Threatening messages aimed to prevent digital piracy have the opposite effect if you're a man, a new study from the University of Portsmouth has found. According to the research, women tend to respond positively to this kind of messaging, but men typically increase their piracy behaviors by 18%.
Make it easy for me to get the shit that I want and maybe I won’t pirate. It’s fucking easier to just pirate shit than to sign up for a bunch of services and deal with asscunt companies. Fuck you.
Those Ads at the beginning of legitimate copies of DVDS and movies, really bugged me, like why are you annoying the people who actually bought the product!? Also the people downloading stuff online seemed cool in those videos so I think the ads had the opposite effect a lot of the time.
We only started pirating after Amazon refused to let us play movies we paid for because our hardware was too old for their DRM. It was a 2014 PC made of recycled parts. At the time, it was less than 10 years old. We pirated the same movie and realized it was easier to find, higher quality, and surprise, surprise, capable of playing on a PC we kept out of the landfill.
When I see anti piracy measures that punish people that don't pirate, such as massive performance hits or privacy violating features, it makes me want to pirate more.
I don't really understand the gender difference thing, because I would think that in general it comes down to understanding what "ownership" is and that it has been taken from us, replaced with "licensing" where we have to buy the same movie every 10 years on a new format, and now that streaming is THE format, companies have made The Producers real, where they can make a whole movie, shitcan it, and get a tax break. We're dealing with items we've paid for being removed from our digital storage boxes, because the "rights ran out." It's wild, because it used to be that you bought a movie and it didn't matter that the rights ran out you could still watch your fucking movie in your own home. Same for old video games. If you have old copies of Grand Theft Auto, you can still listen to the great soundtrack, because they hadn't stripped the music they lost licensing for out of the new copies.
When the fines for all piracy that exists would be bigger than the amount of money that exists, its clear that the system is fucking broken and has been.
The rightsholders did this to themselves by making it increasingly draconian.
When cops are playing copyrighted music when they're being filmed so people can't post it online without it being auto-removed for having copyrighted music in it, things are flat out fucked and everybody knows it.
It's akin to living the end stages of the Soviet Union with Hypernormalization. Everything is totally fucked, but everyone is running around trying to pretend that nothing has changed and everything is fine.
For citizens who get nothing but working themselves to death and taxes that do nothing for them, piracy is one of those small "fuck you"'s that we can give to the rich.
[^1]: "The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) estimates that filesharing website LimeWire owes it over $72 trillion dollars (£46 trillion) in damages. ... Given that the combined wealth of the entire planet is around $60 trillion (£38 trillion), the RIAA likely has no hope of securing this in damages, but believe this is what it is owed, reports Computerworld.com."
Piracy is a service issue. Give people the option to stream all of their media with an option to download for the nerds, and sell it at a reasonable price, you will hurt piracy. Splintering all media up into a thousand streaming services and implementing black box licensing agreements is what pushes people to piracy.
You wouldn't shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet. And then send it to the policeman's grieving widow. And then STEAL IT AGAIN!
1. The effectiveness of the threats is inversely proportional to the tech expertise of the person being threatened. And your typical woman knows less about files, piracy, internet and the likes than your typical man.
If this hypothesis is true, then splitting cohorts based on tech expertise should show a smaller gap between men and women.
2. Society trains women and men to react differently to threat. In simple words: men are expected by society to fight back, while women are expected to passively accept the threat and play along.
If this hypothesis is true, you should be able to see and measure the different answers in other situations that don't involve piracy.
With that said, "perhaps" those anti-piracy messages would be more effective if they didn't rely on bullshit, to the point that sounds a lot like "I expect the viewers of this message to be both tech-illiterate and gullible".
You mean to tell me, people have "you can't tell me what to do" attitude, especially among men?
I only torrent if the show or movie I want to watch is unavailable on Netflix, and I don't want to pay for subscription to another streaming service if such shows are available in those. I'm not made of money.
I've always said, if you can't sell me something based on interest and quality entertainment, then I'm pirating it, because I never would have bought it anyways.
Statistic is a really funny science. So some man who just pirate a 1 h 40 long movie will be inspired to also pirate a sitcom episode from the antipiracy campagne?
Ai summary because it seems like folks aren't reading the article:
The study finds that threatening anti-piracy messages aimed at deterring digital piracy have the opposite effect on men, finding they increase piracy behaviors by 18% in men. However, such messages can reduce intended piracy in women by over 50%. The research also showed educational messages had no impact on intended piracy for both men and women. Notably, those with more favorable views of piracy saw even higher increases in intended piracy when exposed to threatening messages. The findings suggest anti-piracy groups should tailor their messages for different genders and consider alternative educational approaches to avoid unintended consequences like increasing piracy.
Seems like threatening messages specifically drive piracy up in men, but not for women. If you have a favorable view on piracy then the aggressive ads make it more likely that you'll follow through.
It's pretty much saying that the industry may want to reconsider the way they frame their warnings because it may actually be influencing people to take action.