UV, as in “Worldwide, BitTorrent gets 250 million UVs per month.” What the heck is UV? Ultraviolet, and we're counting individual photons now? Uninvited Viewer? Unintentional Verbiage? Unauthorized Vagrant? More likely it's Unique Visitor. Thanks to A and Anders for straightening me out. Quoted line is from Piracy is part of the digital ecosystem by Frédéric Filloux on Monday Note.
You hear claims that piracy is costing copyright holders billions of dollars. This is nonsense. Most pirates are stealing stuff because they can't afford to buy it. Sure, there are a few pirates operating on an industrial scale who are printing zillions of copies and making tons of money, but they are mostly selling their illegal copies at cut-rate prices to people who can't afford to buy the legal versions. So even if you could completely stop all illegal copying of music and video, it is doubtful whether record or movie revenues would increase substantially.
New to me is Big Champagne, a company that tracks illegal copying and reports their results to the big media companies who use this information to direct their marketing strategies. Nobody knows which songs / movies are going to be popular (and even if someone does know, how do you know they are going to be right?). Tracking which tunes are being copied the most tells us which songs are actually popular. Promoting those tunes will probably bring more sales. A back-ass-wards arrangement if I ever saw one. I for one welcome our new pirate overlords.
Got the link from a newsletter from The Code Project.
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