First person convicted of U.S. Internet piracy

Anonymous Coward writes "A college student who ran a pirate website is the first person in the U.S. to be convicted of felony Internet piracy - max penalty 3 years prison and $250,000 fine. Read all about the conviction. "

Comments

Suckage Factor Off the Scale, Captain...

[ewhac]

Okay, everyone, get this through your skulls (and I say this as a professional software engineer of over 20 years experience):

Bitlegging is NOT theft.

The SPA has done an excellent job of getting people to misconceptualize the economic reality of digital media.

Let's decompose the economics of software development:

• $(PRODUCT) development requires people to spend time and effort to create a program.
• At the cusp of the 21st century, we currently motivate people to part with their time and effort by offering them money.
• Therefore, $(PRODUCT) development costs money.

Substitute for the variable $(PRODUCT) any tangible object, like "washing machine." Once you have developed and built $(PRODUCT), it is yours to dispose of as you see fit. You may choose to sell it, or you may choose to give it away. We may question how the developer arrived at the price, but the decision is ultimately up to the guy(s) who created $(PRODUCT). Therefore, the price assigned to $(PRODUCT) is arbitrary and has nothing whatsoever to do with its development costs. The consequence of this is that there is no entitlement to recover development costs, since there is no direct rational connection between development costs and retail costs.

You may think that's specious, disingenuous, or even insane reasoning. Ordinarily, I might agree with you, except that there's a little concept of "reasonable expectation of return." If you put $10 on number 22 on the roulette wheel, do you realistically expect a return from that investment? Of course not; the odds are stacked against you. Same deal with spending a lot of money digging a hole in the ground: You may strike oil/gold/uranium, but more than likely you won't. (A lot of people are about to learn this lesson very harshly when the Internet stock boom falls apart.)

How do you mitigate against wasting your money? By doing research on your target investment. In this case, people heavily invested in software development have not done their homework. It is an incontrovertible fact that digital information -- software, images, sounds -- can be copied easily, and this fact is not about to change. That's what it was designed to do. So, how stupid do you have to be before you stand there proclaiming that you have an inalienable right to expect people won't copy your stuff, when the medium is fundamentally designed to behave otherwise?

Okay, say you don't buy that line of reasoning. Try this out:

• If I take away your $(PRODUCT), I have deprived you of the ability to exchange it for the price you have assigned it. (This is true whether I purchased it from you or shoplifted it; the end result is that you don't have it anymore.)
• If I make a copy of your $(PRODUCT), you still have the original. You still have the ability to exchange it for your chosen price.

Note that this is true no matter what the value of the variable $(PRODUCT) is. If I use a matter replicator to make a copy of your washing machine, you still have yours with which to clean your clothes. If I use a CD-ROM drive to make a copy of Quake, you can still play your original. Since you haven't been deprived of anything, you can't claim theft.

Final point:

• You offer $(PRODUCT) for sale. I think your price is too high, and walk away.
  Result: No sale.
• You offer $(PRODUCT) for sale. I make a copy of it and take the copy home.
  Result: No sale.

Thus, the argument that bitlegging results in lost revenue largely falls apart, since the outcome of both situations is the same: No sale.

You may argue that you have lost "potential revenue," since your potential customer base has been reduced by the number of unsanctioned copies. Guess what: This isn't theft, either. Anyone who has held common stock in a public company knows that one of the hazards of stock ownership is a thing called "dilution." Dilution is what happens when the company issues more shares; the potential market for the shares you own is reduced. Nobody in the stock market labors under the delusion that this is "theft". And although a lot of people grumble about it when it happens, it's not even illegal (unless fraud is involved). Unsanctioned copying of software results in the same economic dynamic which, if you've done your homework, should not come as a surprise to anybody.

So, what have we established?

• You'd have to be a complete moron to be surprised that software is copyable, and that people are copying it.
• Making copies of things, no matter what they may be, is not theft. Period, end of chapter.
• There is no direct correlation between unsanctioned copies and "lost revenue."

Now, you can make an ethical argument against copying software, and I would in fact, in large part, agree with you. But software publishers (and anyone else who can't think beyond their own pocketbook) are asking us to criminalize this activity.

Sorry, but that idea is rock-stupid. It's like passing a law forbidding gravity from applying to certain objects: it illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the medium operates. Digital bits are and forever will be easily copied, and you must live in that reality, or you're just setting yourself up for one heck of an ulcer.

But that's not what irritates me most about this. No. It's the fact that they picked on a guy who had no hope of defending himself against the charges. The N.E.T. Act must have the SPA giggling with glee since, because of the way the law is written, they're never going to encounter a defendant who can actually put up a fight. Which, from their track record, is about par for the course for the SPA.

Start changing the way you think about this stuff, or you are all going to be serious fscked when matter replicators show up.

Schwab