Study finds anti-piracy messages backfire, especially for men

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.

If buying is not owning, copying is not stealing. Simple as that.

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.

I would gladly pay good money to just download an MP4, but they have never given me that option.

i remember when valve's steam completely killed nearly all video game piracy just by existing

"You wouldn't put on a tricorn hat, would you?"

I actually would, if I could find a nice one...

"...and leave your job to sail the seas?"

... That's an option? I didn't even consider-

"And you certainly wouldn't drink rum, and fire cannons, and carry a saber and tell silly parrot related puns."

buys a tricorn hat

I love it when corpos remind us that there is an alternative to purchasing their add bloated products.

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.

I mean, going back to when the music companies were suing music fans for downloading music, the RIAA sued Limewire for so much that if the max payout was given to every rightsholder for all the piracy going on, that it would be a bill larger than the amount of money that actually existed.[^1]

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.

Nobody respects copyright, and that started when Disney fucked us all over with the Mickey Mouse Protection Act in the 1990's.

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."

yOU woULdn't dOwnLOad A caR!

Hell yes i would because fuck yeah!

I remember the commercials "Piracy is not a victimless crime" pissed me off so hard, and drove me to download much more than I otherwise would have

You wouldn't break into someone's house and smash the DVDs they legally bought over the years would you?

I’m suspicious of the idea that women respond favorably to those notices.

“You wouldn’t download a car…”
Women: Gee, officer, that’s a good point.

Riiiiiiight…

People who bought the movie seeing anti-piracy ads: 🤡

People who pirated the movie not seeing anti-piracy ads because they've been cut out: 😎

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!

"oh, right. If I had just pirated this my content wouldn't be delayed by these stupid piracy warnings."

I have two hypotheses to explain the gender gap.

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".

No shit. How have they not figured this out 15 years ago when every DVD had non-skippable anti-piracy messages?

We had an ad that actually said "piracy funds terrorism" here in the UK. Made me laugh my arse off.

The conclusion doesn't follow the study.

Threatening messages decrease piracy by women by over 50%, while increasing piracy by men by 18%.

So, unless there are three times as many male pirates as female, those messages are effective at reducing piracy.

You wouldn’t download an anti-piracy message.

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me.

It's actually advertising. "Ha, that's right, I can just clone the files."

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.

It's the equivalent of "no balls, you won't"

I'm just waiting for that glorious day when I can, in fact, download a car.

you wouldn't go to the toilet in a policeman's helmet

"Oh, that's an option?"

Nothing besides better pricing/permanent availability would stop me from piracy

Men. 🏴‍☠️

I actually spent time on ripping the 'you wouldn't steal...' video from the first DVD that I had with it on it, just for the sheer irony. 😅

well yeah you simply cannot convince me that copying a sequence of 1s and 0s between two computers is tantamount to stealing

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.

If a paid streaming service give users a worse experience than pirating, that's on them!

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?

I have just the song for this effect