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Ars Examines Outlandish "Lost To Piracy" Claims and Figures
Nom du Keyboard writes "For years the figures of $200 billion and 750,000 jobs lost to intellectual property piracy have been bandied about, usually as a cudgel to demand ever more overbearing copyright laws with the intent of diminishing of both Fair Use and the Public Domain. Now ARS Technica takes a look into origin and validity these figures and finds far less than the proponents of them might wish."
How is this concept so very very very hard for certain people to understand.
"I'm going to take it and derive enjoyment from it, but it's not good so I won't pay for it."
It's hard to understand because it doesn't make sense if you've got a shred of ethics.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Anyone else find it humorous that a blatant ad hominem was modded to +5?
This is irrelevant, because you still don't have a right to something if you didn't plan on paying for it. Additionally, the people copying songs who you claim wouldn't buy it anyway aren't just copying it for themselves. P2P apps will share those downloaded chunks with millions of other "best friends" of that user, enabling piracy on astronomical levels. Your argument is one in a list of common arguments used to justify piracy and make people feel less guilty about it, but it doesn't change the fact that piracy is solely about going to PirateBay and looking for things to download so you don't have to go to a store and pay the creators for it. The ethical and moral issues run deep enough that pirates build entire mythologies around it involving cultural revolutions and civil disobedience, when the simple truth is that people are just freeloading because it's human nature to be greedy, and with no repercussions, the danger level is reduced in their minds so that it no longer feels like a legal or moral crime against artists. As much as we hated and mocked Lars Ulrich for talking about Napster...he was still right.
You're losing sales.
Let's go through the logic of that shall we?
Seems to make sense at first.
Problem with that logic is that it typically implies that every instance of copying equals an instance of lost sales which is clearly and demonstrably not true.
Typically implies? Nonsense, doubly so. There is no such thing as typically implying for a logical argument, nor does many people that pushes such arguments think or claim that every illegal copy is a lost sale. Instead, some fraction of the sales are lost. That is the argument you would have to refute.
Of course, network effects might mean more sales are generated, too, but that is beside the point, really. If you believe in copyright, you would say that giving away copies is a marketing ploy, which should be up to the rightholder, not some random Joe. If you, on the other hand, do not believe in copyright, that should apply to the GPL. Middle grounds exists, too, of course, such as shorter copyrights (my personal favorite).
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
"I'm going to do a little work on something and then just sit on my arse earning royalties in perpetuity whilst those lowly peons work hard every day and only get paid once for it." Very ethical.
Let's try a much much better analogy. You go to your local movie theater. Upon arriving you find that all 12 screens are showing Police Academy 27, at which point you decide that it's not worth the $10 admission to stare at Steve Guttenberg for 90 minutes. Then as you're walking home you pass a stand where some guy is handing out free copies of the movie to anyone who asks. You would not have paid the $10 admission, and the theater has empty seats (IOW, the theater's revenue is the same whether you take the offered copy or not) doesn't make it right to accept the copy without walking back to the movie theatre and handing them 10 dollars... wait this is more clearly the bullshit that your argument was...