"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
This is exactly right. Steam single-handedly revived the entire PC gaming market. A simple to use interface, that has your entire collection / achievements / whatever, that can be accessed from anywhere, without screwing around with keys. That's why it works.
Beyond this, a lot of Steam users are familiar with the paradox that Steam is now the opposite of piracy because Steam sales drive so many users to over-buy games just because they're on sale. This drives sales of back catalog releases and provides additional revenue that traditional box software products oftentimes do not capture.
The end result is many Steam users have vast libraries of games that they have either never even installed let alone played for more than 30 minutes. This was common with many of us that used to practice piracy, but now the excess is captured as some revenue rather than none.
>so many users to over-buy games just because they're on sale
I have to say that I'm actually kind of okay with this, at least for myself. I choose to view it as voting with my dollars to let indies and publishers know the types of game I'd like to see more of.
And, admit it, it's kind of pleasant to let your eye wander over the list of unplayed games and imagine how much fun they'll be when you someday, somehow find the time to play them (even when you know deep down that you probably never will). "Wanting is better than having" and all that. And the bonus is that they're all virtual and don't clutter up the house.
I agree with this 100%. Since I started using Steam several years ago I haven't pirated any game. It's actually more of a hassle to torrent a game, unpack it, mount the iso, get it installed, and hope that it runs normally. Steam already has my credit card info saved and within four clicks I can have a game downloading.
And, that's the routine setup. Some games require you to crack it using a separate application. Others require you to disable networking during the install process to make sure it doesn't phone home. Then others disallow multiplayer because it requires logging into the game servers, which authenticate for legit copies. The pirate group reroutes multiplayer servers to a pirate server to play.
And, this was like 5 years ago before I joined Steam. It was a convoluted mess.
Though if someone offered FreeSteam with the exact same interface, convenience, selection, etc. as the official Steam, but the only difference is that everything was free... people would use that instead. It's not just about convenience.
Yeh sure, you know why FreeSteam doesn't exist? Because people don't work for free. The required infrastructure, developers, and legal fees are just insurmountable. What are you going to do, have donations, like...paying for games? Steam is already doing things nearly perfectly, and people don't seem to care.
Fully aware of what they were implying. Infrastructure, developers, etc, still needs to exist. Who would be managing that monstrosity of a repository, all of the auto-updating patches, bandwidth, lawyers, and foreign governments to keep the content creators at bay. Never mind the interface to all of it. No one. Steam is far too valuable to even bother ripping off.
I would imagine the same type of people that are maintaining Popcorn Time and the type of people cracking/seeding games currently.
The backend would be bittorrent, so it wouldn't require bandwidth. If all of the contributors would be sufficiently anonymous, lawyers and governments wouldn't matter either.
So it would just be an interface connected to a repository of curated torrents. Not trivial but not nearly as hard as you're making it out to be. I think the only reason it doesn't exist is that videogame pirates are largely content with their current system. That or no one capable of implementing it has had this idea.
Well... there used to be some kind of `FreeSteam`. But keeping it up-to-date was indeed a hassle for both the `maintainers` and `users`. Not worth the time once you get a paycheck or enter college.
"has your entire collection / achievements / whatever, that can be accessed from anywhere"
And also taken away from you on a whim. I had this happen for about 3 weeks, without a clear reason and without communication (aside from "we're looking into it"). I will never buy another DRM'd game through Steam or anywhere else.
GoG is the next best option, then. Their catalog isn't as deep, but it's expanding all the time. They are also starting to allow you to sync some titles that you've purchased on Steam and download it from them instead, sans DRM/SteamWorks/whatever.
I use them and Humble Bundle sometimes. I'm not a huge gamer but recently I bought SUPERHOT from GoG. In fact, I sought it out after hearing of it years ago and then being reminded of the projects existence when I saw it in a random YouTube video. At the time, their site made it looked like it was only available through Steam and I was going to pass because of it, but luckily I thought to check GoG. You should check out SUPERHOT, it's the most innovative shooter I've played in years.
The chances of that are probably lower than the chances of someone breaking into your house, and stealing the PC containing all of your DRM free games. Every case I've ever read into regarding this, had a lot more to the story than was being led on. Steam isn't going anywhere, the thing is a giant cash cow, and it's in their best interest to keep users active and making purchases.
The beauty of DRM free data is that it can be copied and thus backed up, offsite, which I do. It's more likely that someone will attempt to hack a Steam account and trigger a hold on an account. I did leave out that my money for the 3 games I had bought was refunded while the investigation was pending which may have made it sound less scary, but I wasn't trying to claim anyone was stealing my money. However, the whole reason I signed up for Steam that day was to buy a game that was on sale, even though my computer at the time was not good enough to play it. When I finally got my account back, the game was no longer on sale and they said they couldn't give it to me at the sale price so I ended up paying full price for it, about a $15 difference.
Yes, by selling full CD quality or higher tracks, and with infamous "Steam Sales". There is no incentive for me to buy a lossy track, when I can just go buy the entire disc cheap online. I know most people don't care about audio quality, but this is a major contention for me.
Did you do a double blind test between an uncompressed CD track and same track in 320 kbps (same master — not vinyl, not "mastered for iTunes)? Did you really hear the difference in statistically significant number of trials?
That's not the point at all. I'm not paying the same or more, for a locked in ecosystem, and lesser quality tracks, regardless if I can perceive the difference.
What happens when you want to reencode that 320 to 196 or V0 or want to forego MP3 altogether and go with .ogg? You end up needing to transcode to a lossy source from a lossy source - and quality does suffer from doing that.
There is no reason for a test of perception like this to be blind.
You are not trying to isolate a scientific truth, but engaging a lifetime of biased neural pathways with the goal of maximum enjoyment. When listening to music in the real world, your biases will affect your perception so trying to remove specific ones in the name of science is only muddying your measurement of actual preference.
Probably not worth it. By Valve's measure [0], 0.84% of Steam users are on Linux. They have made the investment into Linux support toward the promotion of their own Linux based hardware. Apple has no such incentive.
Does iTunes not run well enough in Wine [1]?
I say this all as a frequent user of Steam on Linux and a nonuser of iTunes.
I haven't synced my iPhone with iTunes in around 3 years. The only cost is iTunes Match (£25 per year) which puts all of my music in the cloud and available to my device.
Its still a pricing problem. I recently wanted to watch the original Star Wars movies and noticed none of them are available for rent. I could only buy them for $20 each. That's a motivator for piracy.
I think piracy is definitely about price as much as access. I think when Gabe speaks, he speaks for Valve and defends its monetization strategies. Of course he's selling you the idea of access, he wants you to put your stuff on Steam, where he gets a 30% cut. Price still matters.
You can't buy the original Star Wars movies for any price. They can only be had by torrent. It's one thing when the rightsholder wants money and you don't want to pay, but when you would gladly pay and they withhold the content, it makes no sense.
Most piracy is not a service issue. Most piracy is a greed issue. Yes, there are region locks. Yes, not all content is available to all people. Yes, purchased content may only be usable on certain devices. Yes, we could list edge cases for hours.
But most content is available to most people in a way that has never been easier or faster to access in the history of time. It just costs a little bit of money.
Do you realize how incredibly easy iTunes is? I can purchase and start playing almost any TV show or movie ever made in approximately 5 mouse clicks and 15 seconds. (Yes, if you don't live in the US it may not be available. I covered that already. Thanks.) It's insane how easy it is.
It's impossible to compete with truly free. Netflix can offer a good deal thanks to copyright laws. Were it not for such laws piracy sites would be of such high quality that no paid service could possibly compete.
If you had a credit card with infinite money the paid would be pretty god damned good. Better than piracy. The single biggest advantage piracy has, by far, is it doesn't cost money. That's a pretty damned big advantage.
I think service is a piracy solution. But the problem is greed. Old fashioned, simple greed.
I expect downvotes. But this is my opinion. I hope you don't downvote simply because you disagree.
I think it depends on the product. Newall was 100% correct about video games, which is where steam makes most of its money.
The issue with TV shows is somewhat different because of their episodic nature and the fact that alot of what they have to offer is available for free over the air, or already paid for by the cable customer, or the Netflix customer. It's harder to justify buying something that you really only want to watch once, will likely be available at some point in the future for free, or where the producer just doesn't care enough about your part of the world to even bother releasing it in a reasonable timeframe.
I'm not saying price isn't a factor, or the desire to get tons of "free" stuff isn't a factor, but distribution is still a PITA for TV worldwide, and TV/Movie companies also have the same level of "greed" in terms of wanting to herd consumers towards DVD/Blueray that Record companies have with regards to CD sales and wanting to return to the huge paydays of the 90s.
The downvotes are predictable and not worth commenting on (doing so probably attracts more of them). But, for whatever it's worth, this is pretty close to my position as well.
No, it is not. You confuse value with price, totally different things. "Es de necios confundir valor y precio"Machado "It is proper of foolish people to confuse price and value"
You download something on the internet, for free, it could contain anything. The spy agencies of UK and USA had used modified pirated software in order to access computers of enterprise CEOs and engineers that were so stupid to compromise secrets valued on millions in order to save a few bucks.
Selections aren't entirely universal, which I think hurts a lot. I subscribe to Spotify and it's mostly great, but sometimes it just doesn't have something for no discernible reason. Usually I'm discovering music in the app so I never even notice, but every so often I want to listen to something specific and it's just not there. YouTube becomes my backup for that.
And specifically for "latest albums," they seem to do a delayed release a lot. I saw this recently with Clapton's I Still Do, but it shows up with many others too. Often they'll release a single track for streaming, and have a link to purchase the whole thing. And even now that they've made the album available for streaming, there's one track missing!
It's a bit frustrating to pay a subscription only to have it show me an advertisement to buy an album they refuse to stream. I'm less familiar with other services but it sounds like they're similar.
One trouble with the Steam analogy is that there's nothing for games like YouTube is for music. I can go from zero to listening to a particular piece of music in barely more time than it takes to type the name of the song. Pirating games takes a lot more work.
Thanks for posting this, it's easy to forget the distinction between the two. I was just thinking that it's awful inconsiderate to have a stance against piracy given that he himself literally asked people to pirate his music, but there is a difference between people sharing information vs. a platform monetizing it.
Years ago he was making his Nine Inch Nails tracks available for users to download and remix. He uploaded an entire concert (HD, multiple angles, terabytes of video if I remember) to bit torrent so users could download it and produce their own concert film. So he's been taking advantage of the power of the internet for a while and fans have benefited from that. I think his problem is when you take away control from the artist.
Is it, though? In my experience YouTube (or is it the copyright owners?) are quite aggressive about scanning for unauthorised music and removing it - to the point where you actually have to be careful about things like having the radio on in the background during a video.
In fact, they even provide tools to help you fix videos that have audio copyright claims against them...
Would Youtube even exist if it had to have something like Content ID when it first launched? Its existence definitely took advantage of the relative lawlessness of the web back then. Don't see much difference between how Youtube established vs Uber/AirBnB as far as break shit and pay for it later goes.
While many clips were affected by this, you can still (and could always) find almost anything, uploaded pirated, on the first try -- from songs and shows to whole movies. The main exception is for 1-2 very vigilant artists (e.g. can't easily find non-officially uploaded Dylan tracks that are not bootlegs).
That's quite an undertaking and only huge organizations like the record and movie companies can really pull that trick off.
Youtube is full of copyright violations of smaller production companies without this kind of infrastructure. Kid's show are pretty bad. I can put anything on for my son via youtube, when its pretty obvious those are not official channels and those very same episodes are $5 rentals on any other service.
Yeh conveniently when YouTube started to have paid offerings, rentals, etc, they started cracking down on those pirated copies. Obvious is obvious on that one.
> It’s a markedly different opinion from when a 2007 pre-Apple Reznor said the iTunes store made him feel “uncool” (“[it] feels like Sam Goody to me”) and admitted he was a frequent user of the file sharing website OiNK.
Whatever your views on his statements are, this comparison is fallacious. He's called YouTube disingenuous for building a business on the back of stolen content. OiNK can neither be accused of disingenuity, nor of building a business.
Perhaps in some cases, but since OiNK was a donation-funded community, administered by an unincorporated individual (Alan Ellis), I can't think that this is particularly relevant here.
Laws that try to stop people from getting what they want in what they perceive as victimless are doomed to fail, no matter how punitive the enforcement. Examples:
prostitution, gambling, drugs, books, music, video
Both can absolutely be victimless. I would argue that the biggest reason they aren't victimless more often is because they're both crimes in most countries.
True, yet they can be and are in a lot of cases "perceived" as victimless or atleast neglible victimhood. (For ex: read iceberg slim and you get the sense that for him the women were either better off with him(less poor) or just loved sex and drugs anyway they'd be prostitutes without him too.)
Which I guess/believe was the point OP was making.
The issue with YT isn't with people getting access to ripped content. It's with Google running occasional ads on top of that content, and getting "access" to advertisers' big, fat, greasy dollars -- without any form of compensation (or yielding of rights of artistic control) to the creators.
Unless they take very aggressive action to force Google to do otherwise, that is.
Funny you mention the iPod. Back when music companies were getting eaten alive by mp3s and napster, Apple didn't seem to care as much. Their slogan was Rip Mix Burn.
"And the electronics industry's attitude toward the labels is summed up by an Apple slogan: Rip. Mix. Burn. Which, a music executive once told me, translates into "Fuck you, record labels."
And the record companies made big bucks by distributing everything as $20 CDs even if the consumer really only wanted a single song off the album. Of course, the reason why they wanted the single was because the other 8 tracks weren't very good and only there so the company could justify charging $20.
It's not like the record companies were completely blameless. They didn't care about their customers, they only cared about the artists they signed because they were legally obligated to, and no one who cares about music is mourning their downfall.
Right but after "Rip" is "Mix," i.e. create a playlist of different tracks, then "Burn," burn them to a disc (as an Audio CD or a data disc with MP3 or AAC files). Since it's the the 00's version of making a mix tape, that burnt disc is probably going to someone who didn't buy the CDs in the first place, i.e. copyright infringement by distributing works without permission.
The British record industry in the Eighties had a "home taping is killing music" campaign, the could've updated it to "home burning is killing music."
> Rip meant taking physical audio CD's you own and migrating them to mp3
Rip meant taking physical audio CD's you, or anyone you knew, owned. One kid buys a CD, and the next day it's in every kid in the school's iTunes library. I think iTunes even had an ability to just grab and copy MP3s from anybody's library that was broadcasting on the network, circa 2006-07.
Things were different in the eighties. I think the precedent-setting anti-sampling lawsuits came about in the early nineties. The Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique was famously built from hundreds of unlicensed samples, and was one of the last albums that could be made that way, because shortly thereafter it became necessary to license samples.
As if he should criticize about being built from stolen content.
Watch "young gods envoye" from the 80's then watch Reznor's "broken", which was produced many years later... and I recommend using youtube to do it.
You are correct. Perhaps this is OT, but I have 100% respect for youtube as a useful service that I use every day even if its due to something illegal. In contrast, I have very little respect for any artist that bites their style wholesale from another artist esp if they have a successful career from it...even if it is legal to do so.
Much of the internet is built from free things. If we really want to talk about inequity of rewards for effort expended[1], I think content producers need to get in a long line...
[1] The difference, of course, is that many of the free resources were given away by license. However, at the end of the day, very little compensation has gone to many people who have built critical, foundational parts of the infrastructure that has fueled billions of dollars in revenue for companies world wide. On some level, hearing a musician who has been compensated, significantly, for their work complain about inequities kind of makes me laugh.
Personally, I find it not at all obvious that artists "deserve" to be paid for any use of their "intellectual property".
Hell, I don't even find the concept of physical property to be straightforward. Almost every single physical object we have in our lives today is built off the work and ideas of countless millions and billions of people before us. So the objects in our lives that we "own" and have "earned", in reality, were earned and produced by large swaths of humanity over thousands of years.
Now, how do we reconcile this with the fact that I'm still standing here, holding the object in my hand, and "no, I definitely would not like to give it to you, thank you very much". That seems incredibly tricky. And then of course there is the fact the concept of property ownership does incentive huge amounts of innovation and productivity. So we don't want to ruin that. I'll have to continue thinking about this another day...
>> "Youtube's DMCA responses are really good, compared to FB or any other video platform."
Yes but they only started doing that after they became the go-to site for videos. If they didn't allow copyrighted materials from the beginning it never would have become the behemoth it is and more than likely would've died before it had a big enough audience to entice copyright owners to strike deals with it.
Yeah but this musician provides free downloads of his music and high quality garage band files for a low price. That makes it somewhat different..
From his site:
as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com.
the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options - all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.
Ok so he has lots of money, has given a lot of his stuff away for free but is complaining about businesses being built from stolen content. Why? I guess he's standing up for the musicians without a loud enough voice to complain about this stuff then.
How many record labels are making massive profit (via bogus DMCA/Content Aware disputes) off of the backs of YouTube creators? I've had multiple videos get their adsense dollars removed because there was 5 seconds of pop music emanating from a storefront I walked by in my video.
With views and adsense revenue being heavily front loaded against the upload time of the video I have no method of recovery of those lost dollars.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...