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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.'"
Are they sure the current strategy actually maximises profit?
The flow my girlfriend went through recently when trying to watch a season of a TV show:
1. Checked to see if it was available digitally on standard channels like Netflix and Hulu (it wasn't).
2. Checked Amazon, where it was available digitally, but only per-episode, at a ridiculous price like $3/ep (making it over $100 for the season, more expensive than on DVD).
3. Downloaded torrent.
She was more than willing to buy it, but it has to be easy and reasonable or "other" methods of distribution win.
That is exactly my case. Let me use ebooks as an example. I always payed for my ebooks. From Amazon, Fictionwise and Ebooks.com. Then, one not-so-beautiful day, "export" restrictions started applying to ebooks. Most publishers would simply not allow those shops to sell me ebooks, because I was on a different country. I even talked to 2 of the authors, and both were aware of this, not happy, and trying to fight these measures, to no avail. As a corroborating note, these specific books were not available in my country, through any channels. Be it physical books, translated or not, or ebooks. Harper Collins is the leader of this "geographic restrictions", as far as I can tell. Well Mr. Publisher, I went out of my way to try getting these books legally. I contacted the shops, contact you and contacted the authors. For reference, everyone but YOU responded. Everyone pointed fingers at you.
Exactly! Piracy is a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Don't bet on it. All the science we have has told us that Cannabis is at least as safe as any drug in our medicine cabinets. Yet we have been fighting a war against it for decades.
You can't use facts to win a debate the government isn't even willing to have.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
*I know there are a lot of people who do not like this term, but I am not currently aware of any other term which brings together all of the various products that can be lumped together under "intellectual property".
That's because they're disparate constructs with completely different purposes that should not be lumped together.
Trademarks exist to protect the public so they know what they're buying.
Copyrights exist to provide incentive for creators to share their works through a guarantee of a monopoly on copies.
Patents exist to convince businesses to share valuable processes from which everyone can benefit.
why not buy the DVDs?
More likely she wanted it *now* and decided that piracy was a permanent solution rather than the temporary 3-5 day solution while her shiny DVDs shipped from Amazon.
Piracy is just the new socially acceptable temper tantrum. Individual consumers (as opposed to collective market forces) have decided *they* get to decide the price and medium and if they don't get their way, they'll just take it for free.
Fine, pirate it, right after you process your order with Amazon. That way you don't have wait to enjoy what you now legally own. Or, why don't you write a check for a price you're willing to pay per episode and send it to the company as a donation?
I'm guessing you and your girlfriend are perfectly content not paying anything ever because the company dared to not have it your way right now.
Work Safe Porn
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.