How to beat piracy (part 2)
This is the second part of the epic and banal post about piracy. :-) The first one is here .
To begin with, any copyright, patent and other exclusive intellectual property rights are the source of one of two types of legal (that is, legal) monopolies. The first type is natural infrastructure monopolies and everything is clear with them - their existence is more or less objectively justified: the presence of, for example, in our apartments, several water systems that are autonomous from each other would be at least not very convenient. ;-) The emergence of monopolies in the field of intellectual property occurs "by itself" - due to the exclusivity of copyright and patent rights and their very nature. It turns out a curious effect: all the characteristics and properties of ordinary monopolies are applicable to the activities of rights holders, but they are not covered by the antimonopoly legislation. It may seem absurd to someone to ask the question itself - is it possible to talk about any antimonopoly measures in relation to the author who created the cultural object and therefore can do what he wants and how he wants? - however, this is only the inertia of consciousness - there are no real prerequisites why it is impossible to evaluate the activities of rights holders in a similar vein. However, this is a topic for a separate discussion - back to the economy. The information below is for those who are not aware of the topic. Economists know it all. :-)
')
The picture shows the simplest copy of Wikipedia’s optimization graph by the monopoly of its profits. The X axis, as usual, is the quantity of products, the Y axis is the price for it. Blue is the marginal cost curve MC (cost for a company to produce each next unit of output), red is the demand for product D, green is the marginal revenue MR (revenue from the sale of each next unit of output). Marginal revenue drops faster than demand due to the fact that in real life the volume of demand is finite and the actions of the monopolist directly affect him in the lower direction, which causes the marginal income to fall, I will not go into the details of the process. Optimum output is achieved at the intersection of the MR and MC, i.e. until marginal revenue fell below marginal cost. This economic rule (MR = MC) lies in the vast majority of techniques for optimizing any production.
Everything would be fine, but adopting the rule MR = MC as a guideline means selling Qm of a product at the price of Pm per unit, which is much more expensive and less quantitative than the Qc and Pc values ​​that would have occurred (the intersection point D and MC more or less coincides with the equilibrium point of supply and demand) in the ideal case of perfect competition or more or less close to them in real conditions of ordinary competition. Returning to the topic of piracy and speaking in simple language: being monopolies of their products, right holders inflate prices and create an artificial shortage of their goods (for example, the film). You will say - “we all knew it all!” - but I just wanted to show that this is not happening because of the godless essence of the right holders themselves, but according to quite general economic rules that are used by all economic players - from the tent at the metro to Universal Pictures. Simply due to the monopoly rights on their products, which arises from Universal as a result of copyright, these same Qm and Pm are much more different from Qc and Pc in the direction unpleasant for the consumer than in the case of a tent. :-) It is simply not profitable for rightholders to make extra gestures and somehow go to meet the consumers of their cultural products: this will only kill MC and reduce MR. And we still have no place to go with you: if we want to watch a film from Universal - we have to pay Universal for it and without options. :-)
This thesis directly follows from the previous one. If there is too much gap between the prices of Pm and Pc and if you have the physical ability to satisfy your need for the product in alternative ways (you can’t copy this sausage - either buy it or let it go), naturally, you want to do it. And the larger the gap indicated (i.e. the greater the potential demand) - the more third parties want to participate in this process - to satisfy solvent consumer demand, well, and not to offend oneself accordingly ... The fact that it is formally illegal - does not stop anyone (see the thesis first). Illegality only increases the standard business risk in no way affecting the economic component. I would like to stress once again: the gap between the price offered for a commodity monopoly and the one that would correspond to the lack of a deficit for it is so large that it forms a huge unsatisfied consumer demand. And the difference between the cost of producing a unit of pirated products and the price that the buyer is willing to pay for it is so great that it more than covers the risk of the pirate breaking the law (with quite serious deadlines for “piracy”)! And if you remember what piracy is for personal purposes, we are also not imprisoned ... :-)
The second aspect of this thesis is that with each passing year, the demand for the goods that the rights-holders manufacturers do not provide in principle is increasing more and more. Yes, we are talking about the digital form of content, when it is cut off from any media ... In general, over the past hundred years, economists have repeated so many times that “Meeting the needs of consumers is irrelevant, but it’s important to create these needs themselves, and then - to satisfy! ”, That now we have a paradoxical and idiotic situation: the market is overwhelmed with useless crap, and the real human needs are completely unmet. ;-) Devices for playing audio and video files are sold to millions, and the ability to legally buy content for them is absent in principle. And these are completely non-gikovsky things: the same Samsung, still in the old (after CES2010, they are already old) TV models of 2009 (650 and 750 series), offered the ability to play HD-rip'ov in MKV format via USB or network, built-in directly to the TV which means that all millions of buyers of these TVs are pre-recorded in the camp of potential pirates ...
In a word, the emergence of piracy in all its forms is a completely objective economic process caused by the need for people to satisfy their needs, with the inability and unwillingness (see the second thesis) to do this by the owners-owners themselves. And there is no need for any speculations on the topic of authorship, the creative process and suggestions not to watch Avatar if there is no money for a legal BluRay disc! From the point of view of economy, all cultural objects are the same goods as everything else. Only sausage satisfies my need for food, and "Avatar" - the need for spectacles.
And the conclusion from all this is very simple: to fight and conquer piracy can and should be done only by economic means and methods . Any more or less real pressure of force and the policy of fines / punishments of both pirates and end users, a la the United States, will only lead to popular indignation (see the first thesis). Vaughn, in Europe, the pirate parties began to create ... Domestic people do not care about all sorts of 4th parts of the Civil Code, as long as it does not concern him personally - therefore, there was no unrest on this topic. It is worth starting real repressions and towards not ordinary people, but ordinary citizens (who, as I said, are not aware of any copyright at all, but they need a movie - they download the movie), as the rallies are no worse than those where duties on foreign cars protested ...
Specifically, there are two ways to solve the problem of piracy. The first is the introduction of state tariff regulation, as with other monopolies (see the second thesis). I will not dwell on this variant in more detail (although the mass is the direct means of its realization) due to the low probability of its actual use. And the second option is to start all right holders on their own to deviate from the classical monopolistic rules and schemes, see ordinary competitors in the market in pirates and act accordingly. What does this mean in relation to film production? The appearance of the film is on sale in DVD and HD quality in a maximum of 6-8 weeks after the start of screenings in cinemas. The cost of DVDs - around the amount equivalent to $ 5, the cost of BR-drives - no more than $ 20. But this is not the most important thing (on the same Ozon, the prices on the disk are about the same). The main thing is the distribution network. It is impossible to focus only on the creation of special stores in shopping centers and other places - tents on sales of licensed discs should be in every transition and in every clothing market - as it is now applied to pirates. In order to do this, an adequate wholesale system with adequate prices is necessary, so that it would be more profitable for the same tents to purchase licensed discs, rather than pirated ones.
When you enter a movie title and the word “download” on the Web, it’s not the sites with torrents that come up on the Web, but the official store selling video files with prices within 50 rubles for a DVD-quality file and 150 for an HD file. Several payment options, the ability to download a movie in the right format (AVI, MKV ...), fast download speed using standard protocols (ftp, http) without the need to use additional software, such as torrent clients - and there will be practically no piracy (see thesis). Plus, it is necessary to establish direct contact with Internet providers: right holders do not have any idea how much power providers spend on creating and maintaining local “resource portals”. If they do not need to do this and they will also receive small commissions for the video purchased by their users, and also make payment for it from the subscriber’s account (everyone now has the experience of joining billing systems with payment systems) they will immediately and happily replace these same portals with links to legal file stores ...
You can continue for a long time - all this is in fact quite obvious. The only negative of all this activity: it must be done. :-) It is necessary to consolidate the resources of several publishers, you need to create a normal legal store, you need to do its SEO and other promotion, you need to keep it all at a constantly high level, you need to work with providers ... A lot of things and it is not always easy. It is much simpler and more familiar - to lobby your interests in state authorities, to organize demonstration events, to impose an ideology that is alien to the public mentality and to scribe users who really don’t really understand - for what?
I know a huge number of people, including the older generation, who already “communicate” so well with the computer in order to use the video and watch it for their own pleasure, but who do not want and can not bother with all sorts of torrents and so on. They would be happy to introduce “avatar film download” in Yandex, poke it in the very first link, then pay with a credit card or via SMS and enjoy watching the movie. The same goes for music, programs, and so on.
Of course, you can say that everything described above is unrealistic and the right holders will never get off the ground and will not want to meet their own consumers ... However, the piracy in our country right before our eyes was successfully won by the game industry which I wrote above. Now, despite all the "sighing breaths" and nagging authors, the same thing happens in the book business: for example, I honestly bought the last few modern books on Liters, simply because it is easier and faster for me to give 1WMZ than to scour the forums in search of a pirated copy ...
I sincerely hope that similar processes will finally occur in the film and music fields. I do not want to choose from several rips on torrents.ru, I want to go to the official website, pay the same 1WMZ and download AVI'shnik in a guaranteed normal quality without any problems and hemorrhoids. I want to also be able to download any music, so that the programs are not expensively sold through a central repository (a curtsey to Apple and Linux distributions), and the licensed Windows 7 with updates could be obtained not only in the form of an OEM or expensive boxed version with a completely unnecessary technical support, a box and documentation, and to buy a jewel for 150 rubles or 50 just to download from the Microsoft website ... It seems to me that all responsible people will come up with all the above-mentioned and then piracy will be defeated. :-)
The second thesis is economic
To begin with, any copyright, patent and other exclusive intellectual property rights are the source of one of two types of legal (that is, legal) monopolies. The first type is natural infrastructure monopolies and everything is clear with them - their existence is more or less objectively justified: the presence of, for example, in our apartments, several water systems that are autonomous from each other would be at least not very convenient. ;-) The emergence of monopolies in the field of intellectual property occurs "by itself" - due to the exclusivity of copyright and patent rights and their very nature. It turns out a curious effect: all the characteristics and properties of ordinary monopolies are applicable to the activities of rights holders, but they are not covered by the antimonopoly legislation. It may seem absurd to someone to ask the question itself - is it possible to talk about any antimonopoly measures in relation to the author who created the cultural object and therefore can do what he wants and how he wants? - however, this is only the inertia of consciousness - there are no real prerequisites why it is impossible to evaluate the activities of rights holders in a similar vein. However, this is a topic for a separate discussion - back to the economy. The information below is for those who are not aware of the topic. Economists know it all. :-)
')
The picture shows the simplest copy of Wikipedia’s optimization graph by the monopoly of its profits. The X axis, as usual, is the quantity of products, the Y axis is the price for it. Blue is the marginal cost curve MC (cost for a company to produce each next unit of output), red is the demand for product D, green is the marginal revenue MR (revenue from the sale of each next unit of output). Marginal revenue drops faster than demand due to the fact that in real life the volume of demand is finite and the actions of the monopolist directly affect him in the lower direction, which causes the marginal income to fall, I will not go into the details of the process. Optimum output is achieved at the intersection of the MR and MC, i.e. until marginal revenue fell below marginal cost. This economic rule (MR = MC) lies in the vast majority of techniques for optimizing any production.
Everything would be fine, but adopting the rule MR = MC as a guideline means selling Qm of a product at the price of Pm per unit, which is much more expensive and less quantitative than the Qc and Pc values ​​that would have occurred (the intersection point D and MC more or less coincides with the equilibrium point of supply and demand) in the ideal case of perfect competition or more or less close to them in real conditions of ordinary competition. Returning to the topic of piracy and speaking in simple language: being monopolies of their products, right holders inflate prices and create an artificial shortage of their goods (for example, the film). You will say - “we all knew it all!” - but I just wanted to show that this is not happening because of the godless essence of the right holders themselves, but according to quite general economic rules that are used by all economic players - from the tent at the metro to Universal Pictures. Simply due to the monopoly rights on their products, which arises from Universal as a result of copyright, these same Qm and Pm are much more different from Qc and Pc in the direction unpleasant for the consumer than in the case of a tent. :-) It is simply not profitable for rightholders to make extra gestures and somehow go to meet the consumers of their cultural products: this will only kill MC and reduce MR. And we still have no place to go with you: if we want to watch a film from Universal - we have to pay Universal for it and without options. :-)
The third thesis - again economic
This thesis directly follows from the previous one. If there is too much gap between the prices of Pm and Pc and if you have the physical ability to satisfy your need for the product in alternative ways (you can’t copy this sausage - either buy it or let it go), naturally, you want to do it. And the larger the gap indicated (i.e. the greater the potential demand) - the more third parties want to participate in this process - to satisfy solvent consumer demand, well, and not to offend oneself accordingly ... The fact that it is formally illegal - does not stop anyone (see the thesis first). Illegality only increases the standard business risk in no way affecting the economic component. I would like to stress once again: the gap between the price offered for a commodity monopoly and the one that would correspond to the lack of a deficit for it is so large that it forms a huge unsatisfied consumer demand. And the difference between the cost of producing a unit of pirated products and the price that the buyer is willing to pay for it is so great that it more than covers the risk of the pirate breaking the law (with quite serious deadlines for “piracy”)! And if you remember what piracy is for personal purposes, we are also not imprisoned ... :-)
The second aspect of this thesis is that with each passing year, the demand for the goods that the rights-holders manufacturers do not provide in principle is increasing more and more. Yes, we are talking about the digital form of content, when it is cut off from any media ... In general, over the past hundred years, economists have repeated so many times that “Meeting the needs of consumers is irrelevant, but it’s important to create these needs themselves, and then - to satisfy! ”, That now we have a paradoxical and idiotic situation: the market is overwhelmed with useless crap, and the real human needs are completely unmet. ;-) Devices for playing audio and video files are sold to millions, and the ability to legally buy content for them is absent in principle. And these are completely non-gikovsky things: the same Samsung, still in the old (after CES2010, they are already old) TV models of 2009 (650 and 750 series), offered the ability to play HD-rip'ov in MKV format via USB or network, built-in directly to the TV which means that all millions of buyers of these TVs are pre-recorded in the camp of potential pirates ...
In a word, the emergence of piracy in all its forms is a completely objective economic process caused by the need for people to satisfy their needs, with the inability and unwillingness (see the second thesis) to do this by the owners-owners themselves. And there is no need for any speculations on the topic of authorship, the creative process and suggestions not to watch Avatar if there is no money for a legal BluRay disc! From the point of view of economy, all cultural objects are the same goods as everything else. Only sausage satisfies my need for food, and "Avatar" - the need for spectacles.
Conclusions and summary
And the conclusion from all this is very simple: to fight and conquer piracy can and should be done only by economic means and methods . Any more or less real pressure of force and the policy of fines / punishments of both pirates and end users, a la the United States, will only lead to popular indignation (see the first thesis). Vaughn, in Europe, the pirate parties began to create ... Domestic people do not care about all sorts of 4th parts of the Civil Code, as long as it does not concern him personally - therefore, there was no unrest on this topic. It is worth starting real repressions and towards not ordinary people, but ordinary citizens (who, as I said, are not aware of any copyright at all, but they need a movie - they download the movie), as the rallies are no worse than those where duties on foreign cars protested ...
Specifically, there are two ways to solve the problem of piracy. The first is the introduction of state tariff regulation, as with other monopolies (see the second thesis). I will not dwell on this variant in more detail (although the mass is the direct means of its realization) due to the low probability of its actual use. And the second option is to start all right holders on their own to deviate from the classical monopolistic rules and schemes, see ordinary competitors in the market in pirates and act accordingly. What does this mean in relation to film production? The appearance of the film is on sale in DVD and HD quality in a maximum of 6-8 weeks after the start of screenings in cinemas. The cost of DVDs - around the amount equivalent to $ 5, the cost of BR-drives - no more than $ 20. But this is not the most important thing (on the same Ozon, the prices on the disk are about the same). The main thing is the distribution network. It is impossible to focus only on the creation of special stores in shopping centers and other places - tents on sales of licensed discs should be in every transition and in every clothing market - as it is now applied to pirates. In order to do this, an adequate wholesale system with adequate prices is necessary, so that it would be more profitable for the same tents to purchase licensed discs, rather than pirated ones.
When you enter a movie title and the word “download” on the Web, it’s not the sites with torrents that come up on the Web, but the official store selling video files with prices within 50 rubles for a DVD-quality file and 150 for an HD file. Several payment options, the ability to download a movie in the right format (AVI, MKV ...), fast download speed using standard protocols (ftp, http) without the need to use additional software, such as torrent clients - and there will be practically no piracy (see thesis). Plus, it is necessary to establish direct contact with Internet providers: right holders do not have any idea how much power providers spend on creating and maintaining local “resource portals”. If they do not need to do this and they will also receive small commissions for the video purchased by their users, and also make payment for it from the subscriber’s account (everyone now has the experience of joining billing systems with payment systems) they will immediately and happily replace these same portals with links to legal file stores ...
You can continue for a long time - all this is in fact quite obvious. The only negative of all this activity: it must be done. :-) It is necessary to consolidate the resources of several publishers, you need to create a normal legal store, you need to do its SEO and other promotion, you need to keep it all at a constantly high level, you need to work with providers ... A lot of things and it is not always easy. It is much simpler and more familiar - to lobby your interests in state authorities, to organize demonstration events, to impose an ideology that is alien to the public mentality and to scribe users who really don’t really understand - for what?
I know a huge number of people, including the older generation, who already “communicate” so well with the computer in order to use the video and watch it for their own pleasure, but who do not want and can not bother with all sorts of torrents and so on. They would be happy to introduce “avatar film download” in Yandex, poke it in the very first link, then pay with a credit card or via SMS and enjoy watching the movie. The same goes for music, programs, and so on.
Of course, you can say that everything described above is unrealistic and the right holders will never get off the ground and will not want to meet their own consumers ... However, the piracy in our country right before our eyes was successfully won by the game industry which I wrote above. Now, despite all the "sighing breaths" and nagging authors, the same thing happens in the book business: for example, I honestly bought the last few modern books on Liters, simply because it is easier and faster for me to give 1WMZ than to scour the forums in search of a pirated copy ...
I sincerely hope that similar processes will finally occur in the film and music fields. I do not want to choose from several rips on torrents.ru, I want to go to the official website, pay the same 1WMZ and download AVI'shnik in a guaranteed normal quality without any problems and hemorrhoids. I want to also be able to download any music, so that the programs are not expensively sold through a central repository (a curtsey to Apple and Linux distributions), and the licensed Windows 7 with updates could be obtained not only in the form of an OEM or expensive boxed version with a completely unnecessary technical support, a box and documentation, and to buy a jewel for 150 rubles or 50 just to download from the Microsoft website ... It seems to me that all responsible people will come up with all the above-mentioned and then piracy will be defeated. :-)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/80278/
All Articles