Thursday 22 March 2012

The True Cost of Piracy: an infographic to set the discussion agenda

Though I've not seen it till today, I expect that the infographic featured below, kindly supplied by BackgroundCheck,  has been doing the rounds and I apologise in advance if readers of this blog are already familiar with it.  The True Cost of Piracy [now, that's a title which is a hostage to fortune] is quite US-flavoured.  It's also quite eye-catching from an aesthetic point of view and raises lots of discussion points. Infographics like this always remind me of the diagrams of the human digestive system which I had to study at secondary school.  From a didactic point of view, their lay-out makes them both easy to follow, and thus absorb, but also easier to dissect when criticising their content.

Readers' comments are warmly welcomed.

4 comments:

Andrew Robinson said...

The true cost of piracy is, of course, zero. Piracy neither creates or destroys money. It may divert money from one industry to another, but if a penniless student who can't afford to go to the cinema has movie files with a retail price of $30,000 on his computer, the movie industry would have you believe they've suffered a $30,000 loss, when in reality, if piracy was somehow made impossible overnight and all illegal copies destroyed, the student would still be penniless, and the movie industry would be no better off... in fact it would be worse off, because in 20 years time that student wouldn't be tempted to buy the fance 20th anniversary reissue on whatever format has replaced blue ray of that movie he loved at uni, because he didn't see any.

If all the figures presented here are correct, then universities would be around $500,000 better off, and the IFPI, RIAA, MPAA and BSA would be around $30m better off if politicians did what 54% of the American population think they ought to do, and legalised private copying.

Hans Sachs said...

It’s offensive to hear the whining propaganda of music industry lawyers when they misuse the word “piracy” when “piracy” is what Judith Tebbuts has just experienced:

British hostage Judith Tebbut's family 'paid Somali pirates £600,000 ransom' to end her six-month ordeal

She was freed after her relatives paid a ransom - pirate said $1.1m was airdropped

She said 'Seven months is a long time and under the circumstances with my husband passing away...made it harder'

Her husband David, 58, was shot by a gang of six men at their remote holiday resort in Kiwayu, north of Lamu island in September

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2118084/British-hostage-Judith-Tebbutt-released-months-kidnapped-Somalia.html#ixzz1pwgvRBIk

Anonymous said...

Hans, these people aren't pirates and it's you who are misusing the word. They're kidnapers. Oh yes, and The Pirate Bay didn't need to call themselves The Pirate Bay did they?

Kristian said...

Strange graphic. It has no purpose or subject. How does information on piracy, opinion, budgets and top piracy schools relate?