File sharing - a view from the inside
Carefully looking and listening to an interesting dialogue on the Echo of Moscow , and then after reading all the comments, I decided to write a detailed post about the players in the file sharing market. It so happened that I am very close to the topic, and by the nature of my work I often and very closely communicate with all parties.
First, let's define the terms who is who in this niche:
1. Regular users - those who visit sites for free download in order to download something that is clear and do not receive any material benefit from it.
2. The owners of the sites - here I think everything is clear, those who own sites and as far as possible and the desire to make a profit, usually from advertising.
3. "Fighters" for the rights of copyright holders - I specifically quoted the word fighters in quotes, more on that below.
4. Rights holders are actually those who actually own the rights to a particular product.
')
I specifically missed the file hosting companies aka RapidShare in this review, as this is a completely separate topic for discussion.
Regular users are ordinary users who came to the site to download something for their own pleasure, but I have to note that this audience is solvent, I can safely say this based on donate amounts, and on the amounts that these users spend to buy premium accounts for file hosting.
The hosts of the sites - as you understand, nobody has ever given investments for projects of this subject, therefore such projects appear on the pure enthusiasm of the owners, if you succeed, your site has become popular, the site owners start making profits, the time after which the site starts to make a profit for years. Website owners have to communicate with all market players.
“Fighters” for the rights of rights holders are parasites, and first of all they parasitize on the owners themselves. The scheme is very simple, a law firm or a public committee is created, which starts walking around the right holders and telling how badly they live because of the so-called pirates, and how much money they DO NOT GET, the so-called under-received profit - according to many experts thicker They offer their "effective" help to fight pirates, what is it? They simply send letters to site owners with lists of links that they ask to remove, as this is a violation of copyright (they are right here), sane site owners delete links to the products, the “fighters” run to the copyright holders with a report on the work done and get small money, the fact that fresh links to the same products appear on the site again - no one cares, this is for the "fighters" only good, otherwise there will be nothing to ask for removal next month. As a rule, such services are provided on a subscriber basis and all that is necessary for the “wrestlers” is to show a monthly report on the work done, by the way, such services are not very cheap.
The right holders are the producers of the product, here it is worth dividing the right holders into two categories, from the world of art - cinema, books, music, and from the world of IT - software products. About the first it is clear, unfortunately they are almost all far from the world of the Internet, live in some kind of parallel galaxy, and most of them believe that they have all the misfortunes of pirates. Although if you look at the financial statements for example the film industry for 2008 - 2009, we are seeing a steady and steady growth in profits. I will not say anything about music, I was not interested in their income statistics. But about the book market it should be said separately, it’s not a secret for everyone that in recent years it’s just a problem with typography, and this market is not in a hurry to switch to electronic form, which consequently causes large losses of profits, they all cannot believe that people stop buying printed books. By the way, the majority of complaints from copyright holders come to the books, it seems that they grab the fight against piracy as a saving straw, while that many pirate resources have an Amazon affiliate program, and it is the pirates who bring direct buyers to their books :-)
The rightholders from the IT sector are usually very sane and often buy advertising and distribute their product through pirated websites, their logic is very simple, we need as many users as possible to find out and try our product, in any case, corporate customers will buy it later, and bought and ordinary users - this is the concern of our sales managers.
Who do you think are the greatest friends of the “fighters”? If you think that the right holders who pay them money, then you are greatly mistaken, their greatest friends are the owners of the sites, the whole fraternity will not be tomorrow for pirate sites without a very fat piece of cake. I also partially draw my conclusion on the following statistics, for Christmas, the site administration received 2 postcards from advertisers, one postcard from a software company that bought advertising for its product on the site and ATTENTION - 6 postcards from the offices of the “fighters” for rights that were sent during the year complaints to us and we satisfied them, in a postcard the “fighters” thanked us for their sanity, fruitful cooperation and, besides health and happiness, they also wanted a long life for the project :-)
Everything described above is applicable for the international market, much to my regret in RuNet, everything is very wrong and the matter is that the laws that do not work. The precedent with torrents.ru is very sad, as soon as this story gets international publicity, a significant damage will be done to the image of the domain zone RU. Since without a court decision to disconnect a domain under international law, this is lawlessness.
PS If someone doesn’t know, the famous and popular writer Paulo Coelho than once thanked the pirates for making him famous, and in support of his beliefs in his blog he distributes his books for free.
First, let's define the terms who is who in this niche:
1. Regular users - those who visit sites for free download in order to download something that is clear and do not receive any material benefit from it.
2. The owners of the sites - here I think everything is clear, those who own sites and as far as possible and the desire to make a profit, usually from advertising.
3. "Fighters" for the rights of copyright holders - I specifically quoted the word fighters in quotes, more on that below.
4. Rights holders are actually those who actually own the rights to a particular product.
')
I specifically missed the file hosting companies aka RapidShare in this review, as this is a completely separate topic for discussion.
Regular users are ordinary users who came to the site to download something for their own pleasure, but I have to note that this audience is solvent, I can safely say this based on donate amounts, and on the amounts that these users spend to buy premium accounts for file hosting.
The hosts of the sites - as you understand, nobody has ever given investments for projects of this subject, therefore such projects appear on the pure enthusiasm of the owners, if you succeed, your site has become popular, the site owners start making profits, the time after which the site starts to make a profit for years. Website owners have to communicate with all market players.
“Fighters” for the rights of rights holders are parasites, and first of all they parasitize on the owners themselves. The scheme is very simple, a law firm or a public committee is created, which starts walking around the right holders and telling how badly they live because of the so-called pirates, and how much money they DO NOT GET, the so-called under-received profit - according to many experts thicker They offer their "effective" help to fight pirates, what is it? They simply send letters to site owners with lists of links that they ask to remove, as this is a violation of copyright (they are right here), sane site owners delete links to the products, the “fighters” run to the copyright holders with a report on the work done and get small money, the fact that fresh links to the same products appear on the site again - no one cares, this is for the "fighters" only good, otherwise there will be nothing to ask for removal next month. As a rule, such services are provided on a subscriber basis and all that is necessary for the “wrestlers” is to show a monthly report on the work done, by the way, such services are not very cheap.
The right holders are the producers of the product, here it is worth dividing the right holders into two categories, from the world of art - cinema, books, music, and from the world of IT - software products. About the first it is clear, unfortunately they are almost all far from the world of the Internet, live in some kind of parallel galaxy, and most of them believe that they have all the misfortunes of pirates. Although if you look at the financial statements for example the film industry for 2008 - 2009, we are seeing a steady and steady growth in profits. I will not say anything about music, I was not interested in their income statistics. But about the book market it should be said separately, it’s not a secret for everyone that in recent years it’s just a problem with typography, and this market is not in a hurry to switch to electronic form, which consequently causes large losses of profits, they all cannot believe that people stop buying printed books. By the way, the majority of complaints from copyright holders come to the books, it seems that they grab the fight against piracy as a saving straw, while that many pirate resources have an Amazon affiliate program, and it is the pirates who bring direct buyers to their books :-)
The rightholders from the IT sector are usually very sane and often buy advertising and distribute their product through pirated websites, their logic is very simple, we need as many users as possible to find out and try our product, in any case, corporate customers will buy it later, and bought and ordinary users - this is the concern of our sales managers.
Who do you think are the greatest friends of the “fighters”? If you think that the right holders who pay them money, then you are greatly mistaken, their greatest friends are the owners of the sites, the whole fraternity will not be tomorrow for pirate sites without a very fat piece of cake. I also partially draw my conclusion on the following statistics, for Christmas, the site administration received 2 postcards from advertisers, one postcard from a software company that bought advertising for its product on the site and ATTENTION - 6 postcards from the offices of the “fighters” for rights that were sent during the year complaints to us and we satisfied them, in a postcard the “fighters” thanked us for their sanity, fruitful cooperation and, besides health and happiness, they also wanted a long life for the project :-)
Everything described above is applicable for the international market, much to my regret in RuNet, everything is very wrong and the matter is that the laws that do not work. The precedent with torrents.ru is very sad, as soon as this story gets international publicity, a significant damage will be done to the image of the domain zone RU. Since without a court decision to disconnect a domain under international law, this is lawlessness.
PS If someone doesn’t know, the famous and popular writer Paulo Coelho than once thanked the pirates for making him famous, and in support of his beliefs in his blog he distributes his books for free.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/85265/
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