Ableton Forum

esky wrote:

You don't believe that there are plenty of people who simply default to stealing shit on the internet before actually paying for it? You are the dreamer, not me. Having spent plenty of time in a college dorm, I can tell you that MANY people think this way.

But if you, dear Nick the Zombie, read statistics that 90% of music downloads are not legal downloads, from torrent or whatever sites, those many people can't be that many. That's what i mean...just read the numbers. Your college may be a place for honest people, but outside it's different. I agree with many of john doe's points...

I think you may be misunderstanding me, esky. We are completely agreeing with one another here.

I think the key is to price so competitively low that only the doucheiest of bags would pirate. A great example of that is Puremagnetik. $5.75 a month for an ass ton of content. For whatever reason I think roughly the $40 mark is where people start looking at torrents, even though that is still fairly inexpensive.

Sales Dude McBoob wrote:Forge, you should put your tutorials out on vinyl.

didn't stop my tracks getting ripped off!

that would pretty much guarantee that someone would put it up on the web

not many have the gear for playing back video vinyl

longjohns wrote:that would pretty much guarantee that someone would put it up on the web

not many have the gear for playing back video vinyl

Laser disc?

there's a shelf life for that stuff, Live 8 is a clean slate for selling out in new constructive ways.

Since I probably won't hang out on this forum for too long now, I thought it was time for me to take part in one of those heated debates . I've thought of a vs. thread (eg mac/pc, thisSynth/thatSynth, emacs/vim -oh wait, wrong forum) or politics, but this one will do.

Before I subject myself to the flames, I'd like to point out something about terminology. The term "torrents", when referring to copyright infringement of digital content is misleading. It is both too broad and too narrow. It is too narrow, because BitTorrent is only one of the many vectors for copyright infringement over the internet (there are many other file sharing technologies, and, since this thread was originally about videos, you could add web2.0 type streaming websites). It is too broad, because there are loads of legit torrents out there, in fact the technology allows for many projects to be distributed without consuming huge amounts of bandwidth, thus keeping the distribution costs for these projects low (think of the many Linux Distros distributed via torrents - Fedora, or Debian to name some- or open projects such as those conducted by the Blender Foundation). So I'd suggest illegitimate filesharing (since the legality of filesharing/downloading might be debatable depending of your residence country and the specifics of your torrents' client).

More to the point, I like those heated threads because they are the place where people can extrapolate anecdotal evidence into full fledged point of views. They are also where we can make broad claims such as " Those torrents kill the creative industry" (as if the "creative industry" was a homogeneous ensemble, with one business model). Finally these threads allow to quote statistics from lobbyists -best case scenario- or from the Pulled Out Of My Butt poll center. Now I'm going to proceed and fall in those traps.

To me anectodal evidence suggest that people who used to buy music, still do, and that people who didn't allocate their resources to culture still don't. Members of the latter group have grown huge music/video collections, for free, but the way they allocate their money hasn't changed. On the other hand, members of the former group value quality over price and will buy digital contents (reasons include : better encoding, support -such as provided by Nick-, access to updates -software, or books via oreilly or pragprogs-, and simply ideology/price -eg. subscribing to MIT's online library CISNET).

Broad claim: vendors of specialized content don't suffer that much from illegitimate filesharing. The target audience for these contents is composed of nerds who wouldn't accept the very low standards usually found on illegitimate sites (side note, a few month ago I spoke to the head of the legal department of a reasonably sized indie editor/producer/distributor I used to work for, and was told that the hit they took with internet piracy was pretty marginal).

Also I'd like to point out that the motivation for illegitimate filesharing ranges from abuse of DRM on the part of content vendors (eg http://xkcd.com/488/ to "I want anything I can get" state of mind (and I think, that this forum somewhat encourages this way of thinking, with the endless list of advice about what software to get next without even bothering pointing out the obvious fact that mastering any of those software would help alot to obtain the desired result).

Personnally I don't use cracked software, and 90% of the digital content I own (figure courtesy of the Pulled Out of My Butt statistics division), is legit. Heck I don't even have a full fledged torrent client (I do have Opera though).

This long post simply because, while I don't support so-called piracy, I still think we ought to be measured when talking about this issue and bear in mind that the ramifications of it are extremely complex (be they legal, philosophical, or sociological).

EDIT --> If you're a content vendor and plan on flooding torrents tracker, keep in mind that your image might suffer from this kind of behaviour. If you plan on more drastic attitudes such as launching DNS attacks against tracking servers, think about the possible legal implications

blackboab wrote:just flood demonoid, piratebay, et. al. with some videos of you laughing, with a description such as 'Forge video tutorial for upcoming Ableton Live 8' ...

Seriously, put tons of the fuckers on there. No one using torrents will ever trust a Forge Video Tutorial again (unless of course they buy it from your website).

Brilliant!!!!!!

point 1:
mock really hasn't got the hang of this "heated debate" thang. It's not a competition of "evenhanded abstract definitions of web 2 objectivity".
Look, you simply pick an arbitrary stance based on some sense of absolute moral rectitude, and then you pillory anyone who appears to possibly hold the opposing stance.
That's it, TWO choices, geddit. Not some wishy washy liberal spectrum of 'complex facets to be considered' , no!
TWO poles. Good and bad.
now choose!


point 2
I am actually wearing Pirate boots at the moment. Yep, Pirate boots.
long story.

</random idiocy>

i have a feeling the people that downloaded your torrent just downloaded a cracked version of live about 45 minutes earlier. i really dont think you lost as much money as you think and theres more factors than just torrents(global recession?), tho not to be like the news like OMG GLOBAL RECESSION! but i think the purchase of relatively low worth(not as an insult, but i would think very a specialized thing like ableton instruction video has wildly fluctuating demand/price) goes down in harder times. just lower you price and makeup in volume, i bet only like 20% of ableton owners actually know how to use everything.

I'm a programmer in the Video Games industry at a fairly major studio. What my company is trying to do is not "combat piracy", per se, but rather reward people for buying our games by giving them a steady stream of free updates after they buy it. With each update, existing torrents become obsolete and illegal users will have to wait for a new torrent, then re-download and re-install it so they can keep playing.

The goal is that for people who enjoy the game and did not pay for it, that they'll get tired of this process and pay for it eventually. On top of that, people that legally purchased it are happy because they keep getting free goodies from us.

Angstrom : may you be touched by the Giant Spaghetti Monster's noodley appendage. True that I'm not too good with flamewars, mostly because I always assume that being a Slashdot reader makes me an internet debates badass. However I didn't say anything that would prompt the liberal qualification (I did not say whether I thought we should have more or less stringent copyright laws), unless nuance is somehow a liberal thing (and even so, I'm not a US citizen nor resident - as you might have guessed from my english).

Anyhow, Jagermaestro's post shows that radical answers aren't that good. When he says that his company doesn't "combat piracy", he probably means that his company doesn't combat "all forms of piracy" (Jagermaestro, if I misinterpret your post, I'm sorry). Indeed you do have to combat some incarnations of copyright infringement: it's all about where to put the slider. What I mean is that, the most obvious infringement should be taken down (eg for Nick and Forge, issue takedown notice to Youtube/Wimeo/DailyMotion), but the best way to handle marginal infringement is to promote the quality of your support and the advantages of going legit (as Jagermaestro's company apparently does).

(On a sidenote, about terminology, I think it is a shame that the term "piracy" referring to copyright infringement has become so popular, while real maritime piracy costs a lot of money too and puts people in harm's way).

mock wrote:Since I probably won't hang out on this forum for too long now, I thought it was time for me to take part in one of those heated debates . I've thought of a vs. thread (eg mac/pc, thisSynth/thatSynth, emacs/vim -oh wait, wrong forum) or politics, but this one will do.

Did not even read the post because you started like this ^^^

"I've thought about posting a Vs. thread" either do it and expect the hate, or just don't participate in the forum. Starting like this is a cop out. You are a bitch.

mock wrote: However I didn't say anything that would prompt the liberal qualification (I did not say whether I thought we should have more or less stringent copyright laws), unless nuance is somehow a liberal thing (and even so, I'm not a US citizen nor resident - as you might have guessed from my english.

Hi, sorry, I was aiming for a generic internet insult.
It was the first arbitrary and pointless label I could think of.
alternatives were stuff like "bitch", etc.



If you need more help participating I suggest you revise here and then get back to us with a short and snappy diatribe.

What? I can dl Forge's stuff for free? Where????

sweeeeet