Andy Cole writes: Re. Tim Villa (yesterday, comments). All the figures for lost sales which are being bandied about appear to be making a fundamental assumption which no one has tested, and for which in my opinion there is little justification. This assumption is that every DVD copied represents a lost sale. Any private individual who indulges in this practice will tell you that they would never buy most of the disks they copy, not least because they couldn’t afford to.

Therefore if it was possible to prevent copying entirely it would not result in the companies takings appreciating by anything remotely approaching the figures they quote as losses. They are surely well aware of this, and their protestations should be taken with a pinch of salt, and recognised for the cynical hype they are.

Indeed.

me s*ite Opinion is this:

it is considered ‘kind of’ OK to FOR ONLY PERSONAL NO SHARING SINGLE USE HOME VIEWING after d/l an overseas thingo like tv show to see if you are going to want to buy, and if not buy, propose to the Companys to release it into Australia (basically only with PRIOR COPYWRITE OWNERS APPROVAL)

no one will like my typing, Not even me in the Future or past .

Mark Heydon writes: Using the data link provided by Stilgherrian, you can produce the average unit selling price for DVDs as per the chart below.

The increasing DVD revenue has corresponded to a significant reduction in average selling price. This would tend to support Stilgherrian’s assertion that the price of DVDs was not right. At the high prices prevalent in the past, the IP owners were doing themselves a disservice, foregoing significant revenue, which when you consider that the marginal cost is pretty close to zero, means they were foregoing significant profits.

@Kimota: Thanks for the additional linkage, and the reminder about yet another of Mr Pesce’s remarkable little movies.

The problem is no different to that facing record companies back in the 1970’s when we all routinely borrowed each other’s LPs and copied them to cassette. The issue is only escalated because the internet and PC burners allow copying to a greater quality and quantity than before.

Fighting the ease of use of technology is always going to fail. You can no more stamp out internet downloading and burned DVDs than you can change the way people use wrist watches or drive their cars.

What the internet offers is a completely different model for distribution – one that would require different monetisation than the current retail system. Mark Pesce’s fantastic lecture on this certainly opened my eyes to the true nature of this problem. “Piracy is Good” – http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1720068211869162779.

Also, I wrote a piece on the debate for Nett Magazine – “Is the internet killing copyright?”
http://nett.com.au/technology/web/is-the-internet-killing-copyright/11292.html

Screen Australia and the AVSDA agree: illegally copying DVDs costs the industry $233 million, give or take. But that’s only $11 for each Australian, or call it $20 per adult. That’s about one DVD a year. Out of an individual’s total annual spend on communications and entertainment, that’s minuscule.

Dark Knight cost $185 million to produce. But it’s already grossed more than $500 million in US cinemas, let alone the rest of the world. And that’s before DVD sales, broadcast rights, merchandising and other spin-offs.

As with music CDs, only a small proportion of the retail cost of a DVD is for the content. The rest is distribution and distributors’ margins. But Internet bandwidth and local storage get cheaper all the time, and the consumer pays for all this. There’s not much time left for an industry based on charging the punters $25 for a plastic disc when the consumer has a far cheaper distribution channel in place via the all-purpose data pipes of the Internet.