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Piracy Is a Market Failure — Not a Legal One
Mr.Fork writes "Michael Geist, Canada's copyright law guru and law prof at the University of Ottawa, posted an interesting observation about the copyright issue of piracy. Canada's International Development Research Centre came to a conclusion that 'piracy is chiefly a product of a market failure, not a legal one' after a multi-year study of six relevant economies. 'Even in those jurisdictions where there are legal distribution channels, pricing renders many products unaffordable for the vast majority of the population. Foreign rights holders are often more concerned with preserving high prices in developed countries, rather than actively trying to engage the local population with reasonably-priced access. These strategies may maximize profits globally, but they also serve to facilitate pirate markets in many developed countries.'"
'Even in those jurisdictions where there are legal distribution channels, pricing renders many products unaffordable for the vast majority of the population.
Most, if not all, Western nations completely invalidate such studies given that music is extremely affordable and reasonably priced - and much cheaper than capitalistic pricing would otherwise allow.
Its a societal failure, not an economic failure. Period.
In Eastern-European countries average salaries are around $600, but there's a highly educated youth, with cheap internet access (around $30 a month), and a lot of free time, and relaxed copyright laws (suing warez downloaders is not legally possible; you can only sue those who make a profit while pirating ).
At the university where I studied, teachers expected students to use pirated Matlab, as they didn't had an academic license program, so they provided intranet warez copies.
At the same time there's strong opensource culture as well.
Firefox usage:
Poland: 42%
Slovakia: 41.2%
Hungary: 40.3%
Estonia:37.3%
(And my guess is that in China hacker groups are government supported.)
I pirate my TV content. Here's why:
- many shows are not available in my country (Canada)...
- When the shows do appear in canada, they are 1 or more seasons after originally aired.
- I enjoy discussing certain shows online with my friends in other countries
additionally:
- broadcast schedules are sporadic. ie: this season of BigBangTheory has not been regularly broadcast week after week after week. So I prefer to wait until the entire season has been broadcast and then watch the season as a whole.
- the broadcaster or local distributor often puts animated ads on the bottom of content, occasionally covering up subtitles or other text that is part of the content.
- my local cableco compresses the crap out of HD content so pirated content is of higher quality, less blotchy.
- pirated content has had the commercials removed.
- my cableco messes with the encoding so frequently that my capture methods aren't reliable. (firewire on DCT6200)
- a PVR from my cableco has limited disk space, can not accomodate additional disks added, and can not be backed up.
- I also don't have the flexibility to transfer recorded content from my cableco's PVR to my laptop so I can watch it on the plane.
HOWEVER, I pay my cableco monthly anyway. Most of the content I do pirate, is content that would have eventually recorded or at least have come into my home via coax on the cableco's network.. The rest of the content, (foreign content) is I guess truly being pirated but I probably can't buy the DVD's due to region code issues anyway so I'm not a lost sale there anyway.
Sure, it's a fairly weak justification but I feel morally 'ok' with my decisions.
I certainly agree that cannabis should be legal and that its legal position relative to alcohol and tobacco is ridiculous. I also agree that the general lack of rationality and open-mindedness surrounding that debate is frustrating. However, I don't think it's fair to blame just the gov't. California had an election this November on legalizing pot, and it failed by a significant margin. This is partly due to popular stupidity, and partly, I suspect, because the puritan types show up to elections more reliably than people who care about marijuana. If even California, the hippy state, can't muster a majority on that issue, how can we expect the rest of the US to do better? We're a democracy, after all. The federal gov't keeps a hypocritical drug policy around in part because a majority of Americans still seem to want it that way.