peerpee wrote:Complete rubbish. Libraries legally provide discs on a temporary basis. The people illegally making the discs available for download offer the information for infinite use on a permanent basis. Using the example of secondhand sales in your argument is akin condoning the forgery of banknotes -- you're basically arguing that used banknotes don't have any value.
That's true, but that really plays into the ratio more than anything else. If you want to watch the film once on Thursday and once next March, provided they are in stock, you can, through a library. But you do bring up the main difference between a library and a downloading the film (which I suspect most people only do so they can watch the film once), which is the level of convenience involved. Downloads are more convenient that libraries or rental services because you don't have to leave your house when you want to watch the film and you don't have to pay for them.
What I'm really trying to get at is that there's a spectrum--from one viewer : one purchaser to 6 billion viewers : one purchaser--and that all of these services have two kinds of impacts on this spectrum: a theoretical one and a practical one. For libraries, used DVD stores, and rental services the theoretical impact is somewhat limited (though I'd also suggest that the main reason you don't feel the hit from rental services is that you don't know what it would be like without them), say 10:1. The potential ratio of owners to purchasers is pretty much the same, since there's nothing stopping a remotely computer-savvy person from copying the disc after they rent it (and if they buy it used, returning it to the store for almost as much as they paid for it). For downloads the theoretical limit is sky-high.
Then there's the practical limit. In the case of libraries, it's likely to be small, since the service is under-utilized (as we've seen in another thread here). In the case of rentals it's probably pretty high, and if you considered all of the DVD rental income for MoC as potential purchases (which, given the number of people that copy DVDs when they rent them, brings the service closer to downloading in the terms you define), it would probably be significantly higher that you get in sales--certainly it would be more mainstream films. But a big part of the difference is that the rental market is an established part of the way of doing business. Another factor is that each rental house that wants to rent the disc has to purchase it first, and if there is a certain amount of demand for that disc, they must purchase more copies.
Illegal downloading is a newer player, and people are struggling to figure out how to deal with it. The music industry has been dealing with for 10 years what the DVD industry has only been dealing with for 1 or 2 mostly (though everyone knew it was coming). You can't fight it effectively with threats and lawsuits, and nothing short of serious police-state controls will curb it. The best you can hope for is that the ratio doesn't get too out of control, and that being a small company with a reputation for caring about its product, people will want to support you.
If someone chooses to illegally copy a DVD they have rented from the library, then only then does their illegal action equate to filesharing. Trying to compare renting with filesharing in the way that you have is completely disingenuous.
In what way is it disingenuous? The comparison is valid, but the difference is in scale and severity.
One could say the same for shoplifting, but police and shop staff combat shoplifting every day. It would be foolish not to.
Not exactly. To begin with, shoplifting is categorically not a victimless crime. There are three costs associated with shoplifting: the first is the cost of putting the disc on the shelf (i.e., the packaging and materials, the shipping, the stocking, etc.), the second is the opportunity cost of not having the disc available for purchase until you are able to replace it, and the third is the opportunity cost of the person who stole it no longer having a need to purchase it. The third is somewhat incalculable, and I don't see it being used much (although this is the "loss" usually associated with illegal downloads); the second is fairly frequently calculated and while the calculation is usually somewhat questionable, it's hard to argue that the impact is there; and the first is a direct, calculable, visible hit to the bottom line.
The second problem with your statement is that shoplifting is something that increases in a limited way. If shoplifting increased by 20% from one year to the next, that would be an enormous increase, but if illegal downloading increased by 20%, that would be shockingly low. I'm sure you've heard that BitTorrent makes up a third of all Internet traffic. Even if 10% is for legal, legitimate purposes, you still arrive at an amount of illegal downloads that dwarfs all shoplifting and bootleg copies. What's more, the costs of chasing down these things is increasing, and the benefits are highly questionable. How much bad PR has the RIAA received, and has Sony received in combatting this, and how effective have they been? (answers: "a lot" and "not very"). The RIAA has opened tens of thousands of lawsuits against illegal music uploaders, the costs of which must be tremendous (and I doubt they will ever see much return). Do they really think that this will reign in the forces? So far there's very little evidence to support that idea. What return on investment do you see for MoC in combatting this stuff? It's a calculation that you should really try to make.
Downloading the discs, on the other hand, is pretty clearly a victimless crime--
There's lots of evidence in this thread to suggest otherwise, I don't know what logic you're using here, but illegally uploading and illegally downloading are both illegal.
I'm not talking about illegality, I'm talking about victims, and there is no evidence in this thread to suggest that there is a victim when a person downloads a DVD. We know there are victims when you make a DVD available for download (i.e., you are taking away the DVD distributor's and retailer's monopoly on the product), but who is the victim when you actually download a copy for yourself that someone else has made available? You aren't supporting the infrastructure in any meaningful way (even if you are using bitTorrent, where you are also providing some of the bandwidth for others to download, you're not going to be providing more than 5% of the file unless you choose to make it available for some time after you've finished downloading), and you are not directly causing any sort of loss on the part of the DVD distributor.
Is this some kind of justification for Mike illegally downloading films for free? Because of his "inability to see the film otherwise"? There's a pretty wide-open flaw in your argument if so, and that's "Mike's unwillingness to part with cash and use a website to order the film legally".
Er, you misunderstood. It's not a justification for anything, I was pointing out that the only loss you have sustained by Mike downloading a film is by Mike not buying the film. Given that Mike is still capable of buying the film after having downloaded it, the only situation in which have sustained a loss is when Mike would have bought the DVD if and only if he were unable to get it without buying it. Incidentally, you sustain the same effective loss if Mike neither buys nor downloads the DVD. The movie theater analogy holds quite well here. If I bring my own popcorn, the movie theater does not necessarily sustain a loss. If I don't buy popcorn, on the other hand, the movie theater sustains a loss, regardless of whether or not I bring my own.
You're not really bringing much to the table though are you? I foresee a lot more "talking past one another" based around your flawed points.
I guess it's the nature of these conversations that you suppose your points aren't flawed? But in any case, you're definitely right about one thing: I should probably have avoided talking about the ethical issues at all, since that's where the bulk of the "talking past one another" comes from, and it really is beside the point. What I was trying to address with it is that if you don't see any grey area in these issues then you are ignoring the perspective that a good number of your customers and certainly your downloaders (and if you don't see them as potential customers then they don't pose any sort of threat to you, either) share.
The more pertinent point I was trying to make is that with the advent of adequate bandwidth for downloading DVDs--a problem that is only going to increase--MoC is going to be more and more dependent on it's reputation rather than simply the desirability of the product. If people have no respect for MoC, then they will feel no need to pay for the discs. If, on the other hand, they do have respect for MoC, then they will pay for them whether or not they download them first. For most of the world, MoC discs are not available in any form of rental, and the only way to see them without paying out the whopping retail price, is through illegal channels. I'm not sure who you think these people are that are downloading the discs, but I suspect many of them are downloading the discs to their hard drives, watching them, and then deleting them. If they really like the film, probably some percentage will make the purchase. If they
are capable of renting them and are not the sort to buy MoC discs if they don't have to, then they probably would simply copy them from the rental DVD--something that has been quite feasible for the last 5 years.
I would be curious to know if you think that anything you've said on this matter here, or in the other two forums, has had any positive effect in dealing with this problem. One thing you might consider is that, like it or not, MoC discs are now becoming more widely known to people that didn't know of them before. You are losing an opportunity to convince those people they should purchase the films because MoC is a company worthy of their respect and because MoC depends on sales to continue to be able to do what they do.
Do you really think that you can solve the problem with threats, regardless of what you have to back them up with? Don't you think the RIAA would have solved the problem of illegal music sharing if they could? Their resources are vast, their expenditures on this stuff are tremendous, and yet the problem has multiplied year after year. With a few clicks you can download Michael Jackson's entire discography. In five years it will be possible to download a single .rar file with the entire MoC collection (or the Criterion Collection), and store it several times over on a single hard drive (you may have seen that one optimistic Google exec predicts that a single iPod will be capable of holding all of the TV in the world). I have no sympathy for the RIAA, but I do for MoC, and I feel like you are digging yourself into a hole by taking no care for MoC's reputation in your struggles. Regardless of what you may think of the people downloading MoC discs, there are among them a number of potential customers. Also, they will be the carriers of your films to other people, and the regard that they hold for MoC will have an impact on whether their friends or family choose to purchase the discs. You can dispute the significance of that (certainly the arguments that it would have a net positive effect on sales seem optimistic at best), but it's definitely there, and how you choose to act has an effect on it.
As far as I can tell, you have just significantly increased the number of illegal MoC DVDs being downloaded. At this point my advice would be to either make the best of the situation and try to patch up MoC's reputation in those quarters, or to simply back away. I'm not suggesting that you should stop trying to involve Interpol or the FBI if you are, but I am suggesting that your threats do you much more harm than good.