At the same time, the Humble Indie Bundle also showed that there are a lot of people who are willing to pay for something that they could easily pirate.
That was proved long before the Humble Indie Bundle - since virtually every game with DRM was cracked and there were games sold without DRM (i.e. both of those cases illustrate that "there are a lot of people who are willing to pay for something that they could easily pirate").
You had DRM-free games being offered in such a way that people could simply pass a link around and everyone could get free downloads, yet they still made over $1 million in sales.
To be fair, it works out to about $150,000 for each game company. That's enough to pay for 2-3 developers for one year. Not a whole lot of money. Fortunately, it wasn't the totality of their sales.
The Movie industry has been crying foul (one major studio CEO recently said in a speech that piracy is "killing the industry")... while that same industry has been racking up record profits. Sorry, but that made my bullshit detector go off the charts.
Can we please put this myth to bed? Once you adjust for inflation and population growth, domestic box office sales are 9% off their record high in 2002 (http://www.atomicboysoftware.com/blog/2009/12/hollywood-box-office-numbers-and-piracy/). When articles appear on the internet about the movie industry's record breaking profits, they're never using inflation-adjusted dollars. Further, DVD sales continue to decline:
"Hollywood has been sitting a death-bed vigil for DVDs for a long time now. Once a ridiculously high-margin, fat-profit business, sales of discs have tumbled hard over the last few years. The decline has been so severe and so rapid that many industry watchers say the technology is waltzing toward extinction -- and some think it could happen as early as this year.
While it seems a little morbid (and premature) to call the demise of DVDs by year's end, studios have good reason to worry. DVD sales fell nearly 7% in 2008, according to information firm SNL Kagan, and in 2009, the decline in DVD sales has been pegged at 13% by Adams Media Research."
(http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/avatar-dvd-sales-are-out-of-this-world-is-it-the-last-hurrah/19455023/).
Part of the problem is that piracy advocates want to paint a picture that piracy isn't having any effect. So, let's put this "record breaking profits" talk to bed.
From a producer's perspective, I believe that piracy is generally a net positive. There have been several studies that have demonstrated that on average those who pirate buy more legitimate copies of the product class being studied than the general populace.
And I disagree with those studies. For one thing, there's the correlation-causation problem. In other words, let's say that piracy has no effect on sales. Let's also say that people who love music are more likely to pirate music and buy music. Based on these facts, you'd find that people who pirate are more likely to buy. However, in our example, we've already said that piracy has no effect on sales. This would be correlation, and it would mean that piracy did not increase sales (even though some people might interpret it that way). In fact, it's entirely possible for piracy to decrease sales and you'd still see a positive correlation between people who pirate and sales to those same people. This could happen if you have two groups of people: Group A loves music - they pirate and the buy music. Group B isn't a big music fan - they don't pirate or buy much music. Even if piracy caused a decline in purchases among Group A, they might still have higher purchase rates than Group B. This would lead to a correlation between piracy and purchasing - which could erroneously be interpreted as "piracy increases sales".
I also don't believe those studies are accurate. I can think of quite a few reasons why those statistic would be inaccurate - the most obvious being that pirates lie about the amount of material they purchase. I think there's evidence to suggest that those numbers are inaccurate. For example, a number of industries have gotten hit within the last decade with declining sales. The music industry sales are down 50% since 10 years ago. Domestic box office revenue is down 15% when adjusted for inflation and population growth. DVD sales are down (http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/avatar-dvd-sales-are-out-of-this-world-is-it-the-last-hurrah/19455023/). The porn industry is taking a big hit. It's hard for me to believe that those industries are seeing declining sales given that "piracy is generally a net positive" and piracy has been on the increase over that same period. I remember seeing one statistic that said pirates buy 12x as much music as non-pirates. Assuming that piracy caused people to buy 12x as much music, then how does one explain the 50% decline in music sales? Are we supposed to believe that, if piracy didn't exist, that music sales would've seen an 80% decline in sales? It seems unbelievable that music sales would've naturally fallen off by 80% in 10 years - as if people just stopped listening to music.
The problem with the idea that if even a fraction of the pirates paid for it there would be a large increase in sales is that all of the ways to stop them from pirating cost you more sales than you recover from the pirates that now pay for it.
That's actually irrelevant to the question. The question is about whether piracy damages anything. According to your statement above, your answer might be "yeah, it damages stuff - people should control themselves and not pirate. However, stopping piracy is too expensive for the creators." By analogy , you could say that "shoplifting is too expensive to stop, therefore stores shouldn't try to stop shoplifters" -- which may be a true statement even though "shoplifting hurts stores" is also a true statement.
I will illustrate another problem with your idea. I know someone who pirated the World of Goo (actually somebody else had pirated it and gave it to them, they did not realize that they should have paid for it)...I showed the free demo to a friend who went out and bought it.
I mentioned in another comment (http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1715164&cid=32863986) that the effects of piracy may be non-linear. Keep in mind that "piracy as it exists (i.e. at it's current rates)" is a different from the question of the legitimacy of piracy in general. For example, let's say that you think this legitimizes piracy. Let's say that society then decides that piracy is okay. Now what? Your friend pirates it. He gives a copy to you. You show it to another friend. Your other friend pirates it (rather than paying) - because that's what everybody in society does. When piracy reaches high rates, your example falls apart.
It's also worth pointing out that anecdotes aren't the same thing as data. I'm sure your example does occasionally happen. But how frequently compared to people to decided to pirate rather than pay? If "pirate rather than pay" happens twice as often as "I bought because I saw a pirated copy" then it's a net loss. You could also make the same argument for commercial piracy. For example, let's say that Spielberg goes and creates a film. He wants a song to put in his movie. He pirates it. People watch his film, and the song gains popularity because Spielberg pirated it and put it in his movie. Now, you could say that this is a net gain for the songwriter/performer. Now, the question is this: should we allow movie directors to pirate music for their movies because sometimes it ends up better for the songwriter/performer? I think the answer to that is "no". The musician should be involved in that negotiation with the movie director. Maybe the musician will decide it's in his best interest to license the music for free, maybe he'll decide the movie director should pay him money for it. The musician needs to be involved in this negotiation because he's in the best position to make that choice for himself. This has parallels to the World of Goo situation. They should be involved in the negotiation with the user over a price so that they can decide what is in their own best interest - rather than having the user (i.e. the movie director) unilaterally decide what they want to do with it - because the user (movie director) doesn't have the interests of the game-creator (musician) in mind, they have their own interests in mind, even though there may sometimes be positive effects.
1. The law needs to be built on facts: If there aren't some provable cases, how can the law impose punitive damages fairly? Remember, for the US, there's the cruel and unusual punishment angle - if there are no provable cases of piracy stifling creative expression, then one of the grounds for the law's severity is undermined, and so the argument that the law is unconstitutionally cruel gains weight.
You could make the same exact argument about commercial piracy. You can't *prove* that commercial piracy caused any loss of revenue (in particular, if the pirated copy sells for less than the official copy - because that means you'd have to prove that people would've bought the official copy if a lower cost pirated copy wasn't available). Does that mean commercial piracy should be legal? In the case of filesharing and commercial piracy, we don't have absolute proof, but people have plenty of good reasons to think it's true. Holding filesharing to the "proof" standard, but not holding commercial piracy to the same standard is using a double-standard.
Let's take a look at movies: box office has increased and is at record levels.
Just a small note on this. I looked up the numbers. Once you adjust for inflation and population growth, domestic box office sales peaked in 2002. The 2009 numbers were actually about 15% down from the 2002 numbers. Some piracy advocates have ignored the effects of inflation so that they can argue that the movie industry is doing just great.
Yeash. Your post demonstrates a terrible understanding of economics. (What is it with pirates claiming that they understand economics when they clearly do not?)
The reason those people pay what they do is because they value the product that highly.
People pay because they have two options: (1) Pay and get the product, (2) don't pay and don't get the product. When people decide that the product is worth more to them than the money they're paying, then they buy. Piracy is the third option: don't pay and get the product. You can't reasonably argue that people are going to choose option #1 over option #3 because they "value the product".
The thing you overlook is that most pirates would not consume the product at all if they had to pay for it (in those cases where price rather than something else is the deciding factor in the decision to pirate).
No, we're well aware of that. When games like Demigod are seeing 85% of the people showing up on their servers are pirating it, and 85-90% of the people playing World of Goo pirated it, then you start to get an understanding that - if even a fraction of the pirates paid for it, it would cause a big increase in sales. For example, if 10% of the people pirating Demigod paid for it, then sales would be up by over 50%. Saying "the majority of pirates wouldn't have paid, therefore you're wrong about piracy hurting anybody" is a complete non-sequitur. It doesn't even make sense when I use the generous assumption that 90% of the pirates wouldn't have paid. Don't tell us that we don't know anything about economics.
If the quality is good enough, then people will pay for it.
If it's half-good it may still be worth listening to/watching, but not necessarily worth to pay for. (I'll wait until it comes on TV)
One more point:
I saw some statistics for Modern Warfare 2 a while back. According to their numbers, it sold 5-6 million copies on the XBox and 1 million copies were pirated on the XBox. On the other hand, it sold about 250,000 copies on the PC and was pirated 4 million times on the PC. I added up the numbers and calculated that 86% of the people playing it on the XBox paid for it, but only 6% of the people on the PC paid for it.
It seems to me that this blows a huge hole in the "If the quality is good enough, then people will pay for it." argument. Was the XBox version so much better than the PC version? Is the discrepancy due to the fact that the large majority of XBox buyers actually felt burned because they paid for something but it wasn't worth it? Or, is the explanation (as I believe), that people think not paying is better than paying - provided they have a decent chance of getting away with it? It seems to me that people were less likely to pirate on the XBox because it is less convenient to pirate games on the XBox and they risk losing their XBox Live account. (Remember that Microsoft cracked down on pirates right before the Modern Warfare 2 release.)
As other people have aptly pointed out, there's a lot of hidden complexity to the question. The more I think about piracy, the more I discover new complexities to the situation. I will say up front that I am against piracy.
The question is "Has any creative work failed because of piracy?" I'll assume you mean non-commercial piracy. Although, to be fair, you could ask the same question about commercial piracy. I often see people say that filesharing can't be proven to damage profits - their conclusion, therefore, is that filesharing doesn't damage profits. Those same people will turn around and claim that commercial piracy does harm the creator - though, they can't actually prove it (which seems weirdly inconsistent). Afterall, if someone sells pirated Avatar DVDs for $5, you can't actually prove that any of the buyers would've bought the official $10 copy. Maybe $5 is all they were willing to pay. Or maybe the pirate being in the right place at the right time caused the buyer to think about buying the DVD, but they wouldn't have bought it otherwise. Of course, I'm just playing devil's advocate here - to show that someone could argue that commercial piracy doesn't cause any harm to anyone, and they could even use the "you can't prove it" defense - even though the majority of people believe it does.
To use another example, if a store went bankrupt and that same store had shoplifters, then would you know that it went bankrupt *because* of shoplifters? It's hard to say. First, we don't have the hard numbers about the losses due to shoplifting. Second, you could always argue that a *good* store would make enough money to cope with the losses due to shoplifting. We'd never agree that shoplifting is right - even if we can't actually prove to a shoplifting advocate that "shoplifting causes good businesses to go out of business".
Saying "you can't prove it" doesn't mean that it's not true.
Another complication is the fact that, while piracy causes no *direct* loss (in the same way that shoplifting causes the loss of a valuable item), companies do lose out if people who would've paid don't pay. The effects of this can be pretty subtle. It might mean that the company hires fewer (or lays off some) people who were working on that product. This can result in a downward spiral - fewer workers means fewer improvements, which means fewer customers. On the other hand, if the company makes more money (because people are paying rather than pirating), then that company/creator can go on to make new products with that extra money. Those products that don't exist are part of the "loss" due to piracy.
It's theoretically possible that members of society self-regulate their behavior so that people who would've paid do pay, and people who wouldn't have paid simply pirate. Theoretically, this could lead to a situation where piracy leads to zero losses to a company - because they're not losing any paying customers to piracy. I really have a hard time believing that pirates are good at self-regulating their piracy this way. Besides, I know a few pirates who absolutely do not self-regulate. They used to buy stuff until they discovered how to pirate, and now they look at you like you're crazy if you pay instead of pirate. (One pirate, in particular, bought Adobe's creative suite for $2000 a few years ago, and now he laughs at the idea of paying for anything.)
There's also the issue of "Piracy as it exists" vs "Piracy as a concept". These are two different questions. It's possible that many of the people who are currently pirating are poor (which is part of the reason it's so common in college) and wouldn't have paid for it. The current situation might be skewed slightly towards the "self-regulation" situation I outlined above. On the other hand, there are activists who want piracy fully legalized. If piracy were fully legalized, you might be doing a lot more damage because current paying customers suddenly have no reason not to pirate - society has suddenly said i
Uh, you're right and wrong. You're right that piracy causes publishers to skip doing ports, but you're wrong about the Halo example. Halo was originally developed on the Mac by Bungie. Microsoft bought the company and put them to work on an XBox version. They wanted an exclusive that would pump up their new XBox console. That's the reason it never came out for the Mac.
However, more recently, Epic said they're not porting Gears of War 2 to the PC because piracy was so bad. They had ported Gears of War 1 to the PC a few years after it came out for the XBox, and they got burned, so they said, "Too bad PC gamers". The PC is hugely plagued with piracy and people know it. I saw some statistics for Modern Warfare 2 a while back. According to their numbers, it sold 5-6 million copies on the XBox and 1 million copies were pirated on the XBox. On the other hand, it sold about 250,000 copies on the PC and was pirated 4 million times on the PC. I added up the numbers and calculated that 86% of the people playing it on the XBox paid for it, but only 6% of the people on the PC paid for it. Numbers like that are like a kick to the nuts to publishers.
If the quality is good enough... then people will pay for it. If it's half-good it may still be worth listening to/watching, but not necessarily worth to pay for. (I'll wait until it comes on TV)
Nonsense. Assuming you pay for cable TV right now, and suddenly your cable company gave everyone free cable, you really think all (or even a significant majority) of the current cable-subscribers would just donate money to the cable company - and it would approach anything close to the current income they currently receive? Most people are just going to grab it, use it, and then forget about it.
Information traveling to your computer can be identified by your MAC address. I remember one case where a woman tried this defense - saying it was someone else on her wireless network. It came back to bite her when it was revealed that the data when to a MAC address matching her computer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address
How can this lawyer prove that a friend or someone didn't break into my house and use my computer to download something illegal?
Seems like you could use the same defense on child pornography. It's pretty unlikely, and most people just aren't going to buy a silly "I was framed" defense.
I'm filing your comment under "pirates extend their logic to other domains of life and discover that it's perfectly acceptable to steal physical property". I'm not really surprised.
I lock my car because my mommy yells at me if I dont.
Obviously, your mother's a thief. You are now justified in stealing everything you want from her.
Nearly all the value of nearly all copyrighted works comes from ideas that the author learned from people who came before and who the author didn't pay...
I agree with you, but I think you should've focused a little more on the fact that *all* human work is based in part on ideas and work from other people. One example I often give is that farmers plant crops using seeds that were selectively bred for thousands of years. This doesn't mean we can deprive farmers of their work -- even if we can legitimately make the claim that the majority of a harvest is due to our "common cultural heritage" of high-yield seeds. (If you look at the natural versions of our crops, they're pathetically small and barely edible. For example, here's where corn came from: http://www.learner.org/courses/biology/archive/images/1290.html )
Instead, people should stick to the point, which is that the copyright laws themselves are absurd, anti-consumer, bad for culture, bad for humanity, bad in almost every way, and thus any action to subvert them is righteous. That argument is more plain, perfectly transparent, and most importantly, it is true.
BS. Perhaps you'd also like to educate us on the fact that Thomas Jefferson was a tyrant for supporting copyright, now?
I'm tired of this nonsense about "terrorism" not having any decent definition. Creating a "state of terror" (as you say) is *NOT* sufficient to be considered terrorism. If it was, then every schoolboy chasing girls in the schoolyard with a spider in his had is guilty of terrorism. Terrorism has some very important attributes - it has to include violence or the threat of violence against a civilian population. This is why war is *NOT* terrorism. Killing soldiers or creating fear among soldiers is not and cannot be considered terrorism. When a bunch of muslim extremists went to the pyramids in Egypt and started killing unarmed civilians a number of years back - that was terrorism. I'm sure we can all agree that, regardless of the "terrorism" label, killing enemy soldiers is generally considered more morally acceptable than killing unarmed civilians. Do you agree or not agree with that statement? Are you going to slink into some kind of amoral framework where killing soldiers is the same thing as killing civilians?
Also, I'm not surprised that the UN can't agree on a definition of terrorism. Many of the nations involved in those kinds of talks want their version of terrorism to be considered morally acceptable. Many Middle Eastern countries are going to build loopholes so that the Palestinians can blow themselves up among Israeli civilians - and they don't want those acts categorized with a negative label like "terrorism".
The big problem with your argument is that you don't have a model for creators to be paid. If creators can't get paid (or get paid insufficiently), then you undermine the production part of the equation. If you don't like the system, then you should promote alternate ways for creators to get paid for their work that actually work well. For example, if tax dollars went to pay creators, then creators would get paid and society copy their work all they want because the creator already got paid. (Unfortunately, this undermines the need for creators to create something truly useful for society. At least copyright forces creators to create something that society wants to buy.) Or, perhaps a shorter copyright so that people can eventually copy it all they want (after the copyright has expired), but the creator still has an exclusive period where he can get paid (although, even that would be a compromise according to your thinking).
To be fair, it's possible to support both copyright and copyleft. It's also true that many of the copyleft promoters, unfortunately, do not support copyright. The earlier article mentioned Doctorow, and he's a well-known piracy advocate. What evidence do I have for that? Well, the fact that he sold "I pirate music" T-shirts and promoted how-to-pirate books on his website should give you an indication. The EFF is slightly more moderate, although they do employ Doctorow, and seem to have a habit of doing what they can to prevent any enforcement of copyright. As far as I can tell, the EFF is involved in legal wrangling to make sure copyright cannot be enforced - making the whole issue a lame duck. I think it's entirely valid for ASCAP to accuse the EFF of working within the legal system to undermine copyright.
Personally, I'm fine with creators using copyright or copyleft. I have to at least give ASCAP a nod for recognizing that some of these groups are not supporting both - they are working to undermine copyright and would like to see copyleft as the replacement. I don't think copyleft undermines copyright, but I think copyleft is used by these people as part of a larger campaign to undermine copyright.
"This practice, which the EFF has been calling extortive and 'mafia-like',"
I think the comparison to the mafia would only work if they went around suing random people. Instead, they're suing people who broke the law. Does the mafia only go after people who break the law?
I'm not even sure what this story is talking about. For the past few years, all the Starbucks in my area (Denver) simply require you to get a (free) Starbucks gift card and sign-up for free wifi. As long as you have some activity on the card within the past 30 days (either putting money on the card or using it to pay for something), then you get free wifi. They say that you only get 2-hours of wifi per day (not two hours total, as this story implies), but I've never been kicked off their system. And there are no restrictions on which websites I visit. (No, I don't have AT&T.)
"Obscurity, not piracy, is the biggest problem writers face. In the 21st century, if you are not making art with the intention of it being copied, you are not making contemporary art."
Interesting fact: Cory Doctorow rips his ideas from other people. The original quote was from Tim O'Reilly. If you watch the internet closely, you'll see him copy other people's quotes and ideas all the time without giving them credit. A few months ago, I saw him regurgitate one author's comment that piracy is like masterbation. Of course, Cory never gives them credit - he's too busy wanting people to believe "his great ideas" aren't directly cribbed from other people. No wonder Cory is such a big fan of piracy - that's how he gets famous - by taking other people's ideas and regurgitating them as if they were his own.
Yeah, those were the days! Back when governments were monarchies, women had no rights, and men could own slaves. Sometimes the patron model just sounds an awful lot like "make somebody else pay for my entertainment".
One major difference between patent trolls and copyright "trolls" is the fact that people and companies can accidentally violate a patent or violate a patent on the way to implementing some technology - they can be victims of patent minefields. Copyright, on the other hand, can't be violated without someone intentionally violating copyright. Yes, we can still agree that the size of the copyright-violation punishment is too large, but I think equating patent trolls and copyright trolls is fallacious. Are we going to call companies who slap shoplifters with overly large penalties "shoplifting trolls", or call groups who hit car thieves with big punishments "car theft trolls"?
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At the same time, the Humble Indie Bundle also showed that there are a lot of people who are willing to pay for something that they could easily pirate.
That was proved long before the Humble Indie Bundle - since virtually every game with DRM was cracked and there were games sold without DRM (i.e. both of those cases illustrate that "there are a lot of people who are willing to pay for something that they could easily pirate").
You had DRM-free games being offered in such a way that people could simply pass a link around and everyone could get free downloads, yet they still made over $1 million in sales.
To be fair, it works out to about $150,000 for each game company. That's enough to pay for 2-3 developers for one year. Not a whole lot of money. Fortunately, it wasn't the totality of their sales.
The Movie industry has been crying foul (one major studio CEO recently said in a speech that piracy is "killing the industry")... while that same industry has been racking up record profits. Sorry, but that made my bullshit detector go off the charts.
Can we please put this myth to bed? Once you adjust for inflation and population growth, domestic box office sales are 9% off their record high in 2002 (http://www.atomicboysoftware.com/blog/2009/12/hollywood-box-office-numbers-and-piracy/). When articles appear on the internet about the movie industry's record breaking profits, they're never using inflation-adjusted dollars. Further, DVD sales continue to decline:
"Hollywood has been sitting a death-bed vigil for DVDs for a long time now. Once a ridiculously high-margin, fat-profit business, sales of discs have tumbled hard over the last few years. The decline has been so severe and so rapid that many industry watchers say the technology is waltzing toward extinction -- and some think it could happen as early as this year.
While it seems a little morbid (and premature) to call the demise of DVDs by year's end, studios have good reason to worry. DVD sales fell nearly 7% in 2008, according to information firm SNL Kagan, and in 2009, the decline in DVD sales has been pegged at 13% by Adams Media Research." (http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/avatar-dvd-sales-are-out-of-this-world-is-it-the-last-hurrah/19455023/).
Part of the problem is that piracy advocates want to paint a picture that piracy isn't having any effect. So, let's put this "record breaking profits" talk to bed.
From a producer's perspective, I believe that piracy is generally a net positive. There have been several studies that have demonstrated that on average those who pirate buy more legitimate copies of the product class being studied than the general populace.
And I disagree with those studies. For one thing, there's the correlation-causation problem. In other words, let's say that piracy has no effect on sales. Let's also say that people who love music are more likely to pirate music and buy music. Based on these facts, you'd find that people who pirate are more likely to buy. However, in our example, we've already said that piracy has no effect on sales. This would be correlation, and it would mean that piracy did not increase sales (even though some people might interpret it that way). In fact, it's entirely possible for piracy to decrease sales and you'd still see a positive correlation between people who pirate and sales to those same people. This could happen if you have two groups of people: Group A loves music - they pirate and the buy music. Group B isn't a big music fan - they don't pirate or buy much music. Even if piracy caused a decline in purchases among Group A, they might still have higher purchase rates than Group B. This would lead to a correlation between piracy and purchasing - which could erroneously be interpreted as "piracy increases sales".
I also don't believe those studies are accurate. I can think of quite a few reasons why those statistic would be inaccurate - the most obvious being that pirates lie about the amount of material they purchase. I think there's evidence to suggest that those numbers are inaccurate. For example, a number of industries have gotten hit within the last decade with declining sales. The music industry sales are down 50% since 10 years ago. Domestic box office revenue is down 15% when adjusted for inflation and population growth. DVD sales are down (http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/avatar-dvd-sales-are-out-of-this-world-is-it-the-last-hurrah/19455023/). The porn industry is taking a big hit. It's hard for me to believe that those industries are seeing declining sales given that "piracy is generally a net positive" and piracy has been on the increase over that same period. I remember seeing one statistic that said pirates buy 12x as much music as non-pirates. Assuming that piracy caused people to buy 12x as much music, then how does one explain the 50% decline in music sales? Are we supposed to believe that, if piracy didn't exist, that music sales would've seen an 80% decline in sales? It seems unbelievable that music sales would've naturally fallen off by 80% in 10 years - as if people just stopped listening to music.
The problem with the idea that if even a fraction of the pirates paid for it there would be a large increase in sales is that all of the ways to stop them from pirating cost you more sales than you recover from the pirates that now pay for it.
That's actually irrelevant to the question. The question is about whether piracy damages anything. According to your statement above, your answer might be "yeah, it damages stuff - people should control themselves and not pirate. However, stopping piracy is too expensive for the creators." By analogy , you could say that "shoplifting is too expensive to stop, therefore stores shouldn't try to stop shoplifters" -- which may be a true statement even though "shoplifting hurts stores" is also a true statement.
I will illustrate another problem with your idea. I know someone who pirated the World of Goo (actually somebody else had pirated it and gave it to them, they did not realize that they should have paid for it)...I showed the free demo to a friend who went out and bought it.
I mentioned in another comment (http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1715164&cid=32863986) that the effects of piracy may be non-linear. Keep in mind that "piracy as it exists (i.e. at it's current rates)" is a different from the question of the legitimacy of piracy in general. For example, let's say that you think this legitimizes piracy. Let's say that society then decides that piracy is okay. Now what? Your friend pirates it. He gives a copy to you. You show it to another friend. Your other friend pirates it (rather than paying) - because that's what everybody in society does. When piracy reaches high rates, your example falls apart.
It's also worth pointing out that anecdotes aren't the same thing as data. I'm sure your example does occasionally happen. But how frequently compared to people to decided to pirate rather than pay? If "pirate rather than pay" happens twice as often as "I bought because I saw a pirated copy" then it's a net loss. You could also make the same argument for commercial piracy. For example, let's say that Spielberg goes and creates a film. He wants a song to put in his movie. He pirates it. People watch his film, and the song gains popularity because Spielberg pirated it and put it in his movie. Now, you could say that this is a net gain for the songwriter/performer. Now, the question is this: should we allow movie directors to pirate music for their movies because sometimes it ends up better for the songwriter/performer? I think the answer to that is "no". The musician should be involved in that negotiation with the movie director. Maybe the musician will decide it's in his best interest to license the music for free, maybe he'll decide the movie director should pay him money for it. The musician needs to be involved in this negotiation because he's in the best position to make that choice for himself. This has parallels to the World of Goo situation. They should be involved in the negotiation with the user over a price so that they can decide what is in their own best interest - rather than having the user (i.e. the movie director) unilaterally decide what they want to do with it - because the user (movie director) doesn't have the interests of the game-creator (musician) in mind, they have their own interests in mind, even though there may sometimes be positive effects.
1. The law needs to be built on facts: If there aren't some provable cases, how can the law impose punitive damages fairly? Remember, for the US, there's the cruel and unusual punishment angle - if there are no provable cases of piracy stifling creative expression, then one of the grounds for the law's severity is undermined, and so the argument that the law is unconstitutionally cruel gains weight.
You could make the same exact argument about commercial piracy. You can't *prove* that commercial piracy caused any loss of revenue (in particular, if the pirated copy sells for less than the official copy - because that means you'd have to prove that people would've bought the official copy if a lower cost pirated copy wasn't available). Does that mean commercial piracy should be legal? In the case of filesharing and commercial piracy, we don't have absolute proof, but people have plenty of good reasons to think it's true. Holding filesharing to the "proof" standard, but not holding commercial piracy to the same standard is using a double-standard.
Let's take a look at movies: box office has increased and is at record levels.
Just a small note on this. I looked up the numbers. Once you adjust for inflation and population growth, domestic box office sales peaked in 2002. The 2009 numbers were actually about 15% down from the 2002 numbers. Some piracy advocates have ignored the effects of inflation so that they can argue that the movie industry is doing just great.
Yeash. Your post demonstrates a terrible understanding of economics. (What is it with pirates claiming that they understand economics when they clearly do not?)
The reason those people pay what they do is because they value the product that highly.
People pay because they have two options: (1) Pay and get the product, (2) don't pay and don't get the product. When people decide that the product is worth more to them than the money they're paying, then they buy. Piracy is the third option: don't pay and get the product. You can't reasonably argue that people are going to choose option #1 over option #3 because they "value the product".
The thing you overlook is that most pirates would not consume the product at all if they had to pay for it (in those cases where price rather than something else is the deciding factor in the decision to pirate).
No, we're well aware of that. When games like Demigod are seeing 85% of the people showing up on their servers are pirating it, and 85-90% of the people playing World of Goo pirated it, then you start to get an understanding that - if even a fraction of the pirates paid for it, it would cause a big increase in sales. For example, if 10% of the people pirating Demigod paid for it, then sales would be up by over 50%. Saying "the majority of pirates wouldn't have paid, therefore you're wrong about piracy hurting anybody" is a complete non-sequitur. It doesn't even make sense when I use the generous assumption that 90% of the pirates wouldn't have paid. Don't tell us that we don't know anything about economics.
If the quality is good enough, then people will pay for it.
If it's half-good it may still be worth listening to/watching, but not necessarily worth to pay for. (I'll wait until it comes on TV)
One more point:
I saw some statistics for Modern Warfare 2 a while back. According to their numbers, it sold 5-6 million copies on the XBox and 1 million copies were pirated on the XBox. On the other hand, it sold about 250,000 copies on the PC and was pirated 4 million times on the PC. I added up the numbers and calculated that 86% of the people playing it on the XBox paid for it, but only 6% of the people on the PC paid for it.
It seems to me that this blows a huge hole in the "If the quality is good enough, then people will pay for it." argument. Was the XBox version so much better than the PC version? Is the discrepancy due to the fact that the large majority of XBox buyers actually felt burned because they paid for something but it wasn't worth it? Or, is the explanation (as I believe), that people think not paying is better than paying - provided they have a decent chance of getting away with it? It seems to me that people were less likely to pirate on the XBox because it is less convenient to pirate games on the XBox and they risk losing their XBox Live account. (Remember that Microsoft cracked down on pirates right before the Modern Warfare 2 release.)
As other people have aptly pointed out, there's a lot of hidden complexity to the question. The more I think about piracy, the more I discover new complexities to the situation. I will say up front that I am against piracy.
The question is "Has any creative work failed because of piracy?" I'll assume you mean non-commercial piracy. Although, to be fair, you could ask the same question about commercial piracy. I often see people say that filesharing can't be proven to damage profits - their conclusion, therefore, is that filesharing doesn't damage profits. Those same people will turn around and claim that commercial piracy does harm the creator - though, they can't actually prove it (which seems weirdly inconsistent). Afterall, if someone sells pirated Avatar DVDs for $5, you can't actually prove that any of the buyers would've bought the official $10 copy. Maybe $5 is all they were willing to pay. Or maybe the pirate being in the right place at the right time caused the buyer to think about buying the DVD, but they wouldn't have bought it otherwise. Of course, I'm just playing devil's advocate here - to show that someone could argue that commercial piracy doesn't cause any harm to anyone, and they could even use the "you can't prove it" defense - even though the majority of people believe it does.
To use another example, if a store went bankrupt and that same store had shoplifters, then would you know that it went bankrupt *because* of shoplifters? It's hard to say. First, we don't have the hard numbers about the losses due to shoplifting. Second, you could always argue that a *good* store would make enough money to cope with the losses due to shoplifting. We'd never agree that shoplifting is right - even if we can't actually prove to a shoplifting advocate that "shoplifting causes good businesses to go out of business".
Saying "you can't prove it" doesn't mean that it's not true.
Another complication is the fact that, while piracy causes no *direct* loss (in the same way that shoplifting causes the loss of a valuable item), companies do lose out if people who would've paid don't pay. The effects of this can be pretty subtle. It might mean that the company hires fewer (or lays off some) people who were working on that product. This can result in a downward spiral - fewer workers means fewer improvements, which means fewer customers. On the other hand, if the company makes more money (because people are paying rather than pirating), then that company/creator can go on to make new products with that extra money. Those products that don't exist are part of the "loss" due to piracy.
It's theoretically possible that members of society self-regulate their behavior so that people who would've paid do pay, and people who wouldn't have paid simply pirate. Theoretically, this could lead to a situation where piracy leads to zero losses to a company - because they're not losing any paying customers to piracy. I really have a hard time believing that pirates are good at self-regulating their piracy this way. Besides, I know a few pirates who absolutely do not self-regulate. They used to buy stuff until they discovered how to pirate, and now they look at you like you're crazy if you pay instead of pirate. (One pirate, in particular, bought Adobe's creative suite for $2000 a few years ago, and now he laughs at the idea of paying for anything.)
There's also the issue of "Piracy as it exists" vs "Piracy as a concept". These are two different questions. It's possible that many of the people who are currently pirating are poor (which is part of the reason it's so common in college) and wouldn't have paid for it. The current situation might be skewed slightly towards the "self-regulation" situation I outlined above. On the other hand, there are activists who want piracy fully legalized. If piracy were fully legalized, you might be doing a lot more damage because current paying customers suddenly have no reason not to pirate - society has suddenly said i
Uh, you're right and wrong. You're right that piracy causes publishers to skip doing ports, but you're wrong about the Halo example. Halo was originally developed on the Mac by Bungie. Microsoft bought the company and put them to work on an XBox version. They wanted an exclusive that would pump up their new XBox console. That's the reason it never came out for the Mac.
However, more recently, Epic said they're not porting Gears of War 2 to the PC because piracy was so bad. They had ported Gears of War 1 to the PC a few years after it came out for the XBox, and they got burned, so they said, "Too bad PC gamers". The PC is hugely plagued with piracy and people know it. I saw some statistics for Modern Warfare 2 a while back. According to their numbers, it sold 5-6 million copies on the XBox and 1 million copies were pirated on the XBox. On the other hand, it sold about 250,000 copies on the PC and was pirated 4 million times on the PC. I added up the numbers and calculated that 86% of the people playing it on the XBox paid for it, but only 6% of the people on the PC paid for it. Numbers like that are like a kick to the nuts to publishers.
If the quality is good enough... then people will pay for it. If it's half-good it may still be worth listening to/watching, but not necessarily worth to pay for. (I'll wait until it comes on TV)
Nonsense. Assuming you pay for cable TV right now, and suddenly your cable company gave everyone free cable, you really think all (or even a significant majority) of the current cable-subscribers would just donate money to the cable company - and it would approach anything close to the current income they currently receive? Most people are just going to grab it, use it, and then forget about it.
Information traveling to your computer can be identified by your MAC address. I remember one case where a woman tried this defense - saying it was someone else on her wireless network. It came back to bite her when it was revealed that the data when to a MAC address matching her computer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address
How can this lawyer prove that a friend or someone didn't break into my house and use my computer to download something illegal?
Seems like you could use the same defense on child pornography. It's pretty unlikely, and most people just aren't going to buy a silly "I was framed" defense.
I'm filing your comment under "pirates extend their logic to other domains of life and discover that it's perfectly acceptable to steal physical property". I'm not really surprised.
I lock my car because my mommy yells at me if I dont.
Obviously, your mother's a thief. You are now justified in stealing everything you want from her.
Yup, and everyone who locks their car or puts locks on their house is also a thief. (According to your logic, anyway.)
Nearly all the value of nearly all copyrighted works comes from ideas that the author learned from people who came before and who the author didn't pay...
I agree with you, but I think you should've focused a little more on the fact that *all* human work is based in part on ideas and work from other people. One example I often give is that farmers plant crops using seeds that were selectively bred for thousands of years. This doesn't mean we can deprive farmers of their work -- even if we can legitimately make the claim that the majority of a harvest is due to our "common cultural heritage" of high-yield seeds. (If you look at the natural versions of our crops, they're pathetically small and barely edible. For example, here's where corn came from: http://www.learner.org/courses/biology/archive/images/1290.html )
Instead, people should stick to the point, which is that the copyright laws themselves are absurd, anti-consumer, bad for culture, bad for humanity, bad in almost every way, and thus any action to subvert them is righteous. That argument is more plain, perfectly transparent, and most importantly, it is true.
BS. Perhaps you'd also like to educate us on the fact that Thomas Jefferson was a tyrant for supporting copyright, now?
I'm tired of this nonsense about "terrorism" not having any decent definition. Creating a "state of terror" (as you say) is *NOT* sufficient to be considered terrorism. If it was, then every schoolboy chasing girls in the schoolyard with a spider in his had is guilty of terrorism. Terrorism has some very important attributes - it has to include violence or the threat of violence against a civilian population. This is why war is *NOT* terrorism. Killing soldiers or creating fear among soldiers is not and cannot be considered terrorism. When a bunch of muslim extremists went to the pyramids in Egypt and started killing unarmed civilians a number of years back - that was terrorism. I'm sure we can all agree that, regardless of the "terrorism" label, killing enemy soldiers is generally considered more morally acceptable than killing unarmed civilians. Do you agree or not agree with that statement? Are you going to slink into some kind of amoral framework where killing soldiers is the same thing as killing civilians?
Also, I'm not surprised that the UN can't agree on a definition of terrorism. Many of the nations involved in those kinds of talks want their version of terrorism to be considered morally acceptable. Many Middle Eastern countries are going to build loopholes so that the Palestinians can blow themselves up among Israeli civilians - and they don't want those acts categorized with a negative label like "terrorism".
The big problem with your argument is that you don't have a model for creators to be paid. If creators can't get paid (or get paid insufficiently), then you undermine the production part of the equation. If you don't like the system, then you should promote alternate ways for creators to get paid for their work that actually work well. For example, if tax dollars went to pay creators, then creators would get paid and society copy their work all they want because the creator already got paid. (Unfortunately, this undermines the need for creators to create something truly useful for society. At least copyright forces creators to create something that society wants to buy.) Or, perhaps a shorter copyright so that people can eventually copy it all they want (after the copyright has expired), but the creator still has an exclusive period where he can get paid (although, even that would be a compromise according to your thinking).
To be fair, it's possible to support both copyright and copyleft. It's also true that many of the copyleft promoters, unfortunately, do not support copyright. The earlier article mentioned Doctorow, and he's a well-known piracy advocate. What evidence do I have for that? Well, the fact that he sold "I pirate music" T-shirts and promoted how-to-pirate books on his website should give you an indication. The EFF is slightly more moderate, although they do employ Doctorow, and seem to have a habit of doing what they can to prevent any enforcement of copyright. As far as I can tell, the EFF is involved in legal wrangling to make sure copyright cannot be enforced - making the whole issue a lame duck. I think it's entirely valid for ASCAP to accuse the EFF of working within the legal system to undermine copyright.
Personally, I'm fine with creators using copyright or copyleft. I have to at least give ASCAP a nod for recognizing that some of these groups are not supporting both - they are working to undermine copyright and would like to see copyleft as the replacement. I don't think copyleft undermines copyright, but I think copyleft is used by these people as part of a larger campaign to undermine copyright.
"This practice, which the EFF has been calling extortive and 'mafia-like',"
I think the comparison to the mafia would only work if they went around suing random people. Instead, they're suing people who broke the law. Does the mafia only go after people who break the law?
I'm not even sure what this story is talking about. For the past few years, all the Starbucks in my area (Denver) simply require you to get a (free) Starbucks gift card and sign-up for free wifi. As long as you have some activity on the card within the past 30 days (either putting money on the card or using it to pay for something), then you get free wifi. They say that you only get 2-hours of wifi per day (not two hours total, as this story implies), but I've never been kicked off their system. And there are no restrictions on which websites I visit. (No, I don't have AT&T.)
"Obscurity, not piracy, is the biggest problem writers face. In the 21st century, if you are not making art with the intention of it being copied, you are not making contemporary art."
Interesting fact: Cory Doctorow rips his ideas from other people. The original quote was from Tim O'Reilly. If you watch the internet closely, you'll see him copy other people's quotes and ideas all the time without giving them credit. A few months ago, I saw him regurgitate one author's comment that piracy is like masterbation. Of course, Cory never gives them credit - he's too busy wanting people to believe "his great ideas" aren't directly cribbed from other people. No wonder Cory is such a big fan of piracy - that's how he gets famous - by taking other people's ideas and regurgitating them as if they were his own.
Yeah, those were the days! Back when governments were monarchies, women had no rights, and men could own slaves. Sometimes the patron model just sounds an awful lot like "make somebody else pay for my entertainment".
One major difference between patent trolls and copyright "trolls" is the fact that people and companies can accidentally violate a patent or violate a patent on the way to implementing some technology - they can be victims of patent minefields. Copyright, on the other hand, can't be violated without someone intentionally violating copyright. Yes, we can still agree that the size of the copyright-violation punishment is too large, but I think equating patent trolls and copyright trolls is fallacious. Are we going to call companies who slap shoplifters with overly large penalties "shoplifting trolls", or call groups who hit car thieves with big punishments "car theft trolls"?