February 23, 2010 at 01:56File Sharing - An Inside Look
Having carefully watched and listened to an interesting dialogue on Echo of Moscow , and then after reading all the comments, I decided to write a detailed post about the players in the file sharing market. It just so happened that I am very close to the topic, and by the nature of my activity I often and very closely communicate with all parties.
To begin with, let's define the terms of who is who in this niche:
1. Ordinary users - those who visit sites for free download in order to understandably download anything and do not get any material benefit from it.
2. Owners of sites - here I think everything is clear, those who own the sites and, as far as possible and willing, make a profit, usually from advertising.
3."Fighters" for the rights of copyright holders - I specifically quoted the word fighters in quotation marks, more on that below.
4. Rightholders are actually those who actually own the rights to a particular product.
I specially missed the file hosting companies aka RapidShare in this review, since this is a completely separate topic for discussion.
Ordinary users, they are ordinary users, they came to the site to download something for their pleasure, but I must say that this audience is solvent, I can safely say this based on the amounts of donates, and on the amounts that these users spend to purchase premium accounts for file hosting.
Site Owners- as you know, no one has ever invested in projects of this topic, therefore such projects appear on the pure enthusiasm of the owners, if you succeed, your site has become popular, site owners begin to make a profit, the time through which the site begins to make a profit can take years. Site owners have to communicate with all market players.
"Fighters" for the rights of copyright holders- these are parasites, and first of all they parasitize on the copyright holders themselves. The scheme is very simple, a law company or some kind of public committee is created that begins to walk around the copyright holders and tell them how bad they live because of the so-called pirates, and how much money they DO NOT RECEIVE, the so-called lost profit - according to the statements of many experts, it is calculated on the coffee thicker. They offer their "effective" help to combat pirates, what is it? They simply send letters to the site owners with lists of links that they request to be deleted, since this is a copyright violation (here they are right), the responsible site owners delete the links to the specified products, the “fighters” run with the progress report to the copyright holders and receive no little money the fact that fresh links to the same products appear on the site again - no one cares, it’s only for the “fighters”, otherwise there’s nothing to be asked to be removed next month. As a rule, such services are provided on a subscription basis and all that the “fighters" need is a monthly report on the work done, by the way such services are not very cheap.
Copyright holders- manufacturers of the product, here it is worth dividing the copyright holders into two categories, from the world of art - cinema, books, music, and from the world of IT - software products. The first is understandable, unfortunately they are almost all far from the world of the Internet, live in some kind of parallel galaxy, and for the most part believe that all the troubles they have are from pirates. Although if you look at the financial statements, for example, the film industry for 2008-2009, we can see a steady and steady increase in profits. I won’t say anything about music, I was not interested in the statistics of their income. But it’s worth mentioning about the book market separately, it’s not a secret for everyone that in recent years book printing is a disaster, and this market is in no hurry to switch to electronic form, which, accordingly, entails big losses of profits, they all can’t believe that people stop buying printed books.
Copyright holders from the IT sector are usually very sane and buy ads and distribute their product through pirated sites more than once, their logic is very simple, we need as many users to recognize and try our product as possible, in any case corporate customers will buy it later, and so regular users bought it - this is the concern of our sales managers.
Who do you think are the greatest friends of the “fighters"? If you think that the copyright holders who pay them money, then you are very mistaken, their biggest friends are the owners of the sites, tomorrow there will be no pirated sites all this fraternity will be left without a very fat piece of cake. I partially draw my conclusion on the following statistics: by Christmas, the site administration received 2 postcards from advertisers, one postcard from a software company that bought ads for its product on the site, and ATTENTION - 6 postcards from “fighters” offices that sent over the course of the year we have complaints and we satisfied them, in a postcard “fighters” thanked us for sanity, fruitful cooperation and, besides health and happiness, also wished the project a long life :-)
Everything described above is applicable for the international market, much to my regret in RuNet, everything is very wrong and the laws that do not work are to blame. The precedent from torrents.ru is very sad, as soon as this story gets international publicity, the image of the domain zone RU will be significantly damaged. Since without a court decision to disconnect a domain according to international laws is a mess.
PS If someone does not know, the famous and popular writer Paulo Coelho thanked the pirates more than once for making him famous, and in support of his convictions on his blog, he gives out his own books for free.
To begin with, let's define the terms of who is who in this niche:
1. Ordinary users - those who visit sites for free download in order to understandably download anything and do not get any material benefit from it.
2. Owners of sites - here I think everything is clear, those who own the sites and, as far as possible and willing, make a profit, usually from advertising.
3."Fighters" for the rights of copyright holders - I specifically quoted the word fighters in quotation marks, more on that below.
4. Rightholders are actually those who actually own the rights to a particular product.
I specially missed the file hosting companies aka RapidShare in this review, since this is a completely separate topic for discussion.
Ordinary users, they are ordinary users, they came to the site to download something for their pleasure, but I must say that this audience is solvent, I can safely say this based on the amounts of donates, and on the amounts that these users spend to purchase premium accounts for file hosting.
Site Owners- as you know, no one has ever invested in projects of this topic, therefore such projects appear on the pure enthusiasm of the owners, if you succeed, your site has become popular, site owners begin to make a profit, the time through which the site begins to make a profit can take years. Site owners have to communicate with all market players.
"Fighters" for the rights of copyright holders- these are parasites, and first of all they parasitize on the copyright holders themselves. The scheme is very simple, a law company or some kind of public committee is created that begins to walk around the copyright holders and tell them how bad they live because of the so-called pirates, and how much money they DO NOT RECEIVE, the so-called lost profit - according to the statements of many experts, it is calculated on the coffee thicker. They offer their "effective" help to combat pirates, what is it? They simply send letters to the site owners with lists of links that they request to be deleted, since this is a copyright violation (here they are right), the responsible site owners delete the links to the specified products, the “fighters” run with the progress report to the copyright holders and receive no little money the fact that fresh links to the same products appear on the site again - no one cares, it’s only for the “fighters”, otherwise there’s nothing to be asked to be removed next month. As a rule, such services are provided on a subscription basis and all that the “fighters" need is a monthly report on the work done, by the way such services are not very cheap.
Copyright holders- manufacturers of the product, here it is worth dividing the copyright holders into two categories, from the world of art - cinema, books, music, and from the world of IT - software products. The first is understandable, unfortunately they are almost all far from the world of the Internet, live in some kind of parallel galaxy, and for the most part believe that all the troubles they have are from pirates. Although if you look at the financial statements, for example, the film industry for 2008-2009, we can see a steady and steady increase in profits. I won’t say anything about music, I was not interested in the statistics of their income. But it’s worth mentioning about the book market separately, it’s not a secret for everyone that in recent years book printing is a disaster, and this market is in no hurry to switch to electronic form, which, accordingly, entails big losses of profits, they all can’t believe that people stop buying printed books.
Copyright holders from the IT sector are usually very sane and buy ads and distribute their product through pirated sites more than once, their logic is very simple, we need as many users to recognize and try our product as possible, in any case corporate customers will buy it later, and so regular users bought it - this is the concern of our sales managers.
Who do you think are the greatest friends of the “fighters"? If you think that the copyright holders who pay them money, then you are very mistaken, their biggest friends are the owners of the sites, tomorrow there will be no pirated sites all this fraternity will be left without a very fat piece of cake. I partially draw my conclusion on the following statistics: by Christmas, the site administration received 2 postcards from advertisers, one postcard from a software company that bought ads for its product on the site, and ATTENTION - 6 postcards from “fighters” offices that sent over the course of the year we have complaints and we satisfied them, in a postcard “fighters” thanked us for sanity, fruitful cooperation and, besides health and happiness, also wished the project a long life :-)
Everything described above is applicable for the international market, much to my regret in RuNet, everything is very wrong and the laws that do not work are to blame. The precedent from torrents.ru is very sad, as soon as this story gets international publicity, the image of the domain zone RU will be significantly damaged. Since without a court decision to disconnect a domain according to international laws is a mess.
PS If someone does not know, the famous and popular writer Paulo Coelho thanked the pirates more than once for making him famous, and in support of his convictions on his blog, he gives out his own books for free.