News - Cost of Digital Economy Art could push broadband prices up

[cameronlite]

Personally, i think the country has bigger problems than pirates. Obviously piracy is a bigger issue than the financial crisis/unemployment/budget cuts/overpopulation/the environment...

[watercooled]

What, so just because there are bigger problems means nothing should be done about it?
And since you mention finance and unemployment, did you consider piracy may play a significant part in them?
I've heard all the excuses in the book TBH...

[miniyazz]

I know people who download pretty much every movie they watch, so by your terms they would never buy any films if they had no choice which is simply untrue. People pirate because they know they can, they would think differently if pirating was impossible, what you say is certainly true for a few cases but there's no way it applies to most. But again, it's still very selfish and unfair that some people get for free what other people have to pay for. Personally I'm a student so I'm not exactly rolling in money but I'm no thief and I pay for media so I think I have a right to say this.

I should perhaps have been clearer but I didn't mean to imply that most people who pirate would not buy anything if they didn't pirate. I'm sure most people who pirate would buy some of what they pirate, if they couldn't get it for free, certainly. But I suspect there are very few people who would buy everything that they pirate, if they couldn't get it for free.

If I were to pull some random figures out the air, I could give an example that Joe pirates 20 films every month. If he wasn't able to pirate, he would go out and buy the 3-4 he particularly wanted to watch, and not the other 16-17 odd. And in all the figures of loss claimed by the film industries, they assume that Joe would buy all 20 films - and he just wouldn't.

So while pirating films is clearly unethical, and does push prices up for legitimate consumers, it is only a fraction as damaging as the big corporations etc would have you believe.

And making ISPs pay to help the 'creative industries' fight infringement (in other words sue people for piracy) is a frankly ridiculous idea unless those same industries are going to reimburse the ISPs from the proceeds (which let's be honest: they're not, and if they were, there'd be no point in having the ISPs pay anything).


I doubt piracy has anywhere near such an impact on the economy/jobs as you suppose.

[crossy]

What, so just because there are bigger problems means nothing should be done about it?
And since you mention finance and unemployment, did you consider piracy may play a significant part in them?
I've heard all the excuses in the book TBH...

I'm pretty sure that what "cameronlite" was getting at was that there's only a limited amount of parlimentary time, and it'd be ridiculous for something of more relative importance (e.g. changing student loan arrangements or tuition fees) got shunted to the back so this "internet tax" could be brought forward.

I'm unconvinced that this is needed - surely anti-piracy measures are the responsibility of the copyright holders - unfortunately a necessary cost of doing business these days. If they want to recoup the costs, then they could always bundle that into the cost of their products - e.g. same as Tesco etc has to do to cover the cost of store security. It's bad enough that my car insurance has gone up, to cover the costs of those folk who don't see the need for them to have insurance for their bangers. Plus don't forget that there are already sufficient laws in place for the copyright holders to go after the pirates - if they want to expend the effort in doing so.

Like you though, I'm of the opinion that if I want something then I'll pay for it. The very few times that I've raided the Torrent's (many moons ago) it was to get content that just wasn't available in this country. Okay, it's not much of an excuse, but it's the best I've got, and I salved my conscience in that case by dint of "if it was available, I'd buy it, but it's not so I've got to go elsewhere. They've not lost a sale".

[cameronlite]

Even if it was enforced in this country, nobody else would play ball, as usual. When movie companies start going out of business, pirates will start paying.

[watercooled]

I agree with what you're all saying and I also think this particular act is a load of rubbish which won't make a blind bit of difference. It just annoys me when I go round to a friends house for instance and he shows me his 50GB music collection which he hasn't paid a single penny for, after I've just paid a tenner or something for a single album. Or when I see someone playing a game I wanted to get but was put off because it has some limited-activation DRM on it. No, the impact isn't huge but it's still worrying what we might end up watching if the trend continues!