In June, police across several countries raided the operators of streaming video links portal Kino.to. This massive operation was one of the largest of its type and site admins and users alike were branded as enemies of the TV and movie business. However, it now appears that in respect of the latter group, the opposite was found to be true.
The June raids against Kino.to, which involved as many as 250 police and other authorities, dwarfed even the 2006 raids against The Pirate Bay.
Following the event the Kino.to site displayed notices which stated that the site had been “closed on suspicion of forming a criminal organization to commit professional copyright infringement.” While noting that several operators of the site had been arrested, it also criticized the site’s users.
“Internet users who illegally pirated or distributed copies of films may be subjected to a criminal prosecution,” read the warning.
But were the site’s users all criminals hell-bent on destroying the movie industry? According to a report from Telepolis, a recent study found the reverse was true. This, the survey claims, leads pirate site users to buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often and on average spend more than their ‘honest’ counterparts at the box office.
“The users often buy a ticket to the expensive weekend-days,” the report notes.
In the past similar studies have revealed that the same is true for music. People who pirate a lot of music buy significantly more music than those who don’t.
Full report at Torrent Freak
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Cool! Can I start flogging the bootleg copies of Enigma that I secretly filmed in Nottingham then? I’ll include an ad for Svengali, of course!
But I thought home taping already killed music back in the eighties?
this is all a bit like saying that a rapist loves his kids….
it is still stealing… artists food money…
donations..???
hmm, not so sure on the music bit like. The way i see it is, people who pirate a lot of music may buy a CD every now and then, whereas, people who don’t buy music probably don’t pirate a lot of music either because they don’t have as much of an interest in listening.
We all know this. The media all know this. The only people who don’t seem to have realised this is the Movie and TV industry.
Everyone I know who downloads movies and TV, goes on to buy the TV boxsets and have massive legitimate Bluray and DVD collections. Those who do not download movies and TV, watch a bit on telly now and again, and have a DVD collection that takes up half a shelf.
The Movie / TV industry needs to start moving with the times. 1) Drop the prices – £20 for a Bluray is crazy. 2) Use Online downloads as advertisements for the box sets and Bluray – put the quality super high and add shit loads of extras. 3) Add an online distribution model for new movies like i-tunes does. 4) Stop trying to sue everyone who downloads!
Theres a world of difference between the guy who downloads an episode of Stargate, then goes out and buys the boxset, and the guy who downloads the DVD then copies it 100 times and sells it to the public from the back of a car and makes tons of cash out of it.
The movie people need to come down on the latter, whilst loving the former.
I’ve bought a few albums on the back of downloading previous works to see if I like the artist/band. Also for films, if I hadn’t downloaded, for example, the first 2 Harry Potter films, I’d never have went to see every other one at the cinema – I also bought all the books!
The biggest one, though, is Festivals and Gigs. I’d never ever spend £180 on a ticket if I couldn’t download albums from the people who are playing, so that I knew their material before I attended. Been to a load of gigs off the back of my new found tastes in bands.
I’m going to chuck in the old correlation/causation argument here…
I would say that obviously someone who loves movies and spends a lot of money on cinema-viewings and DVDs are also more likely to download movies than someone who doesn’t watch a lot of movies?
In other words, I don’t think that downloading movies are ‘leading’ downloaders to spend more on DVDs and cinema tickets, it is just another way for them to consume.
Nah, the gramophone killed music back in the twenties.
Just to link this to the blog we’re on: If it hadn’t been for YouTube and downloads, I wouldn’t even know who Derren was, let alone have bought all his DVDs and several books. He’d been on tv here in Holland years earlier (Mind Control and Russian Roulette), but I didn’t watch a whole lot of tv back then and I’d never seen him. Saw some snippets of TotM on YouTube when they came up as a suggestion after a The Real Hustle clip a few years ago, watched some more, and then bought the book when I saw it at a bookstore and ordered the DVDs of the series. It’s the same with every new project (apart from the stage shows, which I just go to see live) — it’s on tv in the UK, but after that, it takes ages to appear on DVD, if at all. So I download it. And then I buy the DVD if and when it appears.
The headline is pretty misleading– it didn’t say that the pirates (not thieves, since theft & copyright infringement are totally different things) were law abiding but rather that they spent more money on stuff…which is interesting & something “copyleft” people have been saying for a while now. Nice to see the evidence bears it out, but still isn’t the same as “law abiding.”
Oh well…… there is some Hindu shop in my area and they selling those newest movies (not legal)and those films are recording from cinema. It’s not that good copy like on dvd but it only cost 5 pounds and I can watch it few times not only once( so I save money )…. I download music all the time(because there is only one song that i like in that album and rest of those song in that album is rubbish so why should i waste my money?) and personally I only buy music if I’m real fan of this person because i want to support that person so yhhh …..
It’s entirely likely that people who steal jewellery buy more jewellery than people who don’t wear it. Does that make them law-abiding citizens?
I’ve been saying this for ages. For me, downloading is like a try before you buy. If I don’t like it, I delete it. If I like it, I buy it (with music and video). It has led me to buy things that I would not have risked buying had I not been able to trial it. So the industry wins that way.
There are a few people that are serial downloaders that pride themselves on the fact they have terabytes of illegal downloads. These people just have an addiction and nobody can seriously tell me the artists and industry are losing out, because they wouldn’t have bought the stuff in the first place!!
Lastly DRM seriously pisses me off. If I want to listen to audio books or watch movies on a portable device (or my computer) – I want to be able to freely copy it to any of MY devices (if I buy it)!
As a side note. I’m grateful to people that upload movies and audio books to torrent sites. I often download a movie or audio book that I already own, just because it is far quicker than me illegally removing the DRM and then waiting hours for the file conversion. The downloads are often in an ideal format to watch or listen to on any device I own. So torrent sites are labour saving too!
To totally contradict myself. I do accept downloading as stealing and would prefer it didn’t exist. However the artists and industry should learn from these problems and fix it. It really is easy:
1) Remove DRM from everything. Stop treating everybody as criminals.
2) Allow free low quality downloads of music (?), movies and audio books.
3) Price items competitively.
It’s not rocket science!
I totally agree with the sentiment here. I am very distrusting of advertising and promotion and I would never buy an album or film that I hadn’t already seen/heard. The best way to do this is to download them or watch them on youtube or a similar site.
As for the argument that people who download films or music are people who are more into them anyway and so will enevitably buy more, it doesn’t take into account the fact that downloading things can be a great way for someone to get into music and films in the first place, so if the option wasn’t there people wouldn’t be able to sample what was about and find where their passions within the media lie.