Digital Piracy

I wonder if this would be at all helpful to the debate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity

The most relevant section would be the section on digital abundance, which has this quote: "This negligible-cost reproduction raises the question, 'How much should one pay for something that can be copied near-indefinitely at minimal expense?'" (I'm just putting out the question, not giving an answer because I am personally unsure how to answer it)

edited 20th Nov '11 7:57:18 PM by Rainbow

The problem with that is that it is only post-scarcity for the consumer. The resources necessary to create a game or movie are not infinite. It only becomes post-scarcity as a finished product.

Hence the dilemma.

I am now known as Flyboy.

Hmm. How does one go about regulating piracy though, without mucking up everything else in the process? I know that Youtube for example, makes a big deal about cleaning up pirated content, but a load of the videos they block aren't actually violating copyright, which gives me the impression that piracy is rather difficult to regulate without a lot of collateral crossfire. It'd be kind of annoying if the government started taking that kind of approach toward websites in general, social networking, blogs, etc...

But then again, it also can't be denied that current anti-piracy methods are quite pathetic and ineffectual.

They never travel alone.

@Earth Sheep: One word is not a good enough response to that. If you're saying we should all follow the law, and someone else says some law was bad, and you just say "Granted," you've just opened the floodworks. If you want to defend your position at all, you'll need to come up with some sort of clarification for when we should and shouldn't be following the law.

@Ever9: The laws make a given act legal or illegal, but there's more than one given act available here. A distinction has already been drawn between borrowing a book from the library and pirating a video game. I think further distinctions need to be drawn, some of which would require changing the laws. (In particular, video games need a right of first sale.)

And while I'm at it, I think scaring people out of breaking the law actually is a legitimate tactic, assuming the law is reasonable. Compare it to audits—you'll never be able to catch everyone who commits tax fraud, but you can catch enough of them to reduce fraud.

I'm like this anytime someone treats a statement as obvious long after it's become apparent that most of the people in the thread don't see it as obvious. (I do it even when I personally see the statement as obvious, since in that case, treating it as obvious usually hinders my attempts to justify it.)

edited 20th Nov '11 9:21:45 PM by feotakahari

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

Dude... chill out.

This is gonna turn into a comedy real soon if we start acting like a bunch of forks.

edited 20th Nov '11 9:14:57 PM by DisasterGrind

What the fuck is "right of first sale," exactly?

And why do I imagine I won't like it...?

USAF713 on his phone or iPod.

Edit: Sorry, doublepost.

edited 20th Nov '11 9:16:33 PM by USAF721

USAF713 on his phone or iPod.

^^ Tomu taught me the term. It means that once you buy something, you can sell it used. (For instance, if I go to Gamestop, I can sell them my console games for other players to buy. Most PC games have DRM to prevent me from doing that.)

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

The notion (currently found in relation to books, and other things that are non-media) that, once you have bought a book, it actually belongs to you, and you can sell that book, lend it, or give it away freely without any restriction on who you sell to, how much you sell for, etc...

As usual wikipedia has more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_first_sale

Edit: partially ninjaed.

edited 20th Nov '11 9:27:45 PM by SavageOrange

'Don't beg for anything, do it yourself, or else you won't get anything.'

I am neutral towards that idea, I think.

USAF713 on his phone or iPod.

MLK's civil disobedience.

You can choose to break a law (such as segregation) and fully accept the penalty for breaking the law, as a sign of protest that your moral beliefs outweigh your respect for legal side of things.

Of course, this is more of an example of not following the law being ethical. However, he believed that the law was unethical, and thus enforcing is unethical, and he chose morality over legality in this case.

I do think there's some value in the idea of obeying the law. But if the people are abusing their hold of their works and refusing reasonable accessibility to point that people pushed to "piracy", then perhaps some similar protest and generous accessibility would be justified.

edited 21st Nov '11 9:02:01 AM by abstractematics

Now using Trivialis handle.

A better way of putting it is that it's a situation where the law is set as a point that it makes things that are socially normative illegal. It's just that because it's never actually been enforced before (because it was impossible), it's a bit of a culture shock.

People used to tape albums off the radio and make mix tapes for their friends pretty much all the time. Hell, Apple's old motto for iTunes was Rip, Mix, Burn. Remember that?

Getting cultural/informational content without rewarding the creator directly is something that is socially normative in our society. Maybe it shouldn't be, although I think that's wrong. There's of course a balance between accessibility and control, creating a functioning and thriving marketplace for such works.

That's why I say that functionally and ethically, there's not much real difference regardless of what is legal or not. You're either rewarding the creator or you're not. Full stop. Everything else is pretty much arbitrary. And quite frankly, as long as you're paying for something, as long as you're contributing to the pot in some way, it's not something that I'm going to lose sleep over.

My personal pirating? Fan translated anime and manga, generally. I'll stream a few odd TV shows, I'd be more than happy to go official for them but they're not accessible in Canada. That's about it. I go to the theaters to see the movies I want to see, but most of my games I buy used or rent however, and most books I get out of the library.

That's pretty low, but the thing is, I don't view my buying games used or getting books out of the library as being any better than someone who downloads them. I just do it that way because it's more convenient to me.

Democracy is the process in which we determine the government that we deserve

I'm going to thread hop:

If you're a developer and you're going to heavily fight piracy, either via DRM or government lobbying for draconian laws, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot for several reasons:

• You are reducing exposure of your work to more people thus reducing your footprint
• Heavy DRM and/or draconian laws discourage piracy at the cost of sales, and discourage pirates don't turn around and buy something after being burned
• You are restricting the ability of your works to be experienced after they have run their course preventing any resurgence, or in the event of an artist's death, prevents post-death popularity one of the most famous ways for an artist's work to become known

Now, if you accept "piracy", which I'll redefine as digital copying of a work without permission (thus making it closest to copyright infringement as someone said and very much NOT theft, I don't know why people keep bringing that up... theft is when you take something from someone, if theft were the loss of potential income, wow wee watch them lawsuits between competing corporations fly) then there are several things to consider.

• The cost of producing the product is non-zero but the cost of distributing each additional product is nearly zero. So the strange thing with digital work is that the more you sell, the less it should cost per copy. If we go by capitalism, then a product is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it. If people balk at paying $60 for a video game, then lower the price. It's not capitalism to whine that people are refusing to buy at the high price you set.

• One has to consider the advertising potential of piracy. From the studies I looked at (from MIT and from Stardock Inc), statistically speaking, only the top 10 musicians get hurt (and just barely) by piracy, whereas everyone else profits substantially (and the lower you are on the ladder, the more amazing the positive effect of piracy is). Stardock Inc owes its entire success to piracy, in fact, when their little known Galactic Civilisations 2 contained zero DRM was publicly derided by EA, and then was promptly pirated over a million copies resulting in over 100k sales for a little known indie company.

• Anyone below top 10, or independent artists/programmers have to consider that the most important thing is ease of sale and ease of access. If you're nobody man trying to sell "Yet Another Zombie Shooter", are you really so arrogant to think that people want to set up 5 accounts, have perma-access to the internet, do some challenge questions, have a CD in their drive 100% of the time and have a sniffer on their computer to ensure they aren't pirating? You certainly aren't selling ambrosia here, what's important is that people see a fair price (5-25 range for indie video games) and be able to instantly download it, enjoy it and then pay for it with minimal hassle. Anti-piracy measures naturally get in the way of that. The most you can do is a CD-key.

So really the question is, does the current market support the distribution of digital goods which cost nearly nothing to produce identical copies of? The answer is no.

We shouldn't be trying to fight to keep the old market model, we have to think more of a future model. Perhaps you have a "pre-order" system and the more people who pre-order the lower the price is once the game comes out, reflecting the fact that the price depends on number of sales. You could offer a beta, people who pre-purchase receive the beta and a discounted price. You have tv-shows that do in-placement ads. You can stream your tv-shows and have commercials, so long as it is easy, people have no reason to pirate just to avoid a few commercials. You can sell your movie DV Ds with extra goodies. I mean why pay 60 bucks for a video game and it doesn't even have a DVD case for the disc?

I imagine piracy would be an incorrect term for this phenomena. What's happening right now, is this so-called 'piracy' is heralding a new way of distributing things (which I hope becomes adopted in the future), and that the old business models - growing ever so repressive in combating this distribution - needs to get revised.

It's not just about how much money you get from the product anymore, but if you can be proud of what you've made that you would glee when the people are using it, playing it.

edited 21st Nov '11 9:04:53 AM by QQQQQ

What? And you are talking about not understanding how society works? The democratic principle doesn't even work in that way. If a vaccine fails to prevent a disease, it's just useless. Law enforcement can also have a margin of error, but after a point where it's execution can be called "arbitary", "unpredictable" and "unenforcable", it isn't just useless, it is categorically anti-democratic.

Though most of that content is formally copyrighted against downloading, authors just unofficially choose to let it go this time, because they don't feel like fighting Youtube. And some others are trying to stop such videos. Though afaik, even those others are't sueing youtube viewers, but again, it's because it's easier to cach torrenters, so they choose not to.

A classic example of whole population living on sufferance, and the publishers arbitarily choosing if, when, and how, they should attack them.

"It's not just about how much money you get from the product anymore, but if you can be proud of what you've made that you would glee when the people are using it, playing it."

You know, I've been trying to refrain fron typing mega-long posts and what, but reading this damn near killed me. I'm going to go play another fifty hours of Skyrim.

Here in Germany "theft" under the law is defined as taking a "foreign movable object" without permission of its owner. There was a case where someone stole electricity but it wasn't covered under theft... So they made an extra article for said case. Just as a little analogy.

Maybe this piracy = theft is a Murrikkkan thing? :3

edited 21st Nov '11 1:23:34 PM by Excelion

Murrl LustFatM

Even under our law, it's copyright infringement. Incidentally, that means that it's also not a criminal offense (it is, however, a civil offense).

Yay! I'm not a criminal!

Murrl LustFatM

It's not that $60 is too high, but people simply will avoid paying or things.

Piracy is theft - you are nt paying for something. If it sn't illegal it hould be. It's not really immoral - but it hurts the producers.

Getting cultural/informational content without rewarding the creator directly is something that is socially normative in our society

But the quality of non-official sources was usually worse.

edited 21st Nov '11 1:49:27 PM by Erock

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

Piracy is as much a crime as smoking pot is. We made it a crime by writing a law to make it so.

What the thread's question is, I presume, asking if piracy is parasitism, that is; there is no way for digital copying of material without the consent of the author to ever be useful. I have shown that it is likely in the best interest of an artist to simply put up their works for piracy themselves and if they choose to attack such a distribution of their material, they are merely shooting themselves in the foot in the marketing department.

As I've stated, based on the studies from MIT and Stardock Inc, allowing the piracy of your work will increase sales whereas attempting to punish people for piracy (like through heavy-handed DRM) is likely to lower your sales and damage your profit. So in essence, you're just going to have take the situation as this:

• You produce a product
• Some people will pay you money for it
• That is your revenue

That's it. It doesn't matter who pirated it or bought it legit or whatever. You put out a product, you make x dollars. There's no reason to care about anything else other than that. If you could prove piracy lowered revenue, then it would be parasitism but seeing as how every study shows that it increases revenue, it's illogical to attempt to block piracy. It would in fact be logical to pirate indie video games you write in the hopes that people play, notice it and perhaps buy that game or other games that you may produce. Likewise with other media such as novels and so on. In fact, I personally would not have bought a lot of novels had I not been given previews of an author's work. I like to buy hard copies of books (I like the atmosphere of reading an actual book), so if I'm going to spend 8-15 bucks on a book, I hope the author to be good. I do that by reading a work of theirs. So you can go "Oh noes, you didn't pay for one of the 8 books you bought" or you can go "He pirated zero books and bought nothing", I'm certain an author would prefer the former rather than the latter unless you know he's a total sadist.

edited 21st Nov '11 3:02:08 PM by breadloaf

re: The 'granted' business:

I actually take it back. That is not granted. In that case, following the law was still ethical. However, this doesn't mean that breaking that particular law was not also ethical. If that makes sense.

The law is a code of ethics; if your code is different, you may have a punishment coming. However, it is possible to change a law you find unethical, if you can get enough people to agree with you.

edited 21st Nov '11 5:19:43 PM by TheEarthSheep

Still Sheepin'

@OP- Piracy's not justified, no. The only times it's not wrong are when one really would never have bought the game anyway, or buys it after pirating. The first is still slightly wrong, in so much as it's unfair to the people who did buy it that you got it for free, but it doesn't do any harm to the creator, so... meh.

@ "Does Piracy=Theft? discussion"

It's theft since you're getting a good or service with a price for free, without the owner's permission. The only difference is that there's no copy "missing". If I remember correctly from skimming various EULAs, you don't own the software to any games you download. You're basically paying a one-time rental fee. Therefore, you don't have right of first sale or whatever. No sale was made, you're just borrowing it. If you buy a solid copy, you own the physical CD. You can do whatever you want, with that physical CD. You can't, however, do what you want with the code contained therein, because you don't own it.

@breadloaf- Could you post a link to those studies? It seems odd that piracy would outright increase sales- It seems more likely that DRM just hurts more. To pull some numbers out of my ass- Most piracy will increase word of mouth- at the very least, the pirate himself is aware of the creator's work. I figure somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of pirates wouldn't/couldn't buy it*

around 25-45% are pirating because it's free/easy but have the ability to get the official release and otherwise would*

^{People with jobs, there's a copy in Wal-Mart,}

and the remainder because of DRM on the official version. To pull more numbers outta there, I'd guess DRM deters maybe 15-33% of possible sales.

Something else to consider- Both music and P Cgame sales have been going down since 2000, around the same time the internet and Kazaa/Morpheus/Napster, et al really started to hit their stride. Correlation don't imply causation, but it's interesting to note.

They lost me. Forgot me. Made you from parts of me. If you're the One, my father's son, what am I supposed to be?

Like I said in other threads, if the Internet (which includes legitimate models like iTunes) caused that decline, the businesses could try adapting to it, instead of building more and more walls that earn nothing but hatred.

Now using Trivialis handle.

Thread Hop.

Is piracy parasitism: Definitely yes.

edited 21st Nov '11 5:49:23 PM by mailedbypostman