Don't Make Me Steal: a manifesto of reluctant pirates

Which completely invalidates any claim you could make that you're not stealing.

Look, I feel there are valid reasons at times to pirate. But if the reason you go by is just that you don't want to pay money for your entertainment, that comes off as far too entitled. Do you not believe the people who worked on something and put it out there for mass consumption should be compensated for their work?

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

I made a statement that I was not stealing? I know I'm stealing in the technical sense of the word, but I just don't care, since I'm just making a copy of a product whose marginal revenue is already very low.

This is not to say that I don't feel guilty at times - if I do I'll buy the album or at least listen to it through ad-supported mediums like Youtube.

But compensation for those that do the technical aspects of entertainment - sound mixers, editors, lighting crew, etc., have all already been paid. The above the line/the creative crew employees - producers, musicians, directors, are paid royalties. The music business has shifted its model to concerts, though, so the amount the record label, the musician, the producers, etc., all receive is a pittance compared to what they used to receive so it's hard to feel bad about depriving the business of what they already considered to be an outmoded method. The impact of piracy, while once great, has been dealt with by the music industry - they've shifted to concerts and music videos.

Just as music videos and concerts were meant to promote the album, albums are now meant to promote the concerts. Lady Gaga, for example has the entirety of all her albums on Youtube for free.

tl;dr: I don't care because the music industry has shifted their business and economic model to minimize the loss due to piracy. Any impact it has on the music industry has been minimized. Albums are considered promotional tools for concerts; the opposite was true in the past. The music industry changed the way it worked to deal with piracy and has accepted its existence. They really only care about leaks now.

The film industry hasn't really shifted their model because there's know way to do that. I don't pirate films.

Also: my economic explanation applies to electropop and electronic musicians; for other genres, like indie, rock, hip-hop, I don't really know how to explain that since I don't really listen to those genres so I don't quite know their culture.

edited 26th Oct '12 11:01:57 AM by Completion

How does "integrity dollars" have anything whatsoever to do with trolling?

The idea is "I feel a little bad about denying the artist money, but it's just a corporation that has more than it knows what to do with, so I don't feel bad enough about it to not pirate."

Fresh-eyed movie blog

That was a very interesting series of articles.

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

Because the premise of the idea is to "balance" the amount of costs of different methods by claiming that some methods cost more, in the terms of the article, in "Hail Marys or hours spent lying awake at night".

How can this possibly be true, given the portion of the population who are, appopriately enough given the concept of integrity dollars, morally bankrupt? Who don't care what the consequences of their actions are, laugh at people who react negatively to being treated badly, etc.? I've known a few too many pirates who have actually called me too stupid to deserve to own a computer because I don't pirate.

I don't like being told that piracy is "financially" justified because they have to live with the guilt of it, when many of the pirates I know quite clearly don't give a damn.

How many of them would have bought the game if it were impossible to pirate? Because only these count as lost sales, others are lost causes.

About $I: What the article mentions as $I it more dissuasive than punitive, to me. People who are not morally bankrupt simply don't want to pirate unless other factors egg them on.

The article is more on a "seller" perspective than a "customer" perspective. It's more a "how to make them buy your game" than a "why it's OK to pirate". Edit: And from this perspective, "forget lost causes, but make sure not to alienate scrupulous guys" sounds like good advice.

PS: How old are those pirates?

edited 27th Oct '12 12:14:25 PM by Medinoc

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

"How to make people want to buy your game" is a focus more businesses need to take, rather desperately.

And this is a rather relevant thought to it.

Note: the same logic that rationalizes pirated copies are zero loss means you can sell copies at almost zero cost and almost full profit. And that makes really fun things happen.

edited 27th Oct '12 12:31:17 PM by Pykrete

Read the article less dismissively. The author is not justifying piracy, and states that directly. The author makes games for a living, piracy hurts him more per unit because he's with an indie developer.

The idea of $I is that not everybody who pirates has no qualms about it. In fact, most people do to a certain extent, and his point is specifically that the industry's anti-piracy model assuming that everybody is morally bankrupt is absurdly wrong.

He points out that the non-$M currencies are different for everybody, because it's based on feelings. In his illustration about console DRM, he proposes a hypothetical person who places no value whatsoever on integrity, and thus in his balance, piracy has a 0 $I cost, and within the scenario, the only reason this hypothetical person doesn't pirate is because he's getting a PS 2 game and back then it was too difficult to bother pirating console games.

His argument isn't that piracy should be okay, his argument is that instead of making piracy harder, we should make legitimate acquisition easier.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

I'm more in favor of completely removing anti piracy enforcement in its entirety. I'm perfectly comfortable throwing artists into the wild and saying "convince people to give you money or starve, I don't care which".

Fight smart, not fair.

Well, if someone is making money off their work, I'd say they're doing a good job of convincing people to give them their money.

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

"Convince people to give you money or starve" and those aforementioned means of increasing sales have been around for a long time. It's why advertising exists, it's why sales exist when supply exceeds demand, and so on.

Indeed, when a game is too expensive for me to purchase immediately, I wait until I either get more disposable income or wait for the price to decrease. That or I decide that the game is no longer worth my attention and move on to other things.

I just don't like how, and especially why, the added point of "or we'll obtain and play the games anyway" got into the mix, let alone became acceptable. This comes across as a ludicrous form of entitlement. Seriously, if a game is too expensive or contains sufficient malware and is thus considered not worth buying, there are many other games available. If the companies decide to oligopolize excessively, we can always go outside and throw a ball.

Whether or not video games are considered a business or an art form, I tend to believe that "the honor system" works a lot better when it is provided willingly by the seller, and when they can remove the method if it is being blatantly abused. (In short, Steam is a good idea and I wish more companies would use it or similar methods, but at no point does not using it entitle the audience to take them anyway.)

In at least one reply, the phrase "lost cause" was used to refer to people who are likely to download the games no matter what, with no concern for the company whatsoever, and the sentiment was that they should be ignored.

No. Consistent lack of punishment is equivalent to permission. If there is no personal downside to doing what they do, then logically we should all be doing it. And I don't like being told that I'm the one who's morally unacceptable for thinking this way. (As several pirates who I routinely speak to have done. No, I don't know their ages. People like them know better than to give out personal information.)

The correct solution, had the Internet been properly designed to allow for it, would be to find those lost causes and punish them. But they haven't been, and that's why the act is so widespread that I'm not sure they could even fit in a prison.

Meanwhile I get criticized for renting games, because that costs me more than pirating them and the money goes to a third party who didn't develop them.

I think I'm bitter. I still don't think I'm wrong.

Look, speaking as someone who works in the game industry and whose livelihood depends on things not immolating, I completely agree in principle, but pragmatically it doesn't work so hot. Chasing down pirates necessitates implementing a lot of tools that would do more harm than good — especially in the climate of entertainment industries abusing what tools they have, because it's less profitable to use them to actually go after pirates than it is to use them to stifle competition or resale outlets.

edited 5th Nov '12 6:23:24 PM by Pykrete

Although I pirate music, pirating video games seems like a genuinely immoral act and those that do it have an enormous entitlement complex. There's no other form of income for those people, so it is stealing. There's no other way to argue yourself around it. With music, the musician places more emphasis on concert tours and merchandise now than the actual recordings.

How can video games/computer games work around this? Video game piracy is a genuine threat.

edited 5th Nov '12 7:55:47 PM by Completion

Again, speaking as someone who this hurts, the threat is so dramatically overstated as to be absurd. Yes it's bad and we'd really rather people don't do it, but it's not the kind of media-circus-worthy crisis that it gets made out as, and more importantly it happens to be a case where the cure is worse than the disease.

That, and you're starting to see companies that run with digital distribution as their modus operandi instead of some nebulous threat making obscene profits. You work around it by bothering to provide a good service.

edited 5th Nov '12 8:29:40 PM by Pykrete

If you make your product available the way the people want it, at a price that the market will support, you'll have better profits. You won't completely get rid of piracy, but you'll make a dent in it.

Distributors have a choice between spending a bunch of money constantly on legislation, courts, and product-breaking DRM, or investing a bunch of money into figuring out what kind of infrastructure works better in the 21st century.

Lots of people don't want to leave home to buy games. Steam makes that possible.

Lots of people think $60 is an outrageous price for a game. Gamestop sells it at what the market says it's actually worth.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

Not necessarily all musicians. There are plenty of musicians (usually smaller ones and usually ones that don't perform live) that benefit greatly from albums sold. Even bigger artists benefit from albums sold, and not just monetarily—the more their music sells, the more their record company will promote them, the more potential creative freedom they might get, bigger budget, etc. Appeasing the executives helps in more ways than just money.

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

You shouldn't be so quick to call other people immoral, entitled and thiefs. Personally, I'm torn on whether piracy is stealing or not and I wouldn't jump on your throat for downloading an album, but you should bear in mind that a rich person has a right to all of their sources of income as much as a less rich person. Sure, the argument doesn't have the same emotional weight, but it has the same moral weight. And like Odd said, some musicians mainly count on their albums for monetary compensation.

Anyway, interesting article. I agree with whoever said that nobody "makes" another person do anything, but, on the other hand, several points were entirely reasonable. (The DRM-related ones, for instance.) Some are indeed unrealistic, but as an act it's a good thing, because it's an attempt at negotiation. I don't think it will actually get attention, but perhaps it should. The entertainment industry does need a few changes (or a whole new model?) I'm not too hopeful, though.

edited 17th Nov '12 6:54:39 AM by AnEditor

The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them.

Gotta take issue with this bit here, simply because the metaphor is badly flawed and I'm pretty sure it's not what you're trying to say. If the bookstore keeps locks on the books before you pay for them, how is it OK to break the lock just to look inside? Under this analogy, you are damaging the bookstore's property evidently out of spite.

Me, I'd just put the locked book back on the shelf and wander over to another bookstore-plus-coffeeshop to browse their not-locked books.

If you're making some weird eBook comparison, I'd point out that most eBookstores (or at least, the ones I ever shop at) will let you sample part of the book before buying.

Me, I don't generally pirate stuff anymore . Particularly since much of it is cheap enough now and I make enough money that I can just buy an album or a movie sight-unseen because I liked a song or an actor in it.

In short, if you can't afford the product, don't buy that product. Instead of the $60 video game, buy an $8 book. Or a $2 deck of cards. Or go outside and find a couple of sticks. Video games, music, and movies are not a necessity by a long shot.

That said, stop using business practices that punish people who pay for your product (I'm looking right at you, Electronic Arts with the DRM setup that means I can't play Mass Effect 3 single player because the online servers crashed and thus I can't verify that I legally acquired any of the free DLC I have from you guys). Stop making preachy commercials (that only people who buy a movie will ever see) browbeating your customers not to download movies illegally (nevermind that these commercials are So Bad, It's Good material at best). Can't we all just stop being assholes to each other in this business relationship?

OK, revisiting the book metaphor, I see what you're saying there now, and that would be a really dumb way to run a bookstore. Worth noting, it is how they run many video stores (the Hastings video and book stores I used to go to in college come to mind), but in that case, the cashier has a key they use to pop the anti-theft thing off of your new property.

Yeah, I'm saying that you have to go home and send proof of purchase to the company in order to get access to the book. Which is how a lot of DRM works.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

And of course, the more egregious DRM would say that you have to call the publisher every time you want to read it and remain on the line the whole time.

What analogy would we have for that Sony DRM that broke incompatible CD players? If you're not using publisher-approved glasses, we break your glasses?

Fresh-eyed movie blog

If you don't use a proper satelite TV decoder card, your TV will only show Jersey Shore?

If you don't pay Vinnie on time, you'll get whacked?

edited 24th Nov '12 7:46:49 AM by 0dd1

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

@AFP: While I agree with you, my main problem is availability. I would gladly buy the songs I've pirated, if they were available. But I've literally looked at all my options and none of them have had the songs. How am I supposed to throw my money at them when they aren't offering what I want?

If the industries would make things more easily available, instead of forcing costumers to jump through a million hoops to get what they want, I think pirating would decrease.

People are mirrors. If you smile, a smile will be reflected.