The ESA has released a new report on piracy, this time specifically pointing out the "rife" piracy of products in Western European nations.
The Special 301 Report reviews piracy issues in 48 countries and suggests that 40 of those should be placed on a "USTR Watch List."
During December 2008, reveals the report, thirteen selected movies were downloaded illegally 6.4 million times, ... [ read the full article ]
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Quote:Piracy is a job killer that the world economy cannot afford in these difficult economic times...
Bullsh*t. Expensive-ass CDs and DVDs, and now even more expensive-ass Blu-ray titles are what created theis whole mess in the first place. They created their own worst enemy essentially.
If they thought piracy was bad up till now, and given his statement about the current state of the economy, is this guy a moron to think that piracy will diminish before it gets more commonplace?
The funny thing is, this idiot tries to make the chicken and the egg paradox sound like it began with pirates. Well, first there had to be music/movies to pirate, and then there had to be the assinine record labels (douchebag middlemen) that drove up the price to the point of making downloading something illegally very tempting to lots of people.
So it started with them, and they priced themselves into people finding alternate means to obtain what they wanted. If prices were reasonable and corporate greed was not as prevalent, this could be alleviated to a large extent, though of course, you will never get rid of piracy alltogether.
Piracy is a job killer? Is he really being serious?
How many people have lost their legal jobs due to piracy? I bet the answer is none.
I wonder how many people predicted that the finger would be pointed at piracy for the economy crash, despite the crash being mainly caused by a combination of a credit squeeze, crazy inflation and an out-of-control housing market (at least in the U.S.).
Quote:During December 2008, reveals the report, thirteen selected movies were downloaded illegally 6.4 million times, with the two most popular titles accounting for over 75 percent of the traffic.
I wonder which titles they picked, probably two very popular ones (i.e. Iron Man and The Dark Knight) and the other 11 were crappy ones.
However, if they wanted to make their claim totally insane why did they pick 13 movies?
6.4 million divided by 13 is: 492,308. However, assuming everything was downloaded equally, that means the "top two" were downloaded 4.8 million times or 2.4 million times each.
The reason I point this out is this:
Obviously people would buy movies if they are great. Iron Man smashed both DVD and Blu-Ray sales numbers only to be way out done by The Dark Knight.
Taking that into account this means that, if pirated downloads followed the DVD/Blu-Ray sales trend, Iron Man and The Dark Knight took up a combination of 75% of the mentioned numbers. Just looking at this causes the ESA's anti-piracy effect to look shady and limited, just as it is.
Recession or not, people will go to theaters and buy movies if they are quality and not the crap that is usually put out.
What is the population of Western Europe? They've clumped together 13 movies to increase statistics. The example shown in the previous post puts this into perspective (/13 = roughly half a million per movie), what percentage is that of the population, bearing in mind that we are talking about the 2 most popular movies.
Now lets see the sales figures for the two most popular movies last year..... oh, that's right, Dark night was the highest grosing movie of last year and apparantly in a very long time....but, but, piracy.
Quote:The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is the U.S. association exclusively dedicated to serving the business and public affairs needs of companies that publish computer and video games for video game consoles, personal computers, and the Internet.
