absolutely right, and this points to the larger problem in Canada (and other places, obviously.)

The networks, the distributors, and the internet service providers are all the same people. Shaw, for example, owns Global and also owns the means to provide you with cable TV and internet. Bell and Rogers are the same. Telus is an exception, as they "only" hold 2/3 of the pieces.

Seemingly unrelated things like internet usage caps, cable TV, regional restrictions on content, etc. etc. are all a lot more connected than people think. Shaw's (mostly unsuccessful) attempt at instituting absurdly low internet caps a while back had nothing to to with managing the bandwidth on their network and everything to do with protecting their cable business.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by psyang

This is the major differentiator. Suppose you had a super-high-tech 3d printer from the future, and only had to scan the wallet before it produced an exact duplicate for you. You pay for the materials only. Is that stealing?

That's called counterfeiting.

[LChoy]

Originally Posted by polak

The machine isn't VW's. It's a public machine that can duplicate ANYTHING.

A proper comparison would be your friend, lending you HIS VW that he OWNS and letting you run it through the public duplication machine, which again, can duplicate ANYTHING.

Originally Posted by pylon

Did VW willingly give you the password to start the machine and make free Beetles?

My 2 cents.

The way I see it, imagine the duplication machine works by figuring out how break down the object duplication to it's basic materials. The metal, plastic, organic, inorganic (or even at the subatomic level) and is able to put together a step by step to build a duplicate. The machine then utilizes a billion mini workers who take your own basic materials and hammers out the structures required to assembly a complete copy of a VW beetle.

This is essentially how file sharing works. The movie or media is recreated from the 1s and 0s of the original source material. Nothing is stolen if the original source material was acquired through legal means. Similarly as if I borrowed my friends car to use as a model so I can forge my own metal, plastic, and other materials to build an exact copy. VW can't sue me if I built my own car (unless I sold it as if it was from VW).

DRM in this case would be if VW inserted a special code that scrambled the assembly instructions so the machine could not put together a duplicate.

[FlameOn]

That's the whole thing with illegal downloading. It's more counterfeiting rather than actual theft.

Also if something is not actually available in your country legally and you go and download it, would it even be remotely right to punish someone for getting something that can not legally be bought?

[zamler]

Originally Posted by Flash Walken

Steam is the ultimate applicable example here. Digital content management that is easy to use, fairly priced and easier than pirating.

This x100000000. Need I remind people the following tech was condemned, in fact some (if not all) of these technologies resulted in legal action to stop them. And this is only a short list:

• Cassette tape
• Video cassette
• Recordable compact disc/DVD recordable
• Mp3 technology

The above were said to be capable of devastating an entire industry, but the exact opposite occurred. The video tape opened the door to an entirely new revenue stream. Companies that first made mp3 hardware were sued! Think about that for a moment, and consider the revenue stream from mp3s now. The bottom line is instead of these companies going after people for downloading, they need to instead embrace those same people and convert them to customers.