ZitZot: Internet piracy costs UK $300 million a year
nternet piracy is costing the U.K. alone almost $300 million a year, according to technology analysis group Jupiter Research. Little wonder that European capitals are racing to win more powers to take on the worst pirates. So far, though, they don’t seem to be getting too far.
In France earlier this week the Constitutional Council, effectively France’s Supreme Court, ruled that proposed laws that would have forced Internet service providers (ISPs) to identify and help prosecute users who illegally trade copyrighted material, were unconstitutional. The news comes as a blow for the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy as well as organizations around Europe that had been hoping that the French example might spur other governments into greater action against illegal file sharing.
Article continues at ZitZot.com
Comments(45)
so wat ??
may be the creators should focus on better marketing than wasting money for trying to prevent piracy. cause there is always an OTHER way. If you know what i mean. ban torrents-we have mu, rs, ms etc. and newsgroups and aim sharing and so on.
PIRACY COSTS NOTHING TO NO-ONE.
If someone has absolutely no intention of buying a product, and chooses to download/pirate it, it has not cost the industry a single penny. Nothing has been physically stolen.
F*ck the film/music industry, and f*ck living in the UK
They count way too many they count every individual download of a Movie/Music etc. That certainly does not mean they will actually buy the Movie/Music or anything else for that matter for the retail price. So it's way overrated
Is funny when they calculate what they "loose" .
And actually they don't loose anything , cause ussualy there is no such amount of money on the markets available for buying software in those countries.
So is either pirate it or don't use it , 3rd choice don't exist.
another useless article, the fact that piracy is illegal means there aren't any reliable statistics… Another thing – the UK doesn't use dollars
They don't know whot they are doing!
theR stupid!!
I wonder how much these blundering anti-piracy organizations cost the entertainment industry…
Do you think maybe it costs them more than their imaginary losses from non-existant thefts?
These people seriously need to go back to business school.
the world of torrent lives to see another day ^^, this makes me happy afcourse because music and every other thing you can pirate is WAY overpriced, i just went to the mall to see if there were any buyable films and i saw screamers 2 standing there and i bought it because the screamers 1 was a really good movie, and what do you know….. it sucked monkeyballs -_-', im glad there are torrents and such on the internet so if you actually want to buy a movie you know what your buying, so 3 cheers for the world of piracy
.
300mil is pocket change in global scheme of things.
This sort of propoganda on behalf of the British etertainment industry was recently debunked by "bad science" expert and Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre only last week, see http://www.badscience.net/2009/06/home-taping-didnt-kill-music/
Several (more scientific) reports have shown that people who pirate music are actually more inclined to also buy music legally. The decline in music sales and the rise in piracy are not as related as simplistically as the entertainment industry would have us believe (if indeed it's related at all).
Misinformation, suspicious and uncorroborated inflation of numbers to make the situation look worse than it is, combined with panic-mongering in the media is meant to make piracy seem much more evil than than the straightforward crime it is.
Is that all? So if every person chips in £5 we can all be friends? Like someone said, that's NOTHING in the grand scheme of things, we have a 60 million population (approx). I would gladly pay a fiver for the amount of stuff you can download, if that's all it's costing them. :/
It's a classic claim by the movie/record industry once again.
Throw a bogus number out there and blame it on piracy
to cover up the fact that the evolution has left you in the dust.
Those big mafiosos are driven by one thing and one thing only; GREED.
Greed is a vicious thing; the more you feed it, the more it wants.
Let's starve them to death so that the earth can get rid of the nasty
plaigue they bring!
Dinasaurs are dead. Accept it.
going to see crappy films in cinema costs me 500 quid a year, so we're even
just close the whole internet down.. problem solved..nobody needs internet it is not a human right.
Go and blow yourself
Viva La France!
And how much do corrupt politicians cost the UK?
#3 you hit the nail on the head, totally agree, i swear these companies pick numbers out of the air to justify their privacy intrusion and abuse of their customers
stop spending more money on becoming a police state – that will clear up some funds
Pffft!
To solve this problem in the UK and US and various other countries, What you do is…Stop spending money trying to stop it because you can't.
Stop spending on piracy and while your at it stop taxing my fooking tobacco, $7 US for 1 pack of smokes, I hear its like $11 in New York
You will never get rid of pirating. I learned in my History of Sciences course at university that pirating is an age old habit. Before computers they would pirate books and astrolabes (used to tell the stars).
The industry just has to evolve. I have some temporary solutions but the big wigs don't want to listen.
Put more product placements in movies. Make internet tv the real deal and have a sidebar full of ads. Then you can make it free for everyone. The point is, we don't want to pay for most of the crap out there.
Martin, don't post this pro-douchebag garbage, post something from torrentfreak that the readers here would actually be interested in.
PIRACY COSTS NOTHING TO NO-ONE.
If someone has absolutely no intention of buying a product, and chooses to download/pirate it, it has not cost the industry a single penny. Nothing has been physically stolen.
F*ck the film/music industry, and f*ck living in the UK
the content mafia is on coke
Big sweaty BOLLOX
Thank you France for not giving into the pressure.If you had,more of Europe would have had to follow.Stand strong!
Sarkozys wife is the one behind Frances drive to kill internet piracy. The old cu*t thinks it can sing!!!!He is like a little kid in a candy shop…Sad French bastard.
Pirates are the like the ultimate virus. we get stronger when you push us back, then we push 10 times forward!
BeJeebus….I have a very sore bottom!!!!
Thats so fake number.
They put the numbers based on who downloads what, not who ACTUALLY would have bought it/know about it before downloading it.
Saying if you download it, you would have bought it makes no sence, but they all do it.
Piracy… if anything is costing the consumers the valuable resource of "time". Time wasted watching crap; crap that they would otherwise had avoided if they had to pay for it.
Hm. The way they calculate losses:
1) "hey, we should get 10 million in profit for product X"
2) they only get 80 million.
3) they come up with "it MUST have been PIRATES that STOLE that other TWENTY MILLION!!! EEEK, run for the hills, call out the military! FIDIOTS. They count on money they NEVER made to claim they LOST something. That's how the whole global meltdown is too… They THINK they lost something, yet they cannot LOSE something they never got.
It's like me claiming I EXPECT to get 10 thousand in wages this month & if I get less, I MUST somehow be crashing & burning. It's BS, pure & simple.
L
That law in france is very strict. But somehow i know in my conscious, how far could this piracy continue?
Someone will take hard stance even at the expense of individual's liberty to take measures against this growing piracy.
Make no mistake I do it myself but for entirely different reasons than all you here. I do it to have political knowledge(South Park, Daily Show, Colbert Report, various movies like Floating Water, Moore movies, I definitely don't download Block-busters, hits, music), enjoy soft and hard porn, etc. Bcoz they are banned in my country. That's why this so called piracy takes different meaning to me than to you all here.
Agreed music/movie industry products are very, very overpriced, but so is every thing in life.
You have hardwares like iPhone, iPods, LCDs, Plasma, various mobiles that are well overpriced too, none of you all support piracy then by stealing it, copying its hardware and making a duplicates out of it to revolt against those overpriced corporates products. Do you? Instead there's breaking news here about those products and are marketed here.
The world is full of poverty, starvation, environmental problems, religious fundamentalism, shady countries stacking up weapons of war, fossil fuels diminishing, fish stocks dwindling, and this………. is what our global governments are concerned with?
That comment by Mr X is another trick by Martin himself.
But how I wish if this was real.
Dave did hit the nail on it's head.
@36 ruudy that's why there is a flourishing market now for counterfeit Chinese products. Hardware piracy is equally popular in practice if not more, bcoz lot's of ppl on 3rd world countries buy Chitizen, Chokia, SUNNY ERECTION, ChiPods and ChiPhones but they don't have access to the interwebz to DL anything.
And fianlly, French Supreme Court FTW!!
id like a bigger number plz…
300 million dollars only? …. duh…
They must be starving to death… poor Corporate facks..
1 thing to say CREDIT CRUNCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hmm, 300 million in *lost sales,* or 300 million for legal fees in frivolous lawsuit?
I has your moneys and I'll use it to fund my rise to a world dictatorship.
Seriously, the financial backer of this modern re-imagining of the witch hunts deserves to pay 300 million dollars in nonexistent, imaginary currency. And get into a serious car accident.
I agree that 0$=300000000$, and if you transfer a couple of these kinds of zeroes to my bank account, I will happily stop downloading something from someone.
Ah crap you made me write to the internets, I'll charge you a couple of 1000$ dollars for that you cu
that is all lies i'm alone download 100m movies a year that is about 1000m pound if on average movie rental is 10 pound per movie they are trying to cover us you that's great
Well … you can't beat piracy … because eventually all protections are broken.
But you can adjust prices to what people are willing to afford and increase your sales …
Then again … CEO people are stupid …