Instead of getting into a shouting match over whether piracy is or isn’t stealing, here’s an interesting story.
Bill Gates made an interesting comment regarding software piracy in the 1990s. At that time, software piracy was rampant in China, and Microsoft’s Windows operating system was one of the most pirated products. In response to this situation, Gates remarked that if people were going to pirate software, he would prefer they pirate Microsoft’s software.
His rationale was strategic: if people in China became accustomed to using Microsoft’s Windows and Office software, they would be more likely to continue using these products in the future, including in business environments where legitimate software licenses are more commonly purchased.
(Whether things worked out as he envisioned is a slightly different matter.)
> (Whether things worked out as he envisioned is a slightly different matter.)
Well, actually they did, at least in ex-USSR, and I think in Eastern Europe too.
After not ever having a single legitimate license in 1990s and early 2000s (and being laughed upon if you had one), by late 2000s Microsoft business took off handsomely.
the same goes for most professional software, like the adobe suite. if people pirated, it's because they're not professionals yet. once they are, they're more likely to buy the software they're used to and not the competition.
Piracy isn't exactly a zero-sum game, there is a cost associated with it. Pretending piracy doesn't hurt revenue is a shaky ground to stand on; now whatever it hurts the artists revenue is a different question, with interesting arguments for how or why modern copyright might not provide the intended outcomes.
It's not even as straightforward as that. Most serious studies on the topic have demonstrated that piracy not only does not lead to lost sales, but in fact it leads to increased sales instead.
It's how companies like Microsoft or Adobe could grow and gain uncontested monopolies. Because, due to piracy, price was no longer a good enough differentiator. And it's why "Linux on the desktop" never happened.
There aren't many studies on this topic and the available ones are bullshit, as they don't take into account second order effects of piracy, one of which being the rise of streaming with DRM, which also concentrates power in the hands of a few Big Tech companies.
Piracy is one of the biggest reasons for why we have monopolies. The phenomenon is now repeated with ad blockers. And the irony of the situation is that people point at monopolies to justify piracy or the use of ad blockers.
Indeed, just because some big corps can handle the lost revenue in return for pricing competitors out and exposure, doesn't mean piracy doesn't impact revenue.
Going from "big corp can handle lost revenue in return for market dominance and exposure" to "it doesn't hurt revenue" is absurd.
I would assume, that this is partly because one can get familiar with the pirated product and then many people decide it is worth buying or supporting the creator. Or spread the word about the existence of the product.
He made hundreds of thousands of dollars from those streams, “twelve dollars” was ironic understatement about his dissatisfaction with the compensation Spotify pays artists.
Life isn't fair. If I didn't like a movie, I can't unsee it and get my money and time back. That's just a fact of life. In the same way, people can share content since physics doesn't prevent it. We should just accept these limitations of how we can control each other.
I think this is reasonable stand. Piracy does affect revenue, but probably quite a bit less than anyone makes it out to. I believe most that pirate would not have paid in first place, either because they don't value it high enough or they do not have enough money to pay for it.
Not that actions of those selling does not likely contribute much more to loss of revenue, mainly by making content unavailable. Availability or pricing compared to product is often sub-optimal.
Every study done on the matter shows piracy correlates with sales. If we are to stop pretending, we should start with ending the myth that piracy hurts sales. There is no evidence whatsoever of that.
> Calling BS on that because no one is going to pirate unknown movie/song/software.
I've done it. I'd bet that most people who have pirated anything have.
If you were around for the Napster days you'd know that people would often download things they'd never heard of before and had no idea if they'd like it or not (and that was when it could take many hours, even days, for a single album to download!). Piracy is a great way to try out new things. Napster led to an increase in CD sales as people were discovering new artists and music they'd never heard on the radio or MTV (https://www.zdnet.com/article/study-napster-boosts-cd-sales/)
The objection to P2P file sharing was never about money. It was about power and control. It was about gatekeeping. The RIAA wants to decide what you can and can't listen to and what is popular. They don't want their new artists/albums to have to compete with everything ever released. They know piracy would increase sales. They don't want to give up the control over our culture and they don't want the internet to cut them out as useless middlemen. With computers and the internet we don't need them for distribution or advertising. We can do it all without them.
Perhaps the gatekeepers you describe are the same ones who pushed the term 'piracy' this way; to describe any human who copies chunks of 1s and 0s they feel protective of.
Meanwhile, real pirates really steal real physical goods from real people.
Copiers and pirates are not the same thing, not even close.
A lot of the music I listened to in college was because friends gave me copies. Then we'd end up going to shows together, and would even buy CDs, which we'd promptly copy among each other. In fact, sharing was probably the only way for lesser known bands to find an audience at the time since they obviously weren't on the radio.
People are going to pirate unknown movie/song/software because no seller is going to give it shelf space, making it all but unavailable to the general public through 'normal' channels.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I often download obscure games I see on steam to see if they’ll actually hook me or not. I pay for what I actually am able to sink my teeth in to.
The vast majority of movies I download are me going out on a limb. In some cases I’m subscribed to a service they’re available on. I still download them though because I’d prefer to use my own player on my own terms. You can’t even get higher than 720p on Netflix on PC without using edge. Horseshit. It is also not infrequent that there is no way for me to pay someone to watch it online. I’m not going to buy a used copy of a DVD/blu-ray to watch something I’m interested in. Ain’t nobody making money off a used copy. Is resale of used media ethical?
It's more like proofing / sampling: maybe I want to pay your company to print my magazine, but first I want to see if your printing process gives good results. So you print me a copy for free; if I like it, I'll pay for the real thing.
Or when you're at a stall and they give you a bit of cheese to try, or some bit of cake. They know that, if you like it and you can afford it, you'll buy more. The costs to them are small, and the return is worth it. This is just trading-101.
Free labor abused on a systemic scale is completely different. It's like I asked you for a cheese sample as big as what I need to serve a party of 50 people I'm paid to organise.
Artists can make money during live concerts instead. As it has always been. The artist that writes stuff once and reaps benefits forever is a horrible heresy.
What about artists who are not performing artists? Not many people are going to pay to watch someone with just basic guitar or piano skills and an ordinary singing voice write a song, no matter how great the song turns out to be.
They might later pay to watch and listen to excellent instrumentalists and singers perform that song, so concerts might work for them. Presumably the composer can charge those performers...but how much?
You usually can't figure out the worth of a song beforehand, so if it is going to be a one-time upfront payment from the performers to the composer it is hard to figure out the right price.
You can wait until after the song has been released and see much the concert tour makes and how many people buy copies of the song or listen to it on streaming services and that gives you a good idea of the worth of the song.
Upfront you'd have to agree on how the worth is calculated and how the price is calculated from that. But this is then going to depend on how much revenue the song brings and so sounds an awful lot like a royalty arrangement, just with a lump payment at the end of the license instead of more frequent smaller payments along the way.
> Piracy isn't exactly a zero-sum game, but there is a cost associated with it.
There is zero cost associated with piracy. Zero.
At best, there's an expectation of profit that's not met. To argue that, you need to show how copying a file translates to a potential sale being converted to a no-sale, and there are plenty of evidence that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted work drives demand up.
> Pretending piracy doesn't hurt revenue is a shaky ground to stand on
Go ahead and show exactly where copying a file hurts anyone. You're trying to pass off your personal assertions as axioms, but it's on you to prove that copying a file without the consent of someone hurts anyone.
Go ahead.
> now whatever it hurts the artists revenue is a different question
If anything, artists are the least impacted counterpart as they literally get paid a small fraction of the whole income.
At all the public libraries I've used they only let me checkout something if the total number of copies already checked out is less than the number of copies the library has licenses for. If the number checked out is not under the number of licenses they make me wait until one of the checked out copies is returned.
That's still no different from the content creator's point of view than a non-sale or pirate. The practical limitations of libraries is immaterial to the fact I can view content without paying the creator anything. Carving out some logical exception for content pirates is ludicrous. They're functionally no different than non-customers or library patrons.
The physical limitations of libraries are immaterial. Patrons are non-customers of the content publisher. They're doing the same exact thing pirates are doing, experiencing some piece of content without paying the original publisher. The same thing as if they watched a movie on broadcast TV, listened to the radio, or bought that content second hand.
If you're going to argue against piracy you're also arguing against libraries. The differences between a pirate and a library are mostly statutory.
There is thousands of hours of paid work to produce any kind of software or game. It doesn’t matter if the end result is burned into a physical disk or not. What’s of value here is not the 1 cent piece of plastic but the content.
When you copy content that has a cost, if the company is not offering it to you, what do you call your action ?
I mean, really, you spent 5 years working on a game with no salary. Then a day before launch day someone just makes a copy of it and distributed it « for free » in the internet. How are you going to make a salary out of it ?
Games are always pirated if they are even a little bit popular. I work in the games industry, and games I worked on are always pirated, but the more popular they are, the more copies will be sold legitimately.
People make two choices when they pirate - moral, and economical. If economically they cannot afford the game, they weren't going to pay. If morally they are against paying for a game (like if the game company is associated with suicides, etc), they weren't going to pay. There are some people that will pay if piracy isn't available, but not that many.
Anyways, after the income goes around, and all the exec, upper management, and publisher salaries are paid, the piracy or lack of it probably makes about a $1 difference to my weekly earnings. I put a lot of artistic and creative effort, blood, sweat, and tears into it. If it costs me $1 to make people enjoy it, so be it.
In the AAA games industry, piracy is a thing. People talk about it. And most people have only very mild things to say about it, except for execs. Execs make a disproportionate amount of money off games for what they do, and they do kinda have a lot of time to sit on their hands sometimes, so they can fight these piracy battles, die on these piracy hills.
My example was a illustrate a point. It could be a game or a productivity software, movies, music anything.
You can find any reason to steal, economical, hunger etc the point I making is that the motivation to make a copy does not make it legal.
Do we tolerate some form of theft for moral or other reasons ? Yes sure. But because I, as an individual, have my own reasons not to pay for something and decide to make a copy of it, that does not transforms my action to a perfectly legal thing.
Maybe we can’t do anything about software being copied but that doesn’t magically make laws and IP disappear with it and makes copying software legal ?
I was answering to the comment « nothing is taken ». Because the content is the result of an effort from other people being paid, the content has value. The fact that we can make infinite copies of it makes a single copy worthless because it’s not being burnt into a piece of plastic ?
There are moral principles, and legal principles. Legally, you are right. But the moral perception of piracy is shifting, and broadly speaking, this entire debate is in the moral/philosophical realm.
Legal systems ultimately enshrine the human morality in law. Common law - through case law, civil law - by committees that the legislators consult, religious law - by morality described in legal texts. We're not talking about any of it though. We are talking about day-to-day things, like what does it mean to steal, what kind of consequences it has, are these consequences real or supposed, and other such things.
Law is generally blind to externalities of an action. An action itself is legal, illegal, or undefined in law. We're not in this domain if we talk about the consequences of piracy or how someone might feel about it. We are having a conversation on morals.
Shifting morals will eventually shift the law, of course.
I completely agree with you.
It’s shifting but we cannot consider it as already shifted.
Some comments are going into this direction of the whole debate behind us and laws not applying anymore. Our feeling about it has changed but my country can still sue me if I make a copy without respecting the terms of the seller.
Maybe tomorrow a global business model will emerge and the whole notion of possession will kind of disappear because everything will be a subscription.
Or maybe we will pay a flat fee to whatever organization and use anything as much as we want and copies will be worthless because they won’t be sold individually anymore
That sense of the word “take” is fairly consistently used of physical things, where you are depriving another of possession (with or without permission).
—⁂—
(Just for fun, The Devil’s Dictionary (not a work to be taken particularly seriously):
> TAKE, v.t. To acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.
I quite like that way of putting it because it’s the megacorporations that are the pirates when they steal their DRM content back, because they are acquiring it from you so that you can’t have it, by force if they have to but they prefer stealth.)
