Gabe Newell makes good points. Piracy is about price, but it's not just price. Piracy for me has been about cost / value decisions:
Useful software for < $50 on the App store? Buy.
Useful iPhone app for < $10? buy
Useful software I use rarely for $800 (Adobe CS5.5)? Pirate
Drm free music album for $10? buy
Movie rental I can't find on iTunes for < $5? Pirate
TV Show season on-demand without commercials? Netflix, or Pirate
Any time it's easier and relatively inexpensive to buy, I'll do that. Any time it's a pain to buy, obscenely expensive or a worse experience, I'll pirate.
I don't justify that behavior, but I've noticed I buy when it's easier, and I pirate when it's easier.
I'm pro pirating RIAA artist music, even if it's more difficult than buying through iTunes, since money paid to RIAA artists funds the RIAA (and corrupt artists like Lars).
I sort of feel the same way about the MPAA, but they were less obnoxious in the late 1990s/early 2000s (mainly due to technology not allowing video piracy to the same extent).
I also think all Disney content should be pirated as much as possible, due to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.
Why not buy instead of simply pirating? If you don't care about the industry and would prefer in the long run to see it die always, what's the difference?
This is the truly principled stand -- not because of any particular squeamishness about "piracy", but because piracy actually helps the RIAA labels to a significant degree by serving as free advertising.
Pirating Disney's works doesn't help anything much. It doesn't overcome the problem of not being able to use Disney works as the basis of new, derived works to expand and enrich our culture, which is the real loss where Disney films still being under copyright dozens of years later comes into play. I mean, if Sleeping Beauty was never made, the difference from a world where we aren't allowed to do anything interesting with it as inspiration for further works is not huge -- but the difference between living in that world where it exists but we can't really touch it and a world where we can create derived works to produce enduring culturally enriching works is tremendous.
Still . . . if people are going to acquire it anyway, it's better if they're not giving money to Disney eighty years after it was created thanks to copyright extension robbing us of our culture.
Check the publishing record label for the song, album, or band in question, then check that against the list of RIAA labels (I seem to recall finding such lists in simple, textual form). There's also RIAA Radar:
Do you pirate a Disney movie, then contact each and every person in the credits to pay them for their work, while avoiding giving money to the Disney corporation?
If you're not, you're just trying to justify your intellectual theft.
In addition to blasdel's excellent point, there's the simple fact that if the copyright extension act were not passed it would have entered the public domain (where it belongs so long after the fact), and there'd be no legal infrastructure for enforced revenue generation and royalty distribution, anyway.
. . . but yeah, a gaffer doesn't get royalties for the move on whose set he worked. You seem remarkably naive about how this stuff works.
Another big factor for me is knowing that my money is going directly into the pocket of the creator, or at least someone providing obvious value, instead of some opportunistic middleman. The former feels completely different than the latter -- like I am helping to make the world turn rather than just losing money to the void.
Except this isn't true either and I would suggest it's nothing but pandering.
People pirate because they're cheap, the amount of people that pirate because of DRM is tiny and anyone who takes part in these online communities (gaming.reddit for example) will be part of the small small group that pirates for "moral" reasons.
2DBoy, creators of World of Goo, a game that had 0 DRM and was available, as Gabe says, to EVERYONE without any conceivable inconvenience (beyond the need to purchase) reported over 90% piracy rate: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
Steam have very high purchase rates because it's a convenience, most definitely, Steam is a fantastic convenience and encourages me to purchase some games much like it encourages others, what it does not do is encourage pirates to purchase instead. It seems most people that share Gabes view are just hoping if they say it's true enough then bad DRM will go away...
Minecraft for example has huge piracy rates, yet it's available to anyone (same purchase requirements as Steam) and there's no real DRM, there's no conceivable justification for pirating Minecraft beyond "I don't want to pay" yet people do it...
Piracy rate is a bit of an odd number, because of how easy it is to pirate literally thousands of games and play them each for a small amount of time, when there is zero chance those people would've/could've bought all the games they pirated.
The Wolfire team suggests (http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy) that a better metric would be proportion of the gaming audience that pirates. For example, if 5% of the gaming audience pirates, but pirates download 50x as many games on average as legitimate users purchase, then it'll look like >70% of users pirate games, when the real number is 5%.
Don't forget that many people with licenses eventually end up "pirating" the software they use. It is usually just much easier to download an ISO than to attempt to rummage around and find your CDs and then rummage around and find your manual for the key. Also, the pure version of the software usually installs crap and/or bloatware. Additionally, I will sometimes be at a different location where the CDs are not available but where I need to use the software. This even holds true with many digital download platforms (but not Steam) -- they will make you create a username and password, they will make you jump through a bunch of hoops to download something you've already bought, which is complete BS and in that case I just download a torrent and end up using the "pirated" version even though I paid for the software.
I have a license for WOG and have downloaded it from a torrent at least twice, for instance.
Really, there are two kinds of pirates: those who pirate because they're cheap, and those who pirate for these other reasons. I agree that the former category well outweighs the latter, but they're also completely ignorable when it comes to figuring out how to sell your software. The "cheap" contingent will never pay for your software.
Those who pirate for other reasons, while they may be a small proportion of pirates overall, can be a large proportion of potential customers. These are the people who don't buy your game because the pirated version actually works better. If you can provide a better experience through legitimate channels then you can get their money.
In short: piracy really is two separate and mostly unrelated phenomena when it comes to this question. People who pirate purely to avoid paying don't care about this stuff, but neither should software publishers care about them.
Here's an interesting experiment done by indie game developer SoS for Black Friday: he released a bundle of 13 indie games for 1$, available for just one day. He got some traction thanks to Notch, who tweeted that the games were interesting and easily worth 1/13th of a dollar each.
1. download
2. purchase - this step is optional
3. play
unspecified 4: purchase if you haven't, still optional
I personally didn't even download them so I can't say anything about the quality of the product, I just thought it was somewhat relevant to the discussion, since SoS published real time stats during the operation. That's pretty much ideal conditions in my book for indie publishing, so the stats are actually worth something:
4207 downloads and $276 earnings within a single day. 6.5% of the downloaders purchased the product, regardless of whether they liked what they saw.
I'm not sure what to make of that. On one hand, having 90+% of people download but not buy seems awful. On the other hand, this process is essentially the shareware model even if it doesn't use that word, in which case a 6.5% conversion rate is extremely good.
If you get fifteen times as many people downloading as otherwise would have, and 90% of the people who download haven't paid for it (yet), you still come out ahead. There's nothing awful about a business model like that, period. Never judge a business model by a single metric without context like "90+% of people download but not buy".
> the amount of people that pirate because of DRM is tiny
This depends on the DRM and the software. Software which has high international demand but is region-locked to specific countries will be pirated because of the DRM at rates that sometimes dwarf "freeloading" pirates.
I agree that Gabe is pretty much just pandering, but in the end, DRM doesn't really help piracy rates. Maybe for an immediate period after release, which is desirable in some circumstances as a matter of convenience, but that's it.
The real question is whether the piracy rate is indicative of the loss of sales due to piracy, which is clearly contested in some situations. Would Mojang profit more if Minecraft piracy was -- hypothetically speaking -- impossible? Probably a little bit, but a lot of users will look for something else to pirate, not roll their eyes and say "ugh well I guess I have to buy it now".
Many Minecraft license holders started out as Minecraft pirates. It's somewhat common to "try before buy" via piracy and I don't know if I am really opposed to it -- yes, it opens the door to freeloaders, but even in the case of freeloaders you generally get at least free word-of-mouth publicity out of it. Digital piracy comes at no real cost to anyone; you're not taking stock out of the hands of one who bought it wholesale, you're not removing the copy of one who purchased retail, you're not even using the developer's bandwidth. The only adverse effect comes on the pysches of the money-minded MBAs that falsely correlate each download with a lost sale when in fact many are convenience downloads from persons already entitled to a copy of the software or pre-purchase "trials". This is not true in every case, of course, but it is true in many cases.
I suspect it's true in the NH bubble, but I strongly suspect that very few pirates then go on to buy the product.
When I've wanted to give some money to the author of a book I've downloaded it's really easy; I just go to a store (or Amazon, where buying stuff is really easy) and buy any book from that author on the same publisher. But for digital stuff it's often harder, with annoying websites, weird cart checkout systems, a stupid bit of credit card security theatre thrown in, some spammy email checkboxes to remember to click (or not click), etc. And this is when you want to buy it - that's too much friction for most pirates.
> I suspect it's true in the NH bubble, but I strongly suspect that very few pirates then go on to buy the product.
I think that in other conditions where pirates never go on to buy something they've pirated (gawd, "pirate" is such an awful term for this -- there are no eyepatches and cutlasses involved), they just wouldn't fucking buy it in the first place if they couldn't pirate it.
> But for digital stuff it's often harder, with annoying websites, weird cart checkout systems, a stupid bit of credit card security theatre thrown in, some spammy email checkboxes to remember to click (or not click), etc. And this is when you want to buy it - that's too much friction for most pirates.
That's a bad business model, and in no way contradicts the notion that people who pirate would like to buy later a lot of the time. Reduce the friction in the purchase process, and you'll make more money. It's almost tautological. Keeping the hurdles to purchase high then blaming the results on piracy is completely asinine.
I'd like to address your WoG example. Firstly there are two types of pirates. Those that don't have the money to ever buy, those that have money. The first (and arguably largest group) will NEVER be your customer. These are people that can barely afford their internet. If there was no piracy these people would never get your game. Second group consists of two subgroups - those that might pay and those that wont. I'd argue that the first group is larger based on examples below. Also there are some transitions from people that can't pay into a group that might pay (e.g. a student gets a high paying job and can afford books/software that he pirated before).
However they are not a crux of my concerns. I think the value of piracy is a "word of mouth" advertisements. Even if only people that can't afford your game and pirate it there is going to be boon for your business (e.g. poor kid might have someone who is a bit richer and will buy the game to show off) if they spread good word about it.
"First is Monthy Python. A while back, the Monty Python team made a shedload of their sketches freely available in high quality on their own YouTube channel, hoping that as a result people would buy more DVDs. According to this widely linked story, the experiment has been not just successful, but wildly, crazily so. They’re reporting that sales of Monty Python DVDs at Amazon have increased by 23,000% — that’s 231-fold — since they made all that material available on Youtube."
(Neil Gaiman on books he published for free)
"Then I started to notice that two things that seemed much more significant. One of which was that places where I was being pirated -- particularly Russia (where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading it out into the world) I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. And then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies.
"That's really all this is. It's people lending books. And you can't look on that as a lost sale.... What you're actually doing is advertising. You're reaching more people. You're raising awareness. And understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web was doing is allowing people to hear things, allowing people to read things, allowing people to see things they might never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that's an incredibly good thing." "
With Minecraft in particular, I'd hypothesis that much of the piracy is done by under 18s who don't want to try and justify the use of a parent's credit card or paypal.
I'm not under 18, but personally refuse to use Paypal on the grounds of not wanting to support criminal activity (see Wikileaks blockade for the beast example), and really it's the same for CC. I'd probably have bought Minecraft ages ago if they'd support payment through other means, for example, PaySafeCard.
But anyways, I generally think it's pretty nonsensical to imply that piracy is a question of a maturity. Young people might simply have other reasons to pirate.
I don't believe for a second any of the published piracy rates for any app/game.
The reason I don't is that I have seen how easy it is to trigger these kinds of errors by mistake (or from my personal philosophy of assuming malicious intent until proven wrong) and how beneficial it is to the creators of the programs.
How many people do you think have a credit card? I know a LOT of pirates (here in South America), and most of them fit this profile:
- very low or no income
- no credit card
- lots of spare time
- cheap internet connection
Would they pirate World of Goo? Yes. Have they paid for a game? Rarely, they buy CDs or DVDs or game cartridges on cash, but the originals are outrageously expensive for the average consumer here.
Is it an excuse? No. Would they start purchasing once they archieve a decent income level? It's hard to say, but I'm inclined to think they won't.
In my case, I now have a decent income level, but I don't have any spare time to speak of, so I don't purchase videogames (anything past a U$ 2 app on Android).
Same thing happened with Sins of the Solar Empire, no DRM, tons of piracy, so much so that they had to block out pirated copies from their online servers, the load was totally disproportionate to sold copies.
Exactly, people are forever finding excuses for their behaviour AND most people want something for [near] nothing which is a flawed and lazy idea (GET RICH NOW! GET FIT NOW!) or they want to do something without having to deal with the consequences/results/effects.
This is especially for me because I have 3 computers which don't have an optical drive, things that are becoming increasingly irrelevant thanks to the internet. I share a single USB DVD drive amongst the three computers; it's a pain in the ass to move the drive and find the disc.
Even worse is when the DRM software tells me to uninstall my virtual disc drive which isn't related to the game at all. I use it to make a copy and store it on my HDD so I can use the image rather than the physical thing.
I think it's probably closer to "Pirates have heterogenous preferences", in a way where motivating X% of pirates who could be convinced by either a) convenient purchasing or b) risk of discovery or c) stick-it-to-the-man rhetoric or d) tribal loyalty or e) exclusivity of desired content or f) feature enhancements like online play... could all be viable strategies at making money.
Of course, sooner or later all the important code will be on the server (again!) and we'll chuckle that this was ever an issue.
Valve does a lot of things that gamers love. They make universally acclaimed games, and they often offer them for absurdly good prices. They also managed to defeat piracy of their games with a platform that has proven surprisingly tough to crack. I remember when Steam used to garner almost as much hate as others' DRM, but its been several years. My friends used to be very vocal about hating how much memory it used and that you couldn't move it from one harddrive to another or back it up. Those things were eventually solved though. I wonder if popular opinion favoring valve is more due to these being solved, the fact that steam has been around so long and we got used to it, or the goodwill garnered from good games and/or good offers on games.
Steam used to be an additional thing you had to install/run in order to play the game you already bought on DVD from the local game store. Now it's a service you use to buy games (often at ridiculously low prices) and automatically download them. That's what changed popular opinion of Steam.
Sorry, but it still is an additional thing you have to use/run/install when you buy a boxed game from a B&M store. I found this out only after buying one such game. This is the reason I cracked it and then vowed to never buy another one that does.
I haven't tried to crack Steam games, but I don't have any difficulty pirating Steam exclusive releases.
Admittedly the few times I did pirate Steam games it was about price (as in I didn't want to commit the money while not knowing anything about the game, some really great titles like Super Meat Boy are a bit more expensive than you'd expect, but are absolutely worth it if you happen to like the genre). Steam is almost infinitely preferable to a pirate torrent, lacking only a sane download manager. But otherwise I consistently get faster downloads with less annoyance and I get nice integration with multiplayer and my friends' gaming.
When I pirate content, it's for one of a few reasons:
* The content isn't available in the US yet. Being a big fan of British television, this is probably the biggest reason.
* I want to watch a TV show and the full series isn't available instantly on Netflix or Hulu. I don't bother with the hassle of mailing back DVDs anymore. I suspect this is really a ploy to get me to buy the DVDs. Sorry, but I'm not buying all 7 seasons of House for $15-$30 a season.
* My options are: 1) Pay and get something later, or 2) don't pay and get something now. This is why I don't buy shows off of iTunes.
Ultimately, I doubt my motivations are much different from most people who pirate that would otherwise be paying customers.
Part of the problem is ignoring why consumers download digital content through unofficial channels, and instead call any such download a case piracy. Rather these are holes in the business models of media providers, as such they're only losing money because they're not offering a product that suits the consumer. (Thus falsely claiming that they have lost a sale.)
For example a consumer may be downloading the content for the following reasons:
- Trialing
- Replacing lost/broken content
- Replacing content that is outdated VHS/DVD/Bluray/HDDVD/Cassette/Vinyl, you name it.
- Countering simulated geographical boundaries
- Getting around censorship or getting the uncensored version
- The media is simply not available (e.g. special editions, or event recordings.)
- Dealing with maligned DRM schemes
- Updating to a version of the software which isn't buggy as hell (adobe)
- Acquiring media that is no longer in distribution/supported by the author.
- Dongle keys are either incompatible, broken or taking up a free port on the computer.
In many examples here the consumer was never likely to buy or repurchase content, it's no money lost, and often saving the company needless harassment.
Here are reasons why people circumvent paying:
- They don't have the money to begin with
- The price is unreasonably high (microsoft learned this with office, when will adobe follow)
- The content is DRM'd, or locked to a particular system. (e.g. streaming services.)
- There is no way to purchase the content legally (regional or otherwise)
- The company has a monopoly on a file format or operating system. (many feel if they're forced to use something they shouldn't have to pay for it too.)
- The media does not present a value offering (differing to a high price, i.e. software that is known to be buggy, or is purposefully single use.)
- Exploitation of consumers (buy our product and we'll spam you forever or require your software to check with our servers every time you use it.)
As you can see there is a gamut of reasons why people turn to non-official channels, and the motive is not always greed or theft, often these are replacing other legal methods of acquiring the media.
What Steam, the iTunes music/app/book stores, amazon and Google(heck even allofmp3 knew it) have all realised is that removing artificial limitations on digital content allows consumers to buy digital content to satisfy their various requirements before even looking up a torrents site. It's not only easier and less risky (malware/getting sued), but it's usually faster, supported and reasonable.
Just to add to your wonderful list of reasons for downloading:
- Getting a version of the product in the local language. (e.g. software, for which there's no official translation, and which is unofficially localized by "pirates").
Similarly,
- Getting a version of the product in the original language. (e.g. Hollywood movies in English).
but this is already covered by "the media is not available".
One huge source of piracy, I suspect, is children who have no income and no way to buy anything without negotiating with their parents. For them, piracy is about independence.
When I was researching for my micropayments startup, I found out that not only children, but young women as well, don't like asking their parents or couples for the credit card / paypal account for online purchases.
I've run across quite a few people who actually buy a DRM-infested copy of something to "pay the creator" (even though the creator often gets screwed by the people actually collecting revenues), then "pirate" a DRM-free copy that isn't a hassle to use (listen, watch, play, whatever). I frankly wish they'd skip the purchasing step in most cases, because the behavior of the vendors is often so egregiously bad they should probably be locked up for racketeering rather than paid real money.
My own reaction to horribly restrictive business models, though, is to simply not engage them, to the extent I'm motivated to do anything at all. I'd rather not even advertise for restricted content by telling people I have a copy and like it, regardless of where I got it.
That may be true to some degree but I think for younger people especially piracy is a simple act of frugality. A crime with no perceivable victim that saves you a fair amount of money. Kind of a twisted over entertained version of stealing bread to feed your family. It's not so much that they don't want to pay. They simply don't have the money for all the things they want so they prioritize. The old MPAA tagline of 'Would you download a car?' always made me think about having a free downloaded car and a wallet full of non-car-payment money to go with it. Put into that context it's very alluring. For some people who really likes music, movies and games the money saved via piracy could actually be most of a monthly car-payment. In that sense you can indirectly download a car by saving money.
> Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company.
I think there's an impedance mismatch between this guy's definition of success and that of a lot of other people engaged in business models involving materials covered by copyright. Most of the idiots in these industries think of "success" as "having the most" -- having more of the market than a competitor, having money from as many people as possible, and so on. They are so focused on a comparative measure of "success" that they are probably more willing to operate at a loss than to let anyone "get away" with enjoying what they make without paying for it or to let a competitor operate at less of a loss than them. Gabe Newell, on the other hand, seems to measure success by making enough profits for everyone to benefit, getting people involved in the industry as customers, and having a sustainable business model that is not dependent on the forebearance of the vagaries of momentary changes in circumstance. His company is working on developing a business model that is largely independent of copyright, and is enjoying great success as a result; everyone else is trying to use copyright to punish anyone who isn't buying a product through official channels, including those who are buying a different product instead, and some people who are buying the product, because to them "success" is more about who's prevented from doing what they don't want than about providing value in exchange for a comfortable level of revenue generation that isn't likely to dry up tomorrow.
I think saying that piracy isn't about price is overly simplistic. Computer performance is about CPU and RAM and efficient code and storage media seek time and a lot of other things, but in a given circumstance seek time might e the bottleneck; I think that in this case what he has identified is the fact that service and delivered value constitute the bottleneck that creates a piracy "problem" for vendors, and that price is not the major bottleneck in most cases. That's different from price not being "the problem", but it's close enough for government (or journalistic) work.
Some people pirate simply because they can. Most people will never use 75% of what Photoshop can do yet they will pirate it when Gimp could serve their needs just as well. They simply collect software because it is there.
Others, I feel, pirate from a sense of entitlement. You do not have to look very far to find people complaining about people making profits while talking on their iPhone while carrying a laptop. Where "World of Goo" is concerned some Linux users think all software should be free.
Side note: Notice how most media outlets will tell you pirated software is always full of viruses? In my experience most distributors/hacker groups take great offense to saying their releases contain viri.
Some people just don't believe in so called "Intellectual Property", or don't believe that the current IP regime fulfills its supposed goal of "promoting the development of the arts and sciences".
"""Russia is now about to become our biggest market in Europe"""
I have read things like that a few times recently. Since when is Russia considered a part of Europe? They have this small Exclave in Europe, but really the bulk of Russia is Asian. I mean, you could probably hide Europe somewhere in Siberia and no one would notice!
Saying that Russia is about to become the biggest market in Europe is like saying that the US is about to become the biggest market in Ohio. It just doesn't make sense.
I don't justify that behavior, but I've noticed I buy when it's easier, and I pirate when it's easier.