another chicken / egg scenario

hi all,

its good to be back.....

here's the thing.....my recent assignment took me to China, East Coast, where we were supposed to take over a ship from the "Greeks" (believe me, you dont want to take over anything run by the greeks. nothing against them. its just that they are just as good as Chinese in sailing. and.....Chinese are bad sailors)

thats besides the point. what happened was that when these people left they took all the movies with them and as we were goin towards Australia, we needed some movies to pass the precious free time we get everyday. i was given $100 and asked to go to the market and get some movies. and i am like... i cant get much for that money, two-three movies....tops. it was all we could spare, so off i went.

found a movie store, got inside and started asking for the movies and here's the jist of what i got

1) 18 dvds with minimum of 3 movies in each dvd

2) 6 dvd sets of "top 20 horror movies", "top 20 action movies", top 15 disaster movies", "steven spilburg collection", "jim carry collection", "top 15 war movies"

3) "james bond 007" entire collection

4) "star wars" entire collection, (parts 1-6)

5) windows xp (no activation required)dvd, works and updates, have tried it

6) windows vista (same as above)dvd, works and updates, have tried it

7) the "blade" collection, Collection of "Jaws" movie

8) season 1 and 2 of "prison break", Season 1, 2 and half of of 3rd season of "supernatural", season 1 of "Heroes"

and i still had $19 to spare. i couldnt believe it and what all movies he didnt have, he told me to write them down and he would arrange for them in a couple of hours. and mind you...its a normal movie store. i didnt needed to take the shopkeeper into a dark corner and explain that i want some pirated movies.


so the question:

"IS THE PIRACY SO HIGH THAT THE PEOPLE HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO BUY THE PIRATED STUFF"
or
"THE PEOPLE ONLY BUY THE PIRATED STUFF BECAUSE THERE IS SO MUCH PIRACY AROUND"

both of them hold true from their point of view.
so what do you think.....was it worth the trip or not?


cheers

Don't take any of this home. Customs might not like you very much ;)

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Originally Posted by SirDice

Don't take any of this home. Customs might not like you very much ;)

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i did the next best thing...........

bought an external hhd and made a dump of it all :)

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Originally Posted by bagggi

so the question:

"IS THE PIRACY SO HIGH THAT THE PEOPLE HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO BUY THE PIRATED STUFF"
or
"THE PEOPLE ONLY BUY THE PIRATED STUFF BECAUSE THERE IS SO MUCH PIRACY AROUND"

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That's a very poorly constructed strawman argument.

I would like to think that most people avoid 'pirated' software as much as possible. I certainly do.

'Buy' and 'pirated' don't really belong in the same sentence, if I'm not mistaken.

O

this reminds me of a report i seen a while back on how much software piracy is costing the industry. they had a nice spreadsheet layout with different parts of the world, the percent of software pirated and how much it cost the industry.
The thing that got me was that asia with 95% piracy was losing the industry about 1/10 of europe with 20% piracy. Funnily the report was only on the site for about two days befoer it got pulled...........

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Originally Posted by Ouroboros

'Buy' and 'pirated' don't really belong in the same sentence, if I'm not mistaken.

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yeah... you are right;)

i should substitute "buy" with "get"

plus again the funny thing still is that, one doesnt have to go to any shaddy joint to buy something like that, when its so readily available.

also

Illegal: carrying any recorded dvds across the borders into any country (eg singapore, where there is a fine of $1000 for every pirated dvd)

Legal: storing over 200Gbs of the stuff on laptops or a portable Hhd. which is perfectly fine, as its for our "personal" viewing only.

I think that what you are looking at is a reflection of the local economy. In fact, it would not surprise me if you would have great difficulty in actually purchasing legitimate copies.

I have never believed the big companies claiming to "lose" vast sums of money to piracy in these markets. If the truth be known, people there cannot afford their prices, and the retail sector knows this.

The alternative is not to buy legitimate copies, it is not to buy at all.

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Originally Posted by nihil

I think that what you are looking at is a reflection of the local economy. In fact, it would not surprise me if you would have great difficulty in actually purchasing legitimate copies.

I have never believed the big companies claiming to "lose" vast sums of money to piracy in these markets. If the truth be known, people there cannot afford their prices, and the retail sector knows this.

The alternative is not to buy legitimate copies, it is not to buy at all.

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So the industry loses out whether a result of pirating or no sales. I thought the premise of basic capitalism was supply and demand. Evidently the price is too high if no one buys or everyone pirates. Then again, it could be a non-price issue and could be just that society thinks a lot of what's being produced the music and film industry is just crap. ;)

Plus the alternative of not buying does not arise as..... if one needs something, one gets it.

if there is a movies one wants to watch and its not playing in any cinema near or far from you or there is a game one wants to play and its not stocked in any of the stores.

then......
what do you do? what doo you do?

this topic could go on endlessly. all i wanted was to highlight the fact that in a country which could successfully block "google" searches originating from within and a lot of other websites, one just need to walk into a store and purchase something for which people around the world are put into the slammers.

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So the industry loses out whether a result of pirating or no sales.

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That is certainly the argument I have seen put forwards, and it is very difficult to do anything about it. You see, if you use differential pricing tactics in these markets then you open the door to so-called "grey imports" which is where people buy legitimate copies in the lower priced market and import them into higher priced ones, thus damaging regular trade in those markets.

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Then again, it could be a non-price issue and could be just that society thinks a lot of what's being produced the music and film industry is just crap.

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I don't really buy that one, because if you think something is crap, would you even want a pirated copy? :D

I do believe that it probably has some influence on the music industry, as people are possibly reluctant to pay top dollar for a product that only has a few decent tracks on it. They would be tempted to indulge in file sharing and make their own compilations?

I think that the music industry has been rather slow in catching up with the requirement to buy music on a per song basis. If that were better catered for it would be a very positive incentive to improve quality, as people just wouldn't buy the crap.

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I thought the premise of basic capitalism was supply and demand.

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Sort of :D I think it is important to distinguish between a buyer's market and a seller's one. You need food, you need energy and you probably need gasoline, so those are seller's markets.

Films and music are non-essential luxury items so would generally be classed as a buyer's market. If the price is too high you don't sell, or lose out to the competition, which in this case, is the pirates.

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all i wanted was to highlight the fact that in a country which could successfully block "google" searches originating from within and a lot of other websites, one just need to walk into a store and purchase something for which people around the world are put into the slammers.

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Not that surprising really. The money generated by this trade originates and remains within China. No balance of payments or foreign exchange issues? ;)

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Originally Posted by nihil

I don't really buy that one, because if you think something is crap, would you even want a pirated copy? :D

I do believe that it probably has some influence on the music industry, as people are possibly reluctant to pay top dollar for a product that only has a few decent tracks on it. They would be tempted to indulge in file sharing and make their own compilations?

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What I have heard is that people aren't willing to pay top dollar until they know it's worth seeing or hearing. I know in the music industry that has been a long held thing since a lot of album releases have maybe one or two songs that are ok. But I've also heard of this for games and movies.

Yes, the "few good tracks" argument certainly goes back to the days of vinyl :shocked:

What I have heard about pirate movies (in the UK) is that the quality can be very variable and frequently downright lousy. So you may end up getting ripped off.

I haven't heard people mention games, but I think that the gaming fraternity is much more closely knit so good or bad news travels pretty fast.

games.........

thats another story altogether.

but its a good point. all there is in the news is music or the movie (Hollywood in particular) are getting affected by the pirated market. what about the gaming industry. it has to affect them too.

there are more torrents about the games that are released recently than the movies in the cinemas.

arnt the developers affected / worried about this? they have to be, as they get paid for the number of cds/dvds sold in the market.

i see in the reviews of the games about the number of copies "sold" into the market. therefore if there are links to download them for free, it does not count as the game being "sold".

so why is the gaming industry not making so much of a racket about it as the music or the movies industy.

There are lots of reasons for piracy. In the original described situation I would suspect that it begins with a government that has no interest in lining the coffers of any American company. Other than trying to soak us with their products they are not exactly a friendly government to the US or most Western countries. The locals probably don't really know and don't really care.

Why I purchase Pirated Movies. (I only do this when spending extended time in Asia or Africa)

Long and short.

China, I'm not sure how to purchase legit copies. I don't know if it's the US that wont export or China that wont import the legal copies.

Last time in Harare for a few months, drove down to South Africa to pick up a few cases of wine. Stopped at a store and bought a legit DVD aprox $15 USD When back in Harare, insert DVD which notifies me that I can only play the thing 15 times, thanks for supporting non piracy blah blah blah.

Went downtown Harare and purchased same movie aprox $0.02 took the thing home and played perfect. I still have that dvd.

Perhaps we should lobby congress to make the US automakers (you know the ones loosing their asses in the global market) to install bullet proof windows and anti theft devices to prevent car jacking and theft. No worries about the cost, just pass it on to the customer. If you have any left.

In the past I pirated from VHS rentals.

Disney had a marketing plan that created gaps in availablity in movies. They would release movies in 7 year cycles to keep the demand up. So you could rent the movie until the rentals wore out, got broke or otherwise dried up but couldn't actually buy the movie. If you had kids in between the cycles, you were forced to rent movies over and over because Disney wouldn't sell you the movie. When the movie eventually became available and if the kids were still interested, we bought the movie.

I've also pirated software. I use to copy software that some giant of a company bought the license to just to kill the product. They had no interest in developing or maintaining just preventing it from competeing with their product. If they sold the product, I wouldn't copy it. I wasn't interested in buying their inferior product.

Legally these aren't valid reasons and two ethical "wrongs" don't make a right.

Hi dddc,

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I use to copy software that some giant of a company bought the license to just to kill the product. They had no interest in developing or maintaining just preventing it from competeing with their product.

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That is an interesting one because it almost takes you into the realms of "abandonware". I have no idea as to the legal implications over here, as there is clearly no case of material loss, given that they are not selling the product.

They cannot claim that their product is an alternative because it must have been materially different to avoid them getting sued for theft of IP.

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Originally Posted by dinowuff

Why I purchase Pirated Movies.

Stopped at a store and bought a legit DVD aprox $15 USD When back in Harare, insert DVD which notifies me that I can only play the thing 15 times, thanks for supporting non piracy blah blah blah.

Went downtown Harare and purchased same movie aprox $0.02 took the thing home and played perfect. I still have that dvd.

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found something just for you

http://www.mypicshare.com/dm93gbibpic.html

we should reconsider our respect for the pirates

Nice one baggi:

And as to abandonware; I still have windows on floppy and I know that I have all DOS versions through 6point whatever.

Now since you can't even download windows 95 from MSDN, (Every other OS is there - even DOS 3) If I gave someone a copy of my windows 95 cd, am I breaking the law? Assume there is a small demand for that software but not enough for M$ to recommision it.

That is an interesting question dinowuff,

MS don't sell it and don't support it, so they aren't losing out, and the only reason you would want it would be for education, research or historical purposes? I guess the same would go for NT 4.0 SP6a.

If you really wanted to use it it would be for old games or some weird legacy software. Now, I have a PI/133 and a PI/150, both of which will run Windows 98SE quite happily, and that would really be your OS of choice in those circumstances I would have thought?

I only have two boxes running Windows 95 950B build 1212. One is a Toshiba T2130CS laptop 486/75 and the other is a Gateway 2000 Cyrix 386 probably 12.5. Naturally that runs at a rather leisurely pace so I think that I will replace it with Windows 3.11 for workgroups :D.

I think that MS take a pretty reasonable attitude regarding their very old stuff, as it would only be used in rare and special circumstances.

I run DOS 3.3 on an IBM PC XT............ twin 5.25" floppies and a 10 Megabyte HDD...............real "greenscreen" stuff :cool:

I don't know about your laws, but over here I believe that if you supplied a copy of the software to someone who had a licenced copy but had lost or damaged their media, then it would be legal.