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The Futility of the Ongoing Piracy War
In Nick Bilton's article, he compares the battle of content owners versus pirates to a game of Whac-A-Mole, and concludes that "Sooner or later, the people who still believe they can hit the moles with their slow mallets might realize that their time would be better spent playing an entirely different game." Whether it's Apple's iTunes Music Store, or Valve's Steam gaming service, both retail services and the content providers that publish via those services, have been able to make some tidy profits off their content, even despite the presence of Megaupload, The Pirate Bay, Archie, Usenet, local dial-up BBSes, and any countless other number of ways that people have been pirating for years. Right now, the powers that be, the MPAA and the RIAA, are fighting the same losing war that has been fought for decades already. Indulge me for a moment, as I engage in CowboyNeal story time, and tell a nostalgic tale of a bygone era.
As a kid, I was lucky enough to have my own computer. While the idea of the Internet was long way off yet, those of us in the neighborhood did know everyone else in the neighborhood that owned a computer, because that was how we got software. It wasn't uncommon for any of us kids to throw a box of floppy disks into our backpacks and bike over to someone else's house to share software, so that we could get new games and other software. We didn't set out to do this to rob anyone, it was just how we got by. Growing up in the 1980s, my allowance was $1/week, which was low even by 1980s standards. The average price for a computer game was around $25 to $35 for a new release. Even while supplanting my allowance with whatever I earned from doing work around the neighborhood or picking up pop cans, it took a long time to save up for a game. So, I and most other kids did the only logical alternative: we pirated software. None of us even owned a modem yet in those days, but we all knew someone who knew someone who did, and eventually cracked games would make their way from the BBS scene into our hands, and give us new games without having to pay for them. What I should note here, before all of us kids look like greedy little thieves, is that when I did eventually save up my money, I would still inevitably spend it on the software that I wasn't able to get via pirating. I still remember saving up the money to purchase the original John Madden Football. It cost $32, and came with printed playbooks to help players choose their plays, and most relevant to this article, a decoder wheel which contained a plethora of codes, that needed to be entered before a game could start. It was essentially an early version of DRM, because while the decoder wheel wasn't immune to piracy, without either a photocopy of the innards of the wheel or the wheel itself, there would be no kickoff. While the rudimentary decoder-wheel-based DRM had been defeated, that cracked copy hadn't found its way to any of us in the neighborhood yet. This scenario could be repeated for any number of 8-bit computer games. So while still a pirate, I was still giving the computer software industry all of my money — what little there was of it.
Now, let's go back to the present, and address Nick Bilton's "different game." What the industry still hasn't realized after all these years is that there's not just pirates and legal purchasers. Even people who pirate the same piece of software may do so for vastly different reasons. A good share of them are like me as a kid, pirating because they simply cant afford to buy it legitimately. Then there's the anti-DRM crowd, who refuse to pay for anything that has any sort of DRM involved with it. There's also the "try-before-I-buy" folks who are willing to pay, but they're frugal with their money and don't want to buy something they'll regret later. Some people who pirate content do so simply because it's easier than paying for it. Last are the people who pirate just for the sake of pirating. This last group is the one that no law, no PR junket, and no DRM will ever stop. They will always "win," if winning means pirating. It's also key to understand that a single person can belong to one or more of these demographics, or invent their own reasons for whether they will pirate or not. Maybe someone pirates a game, then later decides he want to play it online or that he likes it and want to support it. Suddenly a pirate is now a paying customer.
Lode Runner came with 150 levels, but my pirated copy crashed after level 33. Eventually I bought my own copy so that I could see the rest of the game. Okay, honestly, I never saw all of Lode Runner, but I still got to play level 34 and onward. After a year of owning John Madden Football, Electronic Arts mailed me a disk with the next year's teams on it. They didn't continue that practice very long, and started releasing a new game ever year instead.
The industry can't ever truly win this war. The best they can hope for is to curb as much of it as they can. Services like iTMS and Steam are able to corral the people who just want easy access. Humble Indie Bundles and GOG.com work for people who want DRM-free games. But even these only address small pieces of the larger pie. As referenced in the NYT article, what about people who want to watch "Game of Thrones" without buying cable or some kind of DRM-laden copy of it? Piracy is their quickest, easiest path to watching it. While we've concluded that the industry won't ever win, until the industry overlords address their methods of content delivery and take into account why people pirate, they cant even hope to make a lasting impact against piracy.
I've never actually thought about that before - that the MPAA and RIAA consider only two types of people - those that buy something because they want it, and those that pirate it because they don't want to pay for it.
It's a false black-and-white that is, like most things, mostly made up of gray. This might be a dumb question, but have there been any "contact us" or any sort of "are you a pirate and why" surveys, that can be taken anonymously of course, put out by the content owners? If not, why not?
The problem is that, the more you try to lock things down, the more new ideas are invented that spur new innovations, leading to more hacking. Bit_Torrent was invented because all the Warez Websites were getting shutdown.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
I don't imagine they're fooling themselves about stopping piracy, so much as maintain the appearance that there's a real (and somewhat severe) risk involved.
And from their perspective, they recently got megaupload, demonoid, and one of TPB guys. They probably think they're doing a pretty good job.
I fear for the private trackers. I imagine they're last on the list, due to limited membership and the relatively small impact it would have to get those folks, but that would hurt some otherwise savvy folks that kinda know what they're doing.
Is defending one's hosts and devices against malware and spam a futile endeavor too, for many of the reasons Cowboy Neal describes?
Does that mean we all should just abandon the effort and move on to a different "model"?
There is a lot of pleading of self interest on these boards.
Most piracy doesn't happen online. Most of it happens in physical trades with people; Head over for a LAN party, leave the 'download' drives connected so people can swap stuff. Someone expresses an interest in another's favorite TV series... out come the disposable flash drives. Everyone has a laptop these days -- visiting a friend's house is a common occurrance, as is file trading. More piracy happens on those channels than online. People still loan each other their DVDs and blurays too (and rip them).
The analog hole will never be plugged, because it wears sneakers and goes through your fridge looking for a beer.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
People that pirate:
1. Don't ever intend to buy the software. Even if you gave them $1000 bucks they wouldn't bother buying Photoshop CS Infinite edition.
2. Often just want to hoard the software, or get it for their broke friends. "Cool look what I have!"
3. The numbers of people that pirate are based on shoddy statistics that are designed to inflate the problem.
4. I've yet to read a study that shows that people with the absence of pirating sites will convert to actual customers.
5. Ironically some people that pirate may in the long run buy the software anyway. This goes against #1, but "in the long run" means years later when they have money.
Ah this took me back to pirating ZX Spectrum games at school in the 1980s. We bought software too, lots of it, but shared it out amongst ourselves. A utility called "The Key" was able to copy games initially but then the makers got smarter and started customising their loaders, but by then, armed with my "Complete ZX Spectrum ROM Disassembly" I was still able to stay ahead of the curve. We also defeated the lightly coloured code sheets of tiny symbols by a simple divide-and-conquer strategy. Cutting the codesheet into multiple pieces, copying them out by hand, then photocopying them on the school photocopier (at a perfectly reasonable 5p/sheet).
A fictional account of "an entirely different game"
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I love the article, but you didn't tell me anything we as an industry don't already know. Of course people want cheaper media and easy delivery. Tell us how to do it and still satisfy both users and investors.
If we just arm other pirates with Letters of Trademarque that show they work for the King or Queen, I'm sure we can solve this once and for all.
After all, it's not like large impersonal corporations which care nothing about human rights are monetizing works of arts from actual Persons who are not corporations, for their own personal aggrandizement.
I claim First Postal Watermarque!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The premise of the article is that content owners want to stop piracy. This, I would argue, is not always correct, as US copyright law allows some copyright holders to collect more money from content infringers than they would ever make from legitimately selling their product without any copyright infringement. Take a look at the RIAA and the porn industry. The porn industry alone has sued over 300,000 individuals for downloading porn over bittorrent, and has sued each for $150,000. They settle about 30%-50% of the cases for an average of $3,400. That's $300 - $500 million from suing infringers. How much do you think they make selling copies of their films at $30 a pop, or a subscription to a website for $15 a month? The RIAA just got a judgement for $200,000 reaffirmed, and you can bet they're going to hold that over the head of anyone they send a settlement offer to. Don't want to pay $200,000 like this lady? Settle now for the low low price of $5000, more than you'll spend in you're entire life on legitimately purchased CDs.
Seriously, this is just the beginning. The music industry is stepping back in the game after years of dormancy, following the road the porn industry has paved with their nation-wide network of copyright litigation.
Oh, and I forgot the best part: by their own estimate, at least 30% of the people they sue are not actual infringers. But they'll be glad to take your ass to court for $150,000 per infringement and potentially ruin your life based on shoddy, untested, unverified, unregulated, unlicensed "forensic" IP evidence.
So no, this is not about "The industry winning and stopping copyright infringement." This is about their ability to monetize infringement through the judicial system.
It seems like the news on everyone's favorite most resilient BitTorrent site never ends, as we approach its ninth birthday in just a couple days.
They've had nine birthdays in just a couple days? Okay, look, the piracy is one thing, but this is just dishonest!
I pay for cable, and even then still download most of my shows. Why ? I want the original content. I don't want the translated content, dubbed by people who can't express emotions with their voices if their lives depended on it. Yes, I understand that most people can barely speak 1 language, let alone that of another country, so they need dubbed content. And they are too slow to read subtitles, which are an acceptable alternative as far as I'm concerned. But my cable (well, satellite, really) provider technology offers alternative audio tracks and off band subtitles, so in theory one could turn them on or off. But, so far, that only happens consistently in 1 (ONE!) channel of my 80+ channels package.
So yeah, I pay for cable, but will still download it, and I feel perfectly fine about it.
morcego
BBSs where you knew the house that hosted the board. Online with a sneakernet accelerator.
you can get blu ray rips of movies weeks before blu ray street date. it's not 16 year old teenie ninjas breaking into high security factories stealing this stuff to post it on BT. the content owners "leak" their content. or they don't put enough protection into the system to ensure that it doesn't leak
Sure...
Copying stuff is the same as taking physical things and shooting people in the process.
Can we shoot you the next time you speed or jaywalk? We would only be applying your own standards to you.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
... The type who really would buy the content but it simply isn't available for purchase on any media in their territory, and probably won't be for a long time.
It's tough being a My Little Pony fan in the UK. :-) A more common example would be the Game Of Thrones example already best explained by the Oatmeal comic.
>>> There's also the "try-before-I-buy" folks who are willing to pay, but they're frugal with their money and don't want to buy something they'll regret later.
Hello.
There's also the group that thinks this is wrong, and have no objection to manufacturers refusing to take back crappy CD or DVD purchases. I don't like that group. (Even lowly candybar makers offer a return policy if the customer is dissatisfied.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Who still uses TPB? I mean it's been a horrible resource as far back as I can remember. There's 5 different torrent sites that Google does return (since I've seen the results regularly) which are superior. Magnet links alone simplify locating torrents.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
The idea that we can just hack out new innovations is predicated on the existence of PCs and the Internet. Neither PCs nor the Internet are a given, and in fact, powerful people are working harder than ever to kill PCs and kill the Internet -- not just the MPAA, but also companies like Apple and Microsoft, the companies that were made possible by PCs.
If your computer would only run pre-approved software, downloading your entertainment would be substantially harder. Yes, people will find jailbreaks, but without a PC to work with, even that becomes harder.
The only disruptive technology relevant to this discussion is the PC.
Palm trees and 8
Under U.S. law, it is considered okay to record a broadcast for personal viewing at a different time.
Well, when someone downloads Game of Thrones (because it's the only thing on HBO that they like and they won't pay for a subscription), and then later actually buys the DVD/BluRay release of the show, then they're just timeshifting into the past to see the show before purchase.
Yeah, yeah, the law doesn't see it that way, but broadcasters should recognize that a lot of people act that way.
He frames the definition of "win" incorrectly. If "win" means "possible to get media for free in some capacity" then yes, the pirates will always "win". But I'd argue a better definition is "easy for a non-technical person to conveniently access high-quality copyrighted media free of charge with no legal risk." If we use that definition then I don't think it's a given that the pirates will always win. Enforcement efforts have the potential to make it less easy (harder to find sites, sites frequently disappear, degraded throughput due to overuse, blocks that require technical knowledge to work around, garbage content masquerading as the real thing, etc.), more expensive (pay-per-byte price structures for network access) and more risky (draconian punishments, forcing ISPs to police activity and/or store data, etc.) Taken together these three may be enough to motivate many "casual" pirates to go legit. Will it make everybody do that? Certainly not. But it might make enough do it that the studios see it as a worthwhile investment to lobby for these types of policies.
>The industry can't ever truly win this war
That's never the purpose of law enforcement. Purpose of law enforcement is to minimize to a reasonable level.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
This is what happens when you have a large industry selling a product that has no measurable value. In the heyday of the recording industry, the companies manufacturing vinyl discs provided both a valuable physical product and the means of distribution. Same with moving pictures. Technology has now eliminated the value of both the physical medium and correspondingly the distribution of said medium. It will take time for the entrenched industry to fully adapt or die.
Commercial software had the problem of artificial scarcity almost from its beginning.
There is still all of the original value of the artistry and engineering to create the works of art and technology. However, monetizing the distribution of that valuable work may not always be as profitable as monopolizing distribution was in the past. So it goes.
Live music performance, the pleasure of viewing a film on a giant screen with great sound and comfort and that bathtub of popcorn, and similar experience based value are still worth paying for, for many people.
It's been interesting, watching this change over my lifetime. I expect many interesting twists and turns in the future, too.
WALSTIB!
Anything from which infinite copies can be made, instantly, and basically for free by anyone has no monetary value. The "pirates" realize this and are paying fair market value, which is zilch. The only way to convince them otherwise is with the threat of violence.
Emphasis mine.
I read on, and then I re-read it a few times. Perhaps I missed it - but where is it examined how piracy could be further curbed already?
It's not extremely well-hidden in this part, is it?
Because then I'd have to take away from it that piracy could be further curbed by just letting it happen in the hopes that the user will later make that decision to pay up.
It's not this bit either, right?
Because if it were - without further context - I'd almost say that's DRM doing a pretty good job there. Maybe it was a bug that was also in the official game and for some reason a patch was never pirated, rather than a flaw in the crack. The 'read on' text doesn't mention.
Perhaps it's this 2-sentence piece in the last paragraph?
Well, certainly more such services would be good. Except.. not. Zune store thing didn't work out too well. Gamers aren't fond of installing Origin when they point to Steam. If anything, more such services means that it's more likely that some content is only available at X, and other content only available at Y, and now you need subscriptions to two services.
Besides, that very paragraph then follows up those two sentences with:
So if those were supposed to be the examinations as to "how piracy could be further curbed already", then you just shot them down. Good job?
I don't get it.. I see a lot of complaining that the industry just doesn't get it, that they need to use the internet to their advantage, that they need to take a realistic outlook as to the various reasons for people pirating. But then when it's even stated that there will be suggestions as to how it can be curbed further... we're left hanging.
I have to say, though, this bit made me chuckle:
Nobody here would suggest you looked like greedy little thieves - thievery implies theft, and copyright infringement isn't theft. :)
But when you go and try to make your past self look better by suggesting that when you did have money you would purchase software, only to point out that if you had been able to pirate it, you would have done so, and kept the money? I'd say you were greedy little somethings alright
The humanity evolved and developed because we shared knowledge. Initially it was "you have a fire, let me borrow it", or "you figured how to make something better, let me take it and improve upon it". Until recently, the act of sharing was considered to be something good: "I enjoyed this book, please have it", "you need to move your lawn, feel free to borrow my mover". That has started to changed after large corporations started guarding their profits and came up with a loophole that essentially removes any ownership from the people. We don't own books, we only lease them; we cannot play music as we wish, improve on it or reproduce it without obliging to some stiff laws that came into play just recently to serve the interests of large corporations. Now the free thinkers who take an existing idea and make it better are being vilified. In fact, many things (and more are appearing) cannot even be taken apart without breaking some laws, they cannot be resold, they cannot be used creatively for something else. The fact that the piracy will not be defeated will be a minor point compared to majority embracing the notion that "doing something creative is bad and illegal, let's not do it."
There's no such thing as "illegal download"
The Futility of the Ongoing Piracy War
It's only futile if we assume that their objectives are, in fact, what they claim them to be. I, for one, don't have that much difficulty seeing through their bullshit...
The more they push media into the cloud (Steam, Valve, etc.) and devices become like Android and the iPad with little on-board storage the more people will get used to the idea of subscription access to all content. How are you going to pirate a game that has its main source code on a cloud server? Music and videos are trickier, but in an age where most people have Internet access of some kind streaming can take over the DVD/MP3 industry completely. Why have 10,000 MP3's loaded on a device when we can stream what we want over 4G from our Amazon account?
There will be other users who are geeks, have a computer, and will screen capture a vid or exploit the "analog hole" to nab songs, but the vast majority of users will be running cloud services and their only access to the content will be to stream it. That will eliminate a very large amount of the kids out there stealing songs and duplicating games.
I'm not saying this is good. I like owning my media. I'm just saying this is the way it's headed. In a few years you won't be buying the latest video game. You'll be subscribing to it, downloading the big texture maps, and then connecting back to the server for the game logic. That's going to change things.
I've got no problem with the concept of people doing bad things -- illegal or otherwise. Whether you steal a candy bar, graffiti a mailbox, or get a game without paying for it, these are all minor things that don't kill anyone. But whether or not the law as written or the law as enforced can or do count your actions as illegal, they most definitely aren't ethical by any consideration.
You're fabricating shades of grey just for fun. Still, throughout every shade, I don't want to be the guy who worked hard to create the content that you didn't pay for. It doesn't matter why. You weren't forced to play my game, child or not, affordable or not.
Case in point. If I make a game, choose to price it at six million dollars per copy, and choose to make it available only from one radioshack in the park, that's my right to do with my own creation. If you want to steal it, that's one thing. But you don't get to use my distribution and pricing as an excuse for your actions.
Man up. You stole it. It's not the worst thing that anyone has ever done. You did it intentionally. It wasn't a political protest. You wanted something and you didn't want to get it legitimately. Man up.
Here's another shade of grey. Commercial advertisements and news coverage and reviews make Game of Thrones sound like the greatest show ever. Professional marketing makes me want it like crack. So I'm addicted to it before I've ever seen it. And hence, I steal to support my addiction because it's not available through my cable provider.
Oh yeah, and I never learned to just say no to yet another derivative tv show.
Or, perhaps, I did; I've never seen the show, and really, I've survived just fine.
By the way, as a child, I stole a $0.05 candy coke bottle, in university I stole three bottles of five alive -- but only because I'd forgotten to pay for them, and didn't go back when I discovered so -- last year the wind took my car door into another car door and I didn't leave a note or anything -- I don't feel bad because the other car was more or less rusted through, not that my paint transfer improved it at all -- and while Game of Thrones easily passes me by, some shows don't.
Man up. It's not a good thing. And though I haven't killed anyone, I'm not proud of everything I've done, do, and plan to do. But hey I also plan to take advantage of a few social encounters this weekend. I don't always plan on being nice. Sometimes I plan to be selfish to.
And I definitely, frequently, and recreationally, drive well above the speed limit -- but not around schools.
I don't typically watch much television but enjoy Game of Thrones.
To watch Game of Thrones legally ON MY Television HBO and Rogers (the local cable company) make me do the following:
1. Subscribe to the local cable company (most channels I don't want)
2. Upgrade to HD and get the HD PVR box (now paying for more channels I don't want)
3. Get the upgrade to HBO / TMN (paying for even more channels I don't want)
4. Wait once a week for the show to air (annoying)
5. Record it on the PVR so I can fast forward through commercials (even more annoying and at which point I'm not even watching it is real-time anyways)
All of the above costs well lover $100 per month (on a 1-year contract) in the Toronto area through Rogers. Just to watch one series !!!
Or the alternative:
1. Go online a few hours after the show airs, download to USB stick, plug into television and watch.
No wonder people "pirate" television!!!!
Slashdotters are the first to attack people who supposedly don't recognize that technology has introduced a new paradigm and we must think about things in a different context.
Why is it, then, that they immediately retreat into the anachronistic "you're not depriving anyone of anything, it's not theft, therefore it's okay" argument when it comes to piracy?
(Rhetorical question, in case anyone doesn't get it. The answer, of course, is because this argument allows pirates to justify their activities.)
How about recognizing for once that digital distribution is a new phenomenon and these kinds of comparisons are simply wrong?
Here is how Mr. "smartass" aaaaaaargh! tells the industry for free how to win the war against piracy for computer games (but similar things work in other sectors):
1.) Make a good, innovative game with procedurally generated levels and content (= extremely high replay value)
2.) If you're totally afraidthat people might actually like your game too much because of the first step, still do it, but charge for the next version of the game engine (e.g. people have to pay for better graphics and optimizations)
3.) Include useful and/or creative items in the box like a complete booklet, collectors items, etc. Heck, even including a whole set of high-quality game controllers is not unheard of...
4.) Do not rip off consumers, make the pricing fair and reasonable. Don't let them pay extra for point 3 (no collectors box, no deluxe edition! One edition for all.)
5.) Good customer service and realease modding/hacking tools for your games.
6.) Ignore the pirates.
Revenue and sustainable business development are ensured, until you're bought by EA games who will fuck up your studio.
During the piracy warning at the movies people have taken to sounding like pirates with arrrgs and saavy. This makes me laugh. Below is a snippet of Bob Mondello's interview with NPR about the Toronto Film Festival. MONDELLO: Well, yes, actually. At the beginning of all the public screenings - this doesn't happen so much with the critics' screenings, but when you're at a public screening as soon as they put up the screen that says to be careful not to record anything, the anti-piracy note, everybody starts making pirate noises and going argh, argh. It's a little strange. http://www.npr.org/2012/09/11/160966328/toronto-film-fest-offers-hints-of-oscar-contenders
Why is it so difficult and so expensive to watch Game of Thrones the legal way??
That's not the same standards.
There's a larger issue here. What the content cartels are doing is un-American and dangerous.
Their business model is no longer working for them overall. The market has shifted. In a free market, they would go out of business. Instead of shifting their model to meet the market, they have bought legislation which eliminates all the risk for them.
Case in point as mentioned above. HBO. I grew up with it. Now I can't afford it and want to watch it. I will not subscribe to cable just for the luxury of getting HBO. I can afford HBO. I can't afford cable, nor do I want to watch 98% of what they're offering. The market isn't buying. The market is adjusting. The market wants easy access and is willing to pay reasonable costs. iTMS sells a ton of TV shows. Even then they're still priced too high. HBO has an online streaming offering, but only as a way to entice subscribers. This is where it goes all wrong.
They are heeding the easy access part. That's HBO-GO. Where they derail is the existing subscribers part. A cable subscription now costs about $38 a month. Add HBO and that's another $15 a month. All of that when all I want is HBO-GO. Bundling is bad. The Benefit goes entirely to the provider. If the company just offered HBO-GO for $15 a month I would gladly pay that.
The other side of that coin is the easy access part. The content is delayed for those who only use HBO-GO even though they are subscribers. In fact, all online content is delayed. Hulu, netflix, crackle, iTMS, google play, viacom, ABC, and CBS.
Delayed by only a day is PBS. This is not the easy access we want. We want it available immediately after air. But the content cartels want to keep their fees rolling in by making it less attractive for people to get what they want while not actually delivering it. This seems like collusion to me.
I remember a time when DSL was only offered by the phone company. Then the government set forth regulations which allowed for competition in 1996. Business was too good for so many when the industry bought their way out of it. Now the content cartels also have a lock on access and distribution. And the consumer loses. Offer what people want and they will pay for it.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I'll be honest. I need to make payments to my car, house, and family (food, health). I make a living out of being creative. If my neighbor can "borrow" my idea or artwork as you so describe it, and sell it at 10% less and I lose all my customers, what's my incentive on being a content creator? I'd rather work in a machine shop or similar.
Let's be more specific. I spend $10,000 on my equipment, 4 years of formal training with $20,000 on student loans - this enables me to create a decent audio/ visual/ or some "creative" work in 3 days (or 24 hours). I want to sell it for $50 to each customer. I call it "licensing" because otherwise, they can not only re-sell the original copy, but also sell infinite duplicates for $49.99 (thereby skipping me as a source). If don't "license" it as the law defines it, the people who paid me have every right to sell duplicates and make profit from my labor.
Even if I license my work for $0.99 cents, there's nothing stopping the other guy from undercutting me to $0.50. The other guy's only cost was the original $50, and if he wants to recover that sum, he can go no lower than a penny and neither can I. That's the only price we can match in order to have some kind of gross profit. To me that's too low unless I have a very very high volume sales to counter that, which I don't.
Let me ask you this: as an independent artist, what is my incentive to keep creating content? In other words, how do I make a living? The notion that we will ride our copyrights/ patents forever is ridiculous because trends and tastes come and go (just look at fashion).
Anyways, I eagerly await your answer. /.'ers always seem to be full of answers like a crowdsourcing oracle.
quit watching their shows, quit buying the DVD's, Blu-Ray's, quit going to their movies.l The ONLY thing the copyright holders/media companies understand is $$$$$$$. I disconnected my cable TV with Charter years ago. I have only gone to ONE movie in the theaters in the last 5 years (and that was only for an outing with friends). I haven't purchased a CD/DVD in years, I have refused to upgrade to Blu-Ray - unnecessary. All the DVD's I do own are good enough. I don't need to see the inside of a persons sweat glad on their face. If I want to listen to a CD or watch a DVD I go to my local Library - they have quite a large enough collection. Besides just about all the new music sounds like cr@p, the new movies are either poor remakes or are just plain cr@ppy movies. I only watch a little TV and that comes in over their air. The big media companies only understand $$$$ - take that away from them and what do they have? If enough people just stopped buying what they are selling you could send them into a tailspin. Of course they would just blame it on piracy again. But if no one even pirated their stuff what kind of argument would they have then?
VOTE WITH YOUR $$$$$!!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
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BT became a way for JoesSmallSite.com to dole out millions of copies of his Fabulous Bouncing Babies video without putting himself and his baby in the poor house.
I come here for the love
I switched my firefox default engine to yandex and its working great, my 2nd choice is duckduckgo
if those don't work then I hit bing
all yandex needs is a the equivalent of the google blacklist domain firefox extension and it will be perfect, I would say it works as well as google 80% of the time
With big enough hammers, you can whack a lot of moles. But also a lot of customers. Big media isnt helping to get sympathy hurting the ones that are willing to pay them refusing to sell (because they are at the wrong place), adding DRM that denies fair use, and adding a lot of unskippable "do not pirate" messages. That is something that goes straight to the legal, (still) willing to pay users, and in good part is absent to the ones that pirate it.
Instead of keep punishing everyone, accept that in digital copying happens, is basically the nature of digital things, so give something extra to legal customers, something not digital, i.e. cloud based services, discounts to live shows, or things like that, and turn them into loyal customers, instead of taking things away and turning them into even more moles.
On the other hand one also has to see some websites like 9gag and FunnyJunk critically, that mostly copy from other websites, web comics, people even scan pages of books, and often enough without giving credit. On rare occasions there is a link to the original. And you have to wonder, is it ok if we can consume media without ever crediting the authors? Is it the job of the authors to run around on the internet and take down things?
The argument people make for music is that it will be advertising and people will buy the albums then. I actually discovered music online and bought CDs because of that. But is the ratio correct? I've seen musicians (not just labels) complain that it just doesn't work and that young upcoming artists suffer because of it. Just because pirates think they're allowed to do whatever they want -- because they don't earn money, because they already paid on another CD, because they'll stick it to record companies, ... or whatever excuses they come up with -- doesn't mean that system will work for everyone.
Free sharing is a double-edged sword. When nobody knows you, it's good to through your stuff out there and get you known. But starting up getting some money back must be extremely challenging.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I've installed or recommended OpenOffice/LibreOffice as a replacement for pirating MS Office a lot lately. It's not worth the hassle of dealing with MS Office's copy protection for most people. Plus, most people can't tell the functional difference anyway. Here's the usual list that I normally recommend for the average person.
VMWare/Parallel => VirtualBox
Photoshop => Paint.net (it's good enough for most basic jobs)
Nero => CDBurnerXP/ImgBurn
MS Office => OpenOffice/LibreOffice
If copyright was only 20 years, how much of the above would be moot?
Artificial barriers to trade and practice is causing all the problems you mention above. A great quote: "We live in the Information age, and yet, we'll be the most undocumented age in history." The reasons:
1. Our paper is made with Bleach (which eats the ink) so our books will become blank pages.
2. Computer storage is short-term, it degrades fast and once degradation starts can be next to impossible to recover. (bit-rot)
3. DRM - we incorporate technologies that prevent replication. How many movies, books, etc from the 1920's-1950's have now been lost and/or only recovered because someone had a copy in an attic or basement (if they have been recovered at all)? And this was before DRM, think about Steam, are they doing anything to ensure if they close down (or burn down, or die in a marketing blitz) that all those games, programs, and access will be continued for the future? Of course NOT!
Everything must be balanced, if companies want DRM then I want to know that all their code is protected in a way where the access to that code, material, and even the DRM itself will be available to me once copyright is over! And I want that copyright to be in a range that will allow that material to enter in my hands before I die of old age (asssuming a mid 20's age -- this could be from 20 to 40 years at a max). I also want a minimum support for any product to be the same as the copyright range plus 10 years; in other words, if you want to protect it, you must support it. Why should they get all their way and nothing for me? And yet they want me to pay more and more for it? And/or will NOT EVEN acknowledge that I bought it and rather like to say I "Leased" or "Licensed" it!
Sure...
Copying stuff is the same as taking physical things and shooting people in the process.
Can we shoot you the next time you speed or jaywalk? We would only be applying your own standards to you.
Not to mention the obvious logic of - if we both want free liquor, we both have to rob a liquor store. Whereas once pirate A cracks the DRM and posts the file, users B through ZYZZY are simply taking a copy. It's like sharing a secret - each new person is getting a fresh copy.
Why is it, then, that they immediately retreat into the anachronistic "you're not depriving anyone of anything, it's not theft, therefore it's okay" argument when it comes to piracy?
(Rhetorical question, in case anyone doesn't get it. The answer, of course, is because this argument allows pirates to justify their activities.)
Or, because it's applying the wrong term to the crime.
If I cross the road in the middle of the street, that's Jaywalking. It's not Assault or Tax Evasion or Murder or Vehicular Manslaughter. And trying to coin a "worse" term for it doesn't make it so.
"Piracy" isn't piracy or theft. It's copyright infringement. There's a specific crime assigned to that activity - why do people insist on assigning "worse" name to it?
Coming from a business/accounting background, my immediate thoughts when Napster popped up and piracy hit mainstream was "adapt or die".
It was just bloody obvious, at least to anyone with marketing and business strategy textbooks in front of them. Literally basic textbook stuff.
When the market moves, adapt to it. No point fighting as you'll only lose, and anyway your purpose is to serve your market as well you can. I'm not going to condone piracy/copyright infringement/whatever, but it's just not business to point fingers and blame your market.
Because if you make it sound worse, it's easier to get the sheep to follow along with it.
PLEASE, for Christ's sake, STOP doing the RIAA and MPAA's job for them! And Cowboy Neal, of all people, should know better too.
Downloading (and in most cases uploading) is NOT piracy! It is merely civil copyright infringement!
Copyright piracy is a VERY old legal term, and it means to make and distribute multiple copies for profit. Pirates don't share via P2P. It would defeat their whole purpose. Calling downloading "piracy" is not an example of "modern usage", it is just plain incorrect.
Piracy is a crime, sometimes even a felony. Downloading is not a crime at all.
"Big Content" wants you to think they are the same things, but they are not. Whenever you call downloading "piracy", you help them toward their evil ends.
Stop.
The "entirely different game" that the content industries seem to be playing is lobbying politicians into passing extremely restrictive legislation, and unfortunately, I think the evidence shows that this is a game they can win, at least in terms of getting the legislation passed. Yes, SOPA was tabled after a large outcry, but agreements like the TPP, ACTA, and so on and so forth continue to be pushed forward by governments with direct support from all those intellectual property and content industry groups. As I said in a comment on another thread, I don't think it will be too long before, for example, some judge somewhere decides that simply having a bit torrent client on your computer, or just clicking on a link on the Pirate Bay, constitutes conspiracy to commit copyright fraud... I think the real "Whac-a-mole" game is going to be played by citizens, who have to keep beating down laws like SOPA and their ilk each time a new one pops up, because these guys are not going to give up.
Well yes, that is quite obviously the reason. The real question is why they chose such a dumb word for it... I mean, "piracy". Pirates have been symbols of cool adventures for pretty much ever, and I doubt anyone but the most dull greysuited "normals" actually get discouraged by it.
No, if they wanted to discourage youths from copyright infringement, they should call it "Accounting" or something. If that got traction they'd probably see drastic reductions in piracy over night. Not teenager wants to be caught accounting.
I'd like that too, but what I really expect is that nothing created in my lifetime or my parents' lifetimes will leave copyright in my child's lifetime. Not much from my grandparents' lifetimes, for that matter. Which sucks. There were a bunch of good stories in Analog and IASFM that I don't think were or will be collected, and once the paper copies have died, that's it.
This is a very insightful post - I would mod up if I had points.
This is a very good example of a symptom of a failing free market - and how interest groups have managed to legislate their way around its failures to make sure the money keeps rolling in. You are right - in a true free market these corporations/businesses would go bust. But this is only half the story - you can't legislate to force people to subscribe to your service! So the real power is still in the hands of individual consumers...
You talk about your toss-up of cost-effectiveness of getting cable. Most people (I guess, based on the success of this model) simply say "I want to watch that one show, so I'll buy the whole cable subscription". I rarely watch TV so I would be fine not having access to it, but many see having cable as an inalienable human right which they 'just pay for' - like electricity or something.
I keep saying this a lot recently but, even in the face of these big powerful companies, the individual consumer still has the power of giving them money or not giving them money. If more people cancelled subscriptions then business models would really change to reflect what consumers want. But while they can still make shit loads of money - what's the point?
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
Piracy in the digital age is inevitable.
What matters is how the companies understand it and try to live in a world where such thing exists.
I sell software for a living and I get pirated, a LOT. To me Piracy is a market KPI:
If you have demand for your product and also piracy, that means you got the price wrong.
If you have a low price and still lots of piracy, that means the channel to your customer is not the right one.
The trick is to balance the equation the best you can.
The issue: you can't use the same tools for physical goods for non-physical goods -- they just don't fit. They've different rules.
Sooner or later people have to realize that were in the middle of a planetary shift called the End of Growth. The whole notion of freedom changes when anything you do in the real world affects everybody else -- independence must give way to collaboration. The Internet is the ground for a new economy and it will have it's own currency system and its own "crowd control". Why does every national leader have its head up its ass wondering why there's an economic crisis?
...He comes from the future.
And unfortunately they control the internet infrastructure.
The only solution is to create a peer-to-peer infrastructure that can piggyback on the existing internet but doesn't depend on it for the vast majority of communication.
TOR and Freenet are steps in the right direction but they are limited by their physical infrastructure and usability issues (tor is getting better).
http://project-byzantium.org/ is a good start, once the local networks are built they can eventually be turned into national and international networks
The "not depriving" argument IS saying that the comparison is simply wrong, not that pirating is 100% morally right.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
NOT lost revenue
Want some documentary evidence:
http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/eng/h_ip01456.html
The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada
Description: Industry Canada undertook a music file sharing study during 2006-07 to measure the extent to which music downloads over peer-to-peer file sharing networks, for which the sound recording industry receives no remuneration, affect music purchasing activity in Canada. The data used for this analysis are from a Decima Research survey conducted between April and June, 2006, on behalf of Industry Canada. The report, prepared by University of London researchers, Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz, found that music downloads have a positive effect on music purchases among Canadian downloaders but that there is no effect taken over the entire population aged 15 and over.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
Gee, can I get your deal? Here in the eastern seaboard of the US it costs more like $60 for cable a month alone without HBO even with bundling. HBO is another $13 a month. The cable companies (think Verizon!) are bitching because people have figured it out and not signing up for the bundle; just the internet and cable without the phone line and using cellular instead. It makes sense to only have one phone bill rather than two at once. We may go that way after our current contract is up. Call it triple pay...
It's like sharing a secret
Except it's not sharing. "Sharing" means John is giving or loaning something to Jane willingly and with full knowledge. The originator of the file doesn't know you're copying it, and they certainly don't want you to copy it.
We won't loose all of our documentation and media, we will have it in the future though not form the media companies but from the pirates that break the drm and backup all of there media. A geek can set up a nix based media server with raid and zfs and will laugh at bit-rot. when a disk dies he will go get another and the data will be copied from the other redundant copies. when the technology changes and video audio picture and document formats change his copies won't have any drm to keep him from converting between formats.
so in ten years when you are having to pay per person per viewing at home for each episode MASH you already bought on vhs, dvd, hd-dvd, bluray, itunes, digital-copy, zune marketplace. don't say we pirates didn't warn you. we will gladly say we told you so as we sit back and watch any thing we want free, when you come ask for what ever show you happen to want that the studio decided they don't want to release again for another few years.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Well first of all if people would stop confusing piracy with sharing we could actually begin discussing the matter with appropriate terms.
By equating making a profit off of material you don't own with sharing it with others for free we miss an important distinction.
Can we cut the false contradiction crap? It's unoriginal, not at all clever, and really makes you look like an idiot. Slashdot is not a hive mind, not one giant entity of one thought, but instead made up of many people with many varying opinions. IF you can't even get that right, including anyone who makes similar statements to that I've replied to, it will be hard to take said posters seriously.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
well, there is a certain similarity altho it's not really the same level ... you won't see someone with billgates-money in his pockets robbing liquor stores and i'm guessing it's been a while since le william downloaded a movie for free as well
... since the money from damages doesnt go to the artists there's room for discussion there, and more, there's way more important things, i havent seen any of the famous hollywood stars beggin yet. You buy what you can afford and like right ?
as for the shooting
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
And this illustrates beautifully why it is fallacious to compare the concept of possession of physical property towards any sort of "ownership" of intangibles.
Property by nature is limited, ownership of scarce materials makes sense for this reason and the law is meant to reflect that. Information, however, is naturally abundant, and computers make this quite apparent. It's worth remembering the founders recognized this and even explicitly wrote into the constitution that Patent/Copyright was only intended to spur the creation of more art and science. It was not based on any moral or philosophical "right" to ownership, it was entirely a pragmatic compromise.
When research shows that compromise by and large no longer works, then is it any wonder that "ownership" is no longer respected? This is why people consider it "Sharing." Because they don't respect the idea that people should be able to "own" such things, period. This doesn't mean they can't be made to pay for content, but it does reflect that people do not labor under any misguided belief that any sort of IP regime is a moral construct necessary to the maintenance of society.
Rather than play whack-a-mole with pirates, someone 'ought to take a page from Valve and try to invest in ways to engage people in paying for cool things because they want to legitimately support the art/science that went into it. Trying to force people to treat a pragmatic compromise as a moral good is not a winning strategy.