OFCOM speaks on Anti-piracy measures.

[Sirius]

Originally Posted by Lord Nikon

Make back catalogs available longer, Ditch the DRM that prevents some people from watching the films. Ditch those ****** annoying 'piracy is theft' commercials you HAVE to watch on a legit DVD. (Guess what. Pirate versions don't have that crap, they don't MAKE you watch 20 minutes of trailers. They just let you watch the film.)

Well said

[Mr Angry]

Originally Posted by Lord Nikon

Several points here....

Theft is wrong - no matter what statistical hand wringing excuse someone tries to peddle.

[v0id]

Originally Posted by Mr Angry

Theft is wrong - no matter what statistical hand wringing excuse someone tries to peddle.

...and you could end up in prison if caught stealing, however when you infringe on someone's copyrighted works the worse that could happen is you get a big fine.

[Angua]

Originally Posted by Mr Angry

Theft is wrong - no matter what statistical hand wringing excuse someone tries to peddle.

Even when that same hand wringing is done by the record companies, movie studios and software producers

They are always coming up with one excuse or another to charge OTT prices.

[Ignitionnet]

Oddly I remember movies and music being more expensive in the past and coming down in price over the years. Can't remember seeing new release CDs for less than a tenner a few years ago and don't remember DVDs being the price BluRay is now when DVD was a new format.

Must be my bad memory, and either way IP should be similar to other property - if the prices are (in your opinion) OTT you simply don't buy the thing until its' price drops to a level you like, you don't help yourself. Basic supply and demand.

[Angua]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

Oddly I remember movies and music being more expensive in the past and coming down in price over the years. Can't remember seeing new release CDs for less than a tenner a few years ago and don't remember DVDs being the price BluRay is now when DVD was a new format.

Must be my bad memory, and either way IP should be similar to other property - if the prices are (in your opinion) OTT you simply don't buy the thing until its' price drops to a level you like, you don't help yourself. Basic supply and demand.

I don't steal. We just continue to go without because we cannot afford the over bloated prices (even a 2006 game The Legend of Zelda has only just gone below £20 and is still £28 in most places). It is the claims of the various companies that XYZ are costing Millions in lost revenue through piracy. They are not. All of you who are paying OTT prices are covering this so called loss. Piracy does not equal loss of revenue, it just equals increased product awareness.

Originally Posted by Lork Nikon

2) It has been PROVEN in the literary environment that downloading of content for free INCREASES legitimate sales. Even when those downloads are free from DRM and of exactly the same quality as the paid for version.

[Ignitionnet]

If we're talking about games I remember Street Fighter 2 on the Super Nintendo. It was released in 1994 for a mere 65 Great British Pounds.

Legend Of Zelda, Ocarina of Time, a 50 quid 1998 release.

Your comment that piracy does not equal lost of revenue is absurd. Of course it does. Not to the extent that content producers claim of course but there will be a loss.

It is interesting how happy people are to accept an unsubstantiated claim when it backs up their point of view though. I see your citation for the above claim being a quote from Lord Nikon which has no citation of its' own at all, and regardless only discusses the literary environment which is a completely different issue from movies, games and music which are very easy to make perfect, digital 1 to 1 copies of, unlike a physical book.

[Horace]

Originally Posted by Kymmy

Surely though even Detica (phorm or any other tap) on an SSL connection can only see your to/from/port as the rest of the data is encrypted, so for example they know that the SSL connection is downloading from a usenet site but not what they're downloading???

I think this is targeting the technically illiterate which is probably the bulk of ISP customers, there's plenty of ways anyone with a little knowledge can get around this even if dpi is used. I was under the false impression that this would be formalising the method currently used, that being, collecting IP's off public file sharing networks. I can imagine a quite few businesses, both UK and foreign, won't be happy about their data being sniffed, - even if assurances are given.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Horace

I think this is targeting the technically illiterate which is probably the bulk of ISP customers, there's plenty of ways anyone with a little knowledge can get around this even if dpi is used. I was under the false impression that this would be formalising the method currently used, that being, collecting IP's off public file sharing networks. I can imagine a quite few businesses, both UK and foreign, won't be happy about their data being sniffed, - even if assurances are given.

Multinational companies aren't naive - anything they need to keep confidential such as inter-office traffic will traverse the Internet via encrypted VPNs.

Certainly our office's traffic would be dull. Mostly IPSEC VPN to our head office and SSL to a couple of cloud-based applications. Thrilling stuff.

[Uncle Peter]

Music has never been such good value or widely available as it is today in CD and download formats. Putting aside the fact that the majority of what's churned out at present is utter dross, if you want back catalogue albums no matter how obscure chances are there's somewhere you'll be able to get hold of what you're looking for.

Also, when you can get double or even triple CD collections maybe even with a bonus DVD for under a tenner it's worth paying for isn't it?

[Angua]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

If we're talking about games I remember Street Fighter 2 on the Super Nintendo. It was released in 1994 for a mere 65 Great British Pounds.

Legend Of Zelda, Ocarina of Time, a 50 quid 1998 release.

Your comment that piracy does not equal lost of revenue is absurd. Of course it does. Not to the extent that content producers claim of course but there will be a loss.

It is interesting how happy people are to accept an unsubstantiated claim when it backs up their point of view though. I see your citation for the above claim being a quote from Lord Nikon which has no citation of its' own at all, and regardless only discusses the literary environment which is a completely different issue from movies, games and music which are very easy to make perfect, digital 1 to 1 copies of, unlike a physical book.

Games used to get to under a tenner in a couple of years - not the case any more (unless of course you have £30 spare & get 3 for £30). By the time films are affordable they are available on TV. As for books, they have been available at your local library to borrow for nothing before the internet was even available.

The majority of people on low incomes either rent the DVD or borrow music from the library at a very reasonable price. If the cost is too high we do not buy - basic economics.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Angua

Games used to get to under a tenner in a couple of years - not the case any more (unless of course you have £30 spare & get 3 for £30). By the time films are affordable they are available on TV. As for books, they have been available at your local library to borrow for nothing before the internet was even available.

The majority of people on low incomes either rent the DVD or borrow music from the library at a very reasonable price. If the cost is too high we do not buy - basic economics.

It would be interesting to see how many people rent DVDs and more interestingly borrow music from the library relative to those who download them.

Indeed your last sentence is how it was, before the Internet messed with the equation a touch!

[Angua]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

It would be interesting to see how many people rent DVDs and more interestingly borrow music from the library relative to those who download them.

Indeed your last sentence is how it was, before the Internet messed with the equation a touch!

Until you can magic money out of thin air the unaffordable will remain unaffordable regardless of availability. This is where I question the losses claimed by various companies.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Angua

Until you can magic money out of thin air the unaffordable will remain unaffordable regardless of availability. This is where I question the losses claimed by various companies.

I question them too, they are greatly exaggerated of course, but to suggest that the only people who download the content are people who couldn't afford to purchase it strikes me as ridiculous.

Even in your example assuming this is 'unaffordable' people download instead of renting, less need for rental copies and rental stores close.

There is a loss somewhere in the chain and it goes all the way to the top. Any time anyone who would have purchased or rented content downloads it and then elects not to purchase or rent as a result of obtaining it for free there is a loss which eventually ends up at the distributor.

I'm sure the same people who can afford 50Mbit and a subscription to a premium Usenet service could afford to purchase at least some of the content they download.

[Lord Nikon]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

It is interesting how happy people are to accept an unsubstantiated claim when it backs up their point of view though. I see your citation for the above claim being a quote from Lord Nikon which has no citation of its' own at all, and regardless only discusses the literary environment which is a completely different issue from movies, games and music which are very easy to make perfect, digital 1 to 1 copies of, unlike a physical book.

I have provided support of this claim many times, hence I did not think I needed to this time, however, I shall provide the evidence from an author.

Evidence from Eric Flint, Author for Baen Books,

1. Online piracy -- while it is definitely illegal and immoral -- is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market -- especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people -- is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. He more or less virtually snorted and expressed the opinion that if one of his authors -- how about you, Eric? -- were willing to put up a book for free online that the resulting publicity would more than offset any losses the author might suffer.

The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. After all, Dave Weber's On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a "loss leader" for Baen's for-pay experiment "Webscriptions" for months now. And -- hey, whaddaya know? -- over that time it's become Baen's most popular backlist title in paper!

And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.

Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a "gesture of solidarity." But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren't worried about the small cost -- once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug.)

That's his opinion on the matter, quoted from here, but you asked for proof. Ok.

Since the figures are all quoted by the author himself, and represent hard facts I shall give a link to the information here

Pertinent information is just below the table about a third down the document.

Between the January-June 2000 reporting period and the period one year later, the sales for that title-which had now been out for two years, remember, long past the time when it should have been selling very much-were suddenly almost 250% higher. (239%, to be precise: 1904 compared to 795.)

What happened in the interim? Well, obviously I can't "prove" it, but it seems blindingly obvious to me that it was the fact that An Oblique Approach went into the Library in the fall of 2000 that explains most of that increase. It would certainly be absurd to claim that being available for free somehow hurt the novel's sales! I can guarantee you that most authors would be delighted to see a two-year-old title suddenly showing a spurt of new sales.

It's worth noting, by the way, that the second volume in the series, In the Heart of Darkness, shows much the same pattern. In the Heart of Darkness went into the Library at the same time as An Oblique Approach, a year and a half ago. In the last period before it appeared in the Library (Jan-June 2000), Heart of Darkness sold 1,704 copies. A year later, during the equivalent reporting period, it sold 1,886.

The difference is certainly not as dramatic as the difference in sales of An Oblique Approach, much less the near-doubling of sales which Mother of Demons experienced. Still, the mere fact that sales increased at all instead of declining is significant.

Before I move on to my next point, I want to take the time to emphasize the significance of these HARD FIGURES. I stress "hard figures" because those people arguing the "encryption/enforcement" side of the debate NEVER come up with hard figures.

Note that he describes a significant increase in sales following the release of his book as a DRM free ebook available for download and distribution by ANYONE who so desires, and then cites a couple more examples by a fellow author. Please note also that baen books started their free library in 2000 and are still going strong 10 years later. Also note that they distribute DRM Free ebooks of all their titles, and occasionally release ebook compilation CDs which are also freely available on the net, None of their epublishing contains ANY form of DRM.

Reliable enough citations to back my claim?