Music Piracy Documentary Released As Torrent

goodbye_kitty writes "The producers of a new documentary film analyzing global music piracy have decided to 'put their money where their mouth is' by releasing the film as a free Xvid download (hosted by the Pirate Bay, as one would expect). The film explores the blurred line between 'fair use' and piracy, and includes interviews with DJ Danger Mouse (creator of the now infamous 'grey album'), Lawrence Lessig (founder of Creative Commons), the lads from the Pirate Bay, and even some guy from the MPAA. Here is a link to the torrent."

Re:Put their money where their mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure it wasn't simply the case that they're out of money and/or nobody will distribute the documentary for them?

Or maybe they're just clever and realise they can get lots of free publicity on sites like /. by releasing the programme as a torrent. Don't think we'll ever know, but you're reading this article aren't you?

Unfortunately am in Canada and Bittorrent has been banned [torrentfreak.com] by the Internet Police [rogers.com] over here, so we're not allowed to download files.

Re:The producers will starve

[lilomar]

I doubt it's very feasible to do a real, independent study on this.

I tend to agree with you on this.
But it doesn't [washingtonpost.com] stop [com.com] people [harvard.edu] from [princeton.edu] trying [unc.edu].
(The last two are PDFs)

I never said that it outweighed, or even matched the lost revenue, I said it might which means you can't say for sure that piracy has a negative impact.
I tend to believe that piracy doesn't have a negative impact though because of an interesting observation that I read somewhere. (but I can't for the life of me remember where, could have been a /. post)

There are 3 types of pirates:

1. People who would have bought the product, but didn't because they downloaded it.
2. People who wouldn't have bought the product, but downloaded it and liked it enough to buy/recommend it to their friends.
3. People who wouldn't have bought the product, but downloaded it and didn't like it enough to buy/recommend it to their friends.

As long as 2 and 3 are greater than 1, there is a net gain.

As to whether or not this is up to the community to decide, I'm not arguing the moral issues, I'm just arguing the economic ones. In economics, the consumer always decides the profit, even when that makes them criminals.