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Piracy
Friday, April 17, 2009 | Permalink
As many of you may have read in the news, the verdict in the Pirate Bay trial was delivered today, sentencing the four defendants to jail and 30 million SEK (~$3.5M) in damages. This will undoubtedly generate quite a lot of fuss and I wanted to share my thoughts on piracy in general. Given that this is a quite controversial issue I want to begin by pointing out that this is entirely my own personal opinions and does not in any shape or form represent the opinions of my employer, former or future employers, my friends, relatives, my penguin or my ceiling cat. This represents my view as of 2009-04-17, and I reserve the right to change my opinions at any point, as I’ve done in the past. The reason I say that is because this issue is fundamentally hard, very fussy and with many shades of gray in palette, legally and especially morally. Some people see it as black or white though. You can generally categorize those in two groups; the ignorant and those with an agenda. I say the ignorant because I find it hard to believe anyone who considered the arguments from both sides would end up at either extreme. Those with an agenda are of course the corporate representatives and the anti-copyright activists.
While reiterating that I’m representing myself here only, for the sake of the argument, I do work in the game industry, and my income is dependent on people paying for games. That doesn’t automatically land me in the property rights corner. In fact, talking to my colleagues I find that the opinions vary, but I hear more piracy friendly opinions than the opposite. I’m probably leaning somewhat more towards the property right than many of my friends though.
Let me elaborate why I’m rejecting the extremes. I’ll begin with the “piracy is theft” argument. The people trying to push this idea are making a fundamental mistake. Piracy is not theft. Morally questionably? Perhaps. But it’s not theft. But reiterating this argument over and over they are feeding the trolls in the other camp and giving them a reason follow the tangent all the way into the conclusion that property rights don’t exist. The difference between piracy and theft is that when you steel something the owner loses what you stole from him. When you copy something, the owner doesn’t lose what you copied. So that makes it OK, right? Not necessarily. Just because it’s not theft doesn’t make it right. Rape, for instance, is not theft either, but of course morally and legally indefensible. Piracy is of course not rape either, but it is copyright infringement. Copying someone else’s work without permission is indeed questionable. Anti-copyright activists argue it’s perfectly fine, and it’s of course hard to see the harm if you don’t personally know the author. It’s clear why the victim of theft suffers, and it pretty much automatically invokes a sense of moral wrong in all normal people, in a way that copyright infringement does not for most people. Arguing for intellectual property is usually on rational grounds, rather than based on principles or a moral sense. But let me give you an example where copying someone else’s work without permission should give you sense it’s morally wrong. Let’s say a school class is handed some homework. Lisa spends all evening researching and writing down all answers to the questions. Steve on the other hand spends the night in front of the TV. Next morning he secretly borrows Lisa’s notes and copies the answers. Lisa still got her sheet of answers and will still get a good grade, so that makes it OK, right? No, of course not. The answers belong to Lisa. She spent the work assembling them. They are her intellectual property.
So why do we feel the moral indignation in this case? Because we imagine Lisa being an innocent schoolchild, and Steve is taking advantage of her work. It’s harder to feel the same sympathy for an artist making millions. Of course, the vast majority of artists don’t make millions, but that’s less frequently brought up in these kinds of discussions. Let’s ignore that for now. I’m sure pretty much everyone would agree however that it’s not right to copy Lisa’s work without her permission. However, if Lisa herself decides to share her work with her classmate it’s a totally different matter. Anti-copyright activist basically side with Steve in this matter though. Just because it’s possible to copy doesn’t make it right to do so.
Now, while defending the author’s right to his or her intellectual property, the question is how companies and society as a whole should react to this phenomenon. All over the world copyright laws are tightened, property rights are extended to ridiculous times, kids are sued over downloading a song, personal privacy is violated and corporations are taking over the police’s role in criminal investigation. This is pretty backwards in all possible ways. Sweden recently implemented new tougher laws that forces ISPs to provide the personal information for the individual a certain IP address belongs to. The immediate response to this has been that internet traffic has dropped significantly and legal purchases of things like music, games and movies have gone up. This is probably the effect law makers were hoping for. I would agree that it’s a positive development if this is happening, but this is obviously a temporary effect. When the first anxiety of the new laws have settled and people realize there’s no way they can sue an entire generation of youth and their parents and schools things will of course go back to normal again. But the more important point is that this change in behavior is not happening for the right reasons. People are changing their behavior because of fear, not because they found the legal alternative more appealing. This is not the society we want. And it’s all pointless anyway. It should be pretty clear that there’s no technical or legal way to win this battle. Piracy is here to stay (not that piracy is new either).
I do defend copyright law and the concept of intellectual property. The question is, how much effort should society put into preventing piracy? While the laws in this area were probably originally written back in Gutenberg’s days, so some updates and clarifications on how it applies to modern content is necessary, I don’t think we need to change the basic principles. If anything, the more logical course of direction would be towards greater personal freedom. Things move faster these days, so if anything, things should get into the public domain quicker, patents last shorter, and greater liberties with regards to “fair use” should apply. When more things are technically possible, and public opinion generally favors greater liberties, it only makes sense that laws should follow in that direction.
Another thing to consider is what effect piracy has on society as a whole. I won’t lie, I have listened music, seen movies, used software and played games that were not paid for and properly licensed. As I grew older, got a stable income, it’s something that’s far less frequently occurring than in the past though. When I got my first real job I decided I could now afford to buy my games. So for the last 6 years or so I haven’t pirated any games for instance. This is something I think I share with a lot of people. Instead of fussing around with cracks that don’t always work and lock you out from being able to patch the game and not knowing if this stuff from shady people comes with any bonus viruses or trojans you simply decide that buying the game is a more attractive option. If you have a job, it’s not much money, and it just works. But if you’re a student who can barely afford your food and housing, you may see things differently. What do we gain on preventing this student from pirating a game? Most likely he wouldn’t buy the game anyway in most cases if that was the only option. While games are non-essential one could argue it’s not much of a loss either that he can’t play it. But what about other software? The first software I ever pirated was a compiler. A stack of floppy disks, RAR for DOS, and several rounds back and forth between home and school over a couple of days and the compiler was up and running. Imagine if I had not done that. Imagine I would not have spent endless hours coding at home on the pirated compiler. Would I be where I am today? Most likely not. But I was 16 years old, just realized what my biggest talent was, and needed the tools to evolve it. I had no money, nor were my parents particularly wealthy considering my we were 7 kids and a single income, and I really don’t think my parents would have understood how significant buying a compiler for me would have been. I’m not sure I fully understood that myself at the time. There have been studies showing the piracy has a positive effect on society as a whole. I don’t doubt that given my own personal experience.
In my opinion, the proper response from society is realizing that we have a new situation enabled by modern technology. Trying to fight off pirates is perhaps a good idea around the coast of Somalia, but I don’t think there’s any government response necessary at all for the pirates here at home. We need a new mindset however with greater freedoms for individuals and more content available for free. There’s a precedent in the form of libraries. You have copyrighted material available there that anyone can read. If you’re a writer, your work may very well be read by people at the library, and this could perhaps reduce the number of books sold. This has not been a disaster for writers. In fact, one could argue that writers have benefitted from it, as more people get exposed to your work. I admit it was a long time since I was in a library, but even back in my school days there were CDs available you could listen to there too. I didn’t ruin the music industry. I don’t know if computer games have made it into any libraries these days, but perhaps in the future you’ll be able to try them out there. Although in a sense, Internet is replacing the library these days. You don’t have to find the right book on the library shelves, but a few keywords in Google and the stuff you require may readily available.
What about the producers then? Well, new situations require new business models. Companies stuck in the past will go under. No amount of legal action will prevent that. If you’re producing music on CD, your days are numbered. Optical media for music in 2009, seriously? The only solid approach to dealing with piracy is ensuring that the paid for experience is better than the pirated one. This basic concept appears to be really hard to grasp for some of the old folks in some corporate headquarters. There’s no technical solution that will prevent piracy. If you’re considering sophisticated DRM schemes, realize that you’re primarily hurting your paying customers, not the pirates. Once the cracked version is out there it’s going to be stripped of all the limitations, whereas the paying customer will have to live with the restrictions you imposed on the software. And seriously, it’s 2009 and we live in a globalized world, and Internet knows no country borders. Releasing any form of digital product at different times in different regions is a fundamentally broken business model. You can either wait until the product is available in your region, or you can download it and enjoy right away. Congratulations, you just created an incentive for people to pirate. It’s not rocket science. If you’re an artist, instead of seeing it as a threat, use Internet as a tool for marketing. It may be harder to sell the music these days, but instead of whining over that, consider yourself the product and the music your marketing. Provide the music for free and earn your money from concerts, T-shirts and other fan material. The new reality is that people will copy your stuff, so instead of making that a problem, the future belongs to those who are able to take advantage it.
Jackis
Monday, April 20, 2009
Håller med Nadya.
As for the topic - Emil is right in the most important thing, that there is no hard edge, where we can say what is good and what is bad. As for me - as I'm growing up, I realize, that there can't exist one formal rule for all the situations. When theft is made - it's always evident, who is bad guy. But with getting some soft or music... Brrrr, music industry is not very good example, as for me, their chiefs, got used with mega-sales and mega-profits, just can't figure out, what's happening, making stupid licensing decisions and trying to close P2P networks and so on.
The more general soft become free - the less piracy would have exist. But specific soft must be well-paid.
ZerK
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Good post and good idea to have some blogs for non-coding topics.
sqrt[-1]
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
I was lucky enough to know someone doing programming in uni when I was growing up - so I could borrow his compiler. (not that you need to do this now days with all the free compilers out there)
I just hope the future is not all "internet activation" as I like playing old classic games. (and the servers will eventually go down) Perhaps there could be a patch released - say 5 years afterwards that allows these games to be played?
I sometimes think that all these "pirates" and hoarders will be a treasure trove of info for future archaeologists.
Mito
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Nice reading. May I "pirate" it, by copying and pasting it in forums? :o)
Cheers.
Humus
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Heh, sure.
James
Saturday, April 25, 2009
You say rape isn't theft, but a rapist steals a number of things from the victim (time, innocence, health, emotional/physical fatigue) are a few. I get your point but bad example.
ZaPP
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wow, I really enjoyed reading this. I totally agree with you, I often discuss topics like this with friends, since I pirate some stuff, and they do. Take for example a program like 3D studio Max. How are people supposed to learn the program if they can just use it for 30 days and then have to buy it for ~3500$? I mean, come on, they should give out studying licenses for like $50, which you just shouldn't use for any commercial work. Everyone who's really using it will buy it eventually anyway.
Furthermore, i think for example artists should put different licenses/copyrights on their music. They could give out their mp3's that are older than 1-2 years for free, since they don't sell a lot of those cd's anymore. People will listen to it and think it's great music, so they will be more likely to buy a new album when it's there.
Warshade
Saturday, May 2, 2009
The best analysis of the problem I've read so far, thanks for writing it down. Some aspects that might be worth considering aswell:
"crackers", the people who break copy protection, don't do it for profit. They do it for the challenge. This is a very important thing to realize that crackers are not into booty, in fact they are more like modern Robin Hood. Take from the rich to help the poor. Most people will find this a very noble concept and as long as there copy protections there will be crackers.
Only a minority of companies does demo and trial versions these days. Instead, they hire other companies to render CG teasers for their games, which in no way reflect the quality of the game they're promoting. (Customer feels cheated and has less of a problem cheating the company in return)
Yes this was already mentioned, but cannot stress it enough: Assuming 1000 illegal downloads equals a loss of 1000 sales is just stupid. A good number of people collects software/mp3 like "oldschool" people collect rocks, stamps, coins, perfume bottles, etc.
Another good chunk of the pirates are not of legal age to purchase the product in a shop. This is imho the biggest issue with piracy, because it gives minors an access point to M rated material.
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