Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Piracy
A lot of people were arguing with Scott in Rym's thread, so I'm shifting this over here to relieve Rym's butthurt.
To begin with, I'm going to weigh in on this point of Scott's:
Let's say somebody downloads a copy of the latest hit movie for free, and watches it. They then never pay to see the movie. This begs a question. If the person were unable to see that movie for free, would they have paid to see it, or would they simply have not seen it? These are the questions I tried to answer inthis thread about pirating Spore.
I strongly believe that if a study were to be done, you would find that the people who pirate instead of purchasing something, and would have purchased in the absence of piracy, are an extremely small group of people. Again, when you look at the kind of thing Valve did in Russia. They found out that people were pirating games not because they were unwilling to pay. They were pirating because they wanted the game on the same release date as everyone else, and also lower prices. Valve obliged, and piracy dropped like a rock. People who knew how to pirate, and had no qualms about pirating, ceased to do so. They were not moved by legal pressures, but by market pressures.That is just silly. From a purely economic standpoint, the choice to pay $10 rather than $0 can only be due to irrationality. "Market pressures" cannot possibly provide an explanation for this behaviour. However, the question remains - why would people pay money when they can pirate? I think it's because most of them have a desire to support the creators of the art.
As Timo said in the other thread,
To begin with, I'm going to weigh in on this point of Scott's:
Posted By: AprechePosted By: lackofcheeseWhy? What's your reasoning behind this?The reasoning is thus.
Let's say somebody downloads a copy of the latest hit movie for free, and watches it. They then never pay to see the movie. This begs a question. If the person were unable to see that movie for free, would they have paid to see it, or would they simply have not seen it? These are the questions I tried to answer inthis thread about pirating Spore.
I strongly believe that if a study were to be done, you would find that the people who pirate instead of purchasing something, and would have purchased in the absence of piracy, are an extremely small group of people. Again, when you look at the kind of thing Valve did in Russia. They found out that people were pirating games not because they were unwilling to pay. They were pirating because they wanted the game on the same release date as everyone else, and also lower prices. Valve obliged, and piracy dropped like a rock. People who knew how to pirate, and had no qualms about pirating, ceased to do so. They were not moved by legal pressures, but by market pressures.That is just silly. From a purely economic standpoint, the choice to pay $10 rather than $0 can only be due to irrationality. "Market pressures" cannot possibly provide an explanation for this behaviour. However, the question remains - why would people pay money when they can pirate? I think it's because most of them have a desire to support the creators of the art.
This is why non-commercial piracy is not harmful. It's not actually taking any money from anyone. It's just giving enjoyment to people who would not have paid otherwise. I mean, how many people pirate Photoshop who could not possibly afford it? Yet, look at all the good that comes from these people becoming great artists because they were able to learn these tools early on due to piracy.As Timo pointed out in the other thread, your analysis here is flawed. If someone buys a bootleg copy for $5, we know that they were willing to pay some amount X, which is greater than or equal to $5. This could have been $20, $50, $200, or even $300. We can place minimum and maximum bounds on the amount "lost" - it is necessarily between $5 and $200. We may not be able to demonstrate what this amount is for an individual person, but we can demonstrate aggregates over a number of people. In the case where someone gets it for free, we know that the amount they would have paid for it is between $0 and $200. We can't prove that it's any more than zero, but it evidently is.
However, I did say that printing and selling Mickey Mouse T-Shirts is wrong. And this is why. Let's say I print some for myself. Ok, that's just personal use, and is fair use even now. You can't regulate what people do privately. But if they start to sell them, then there is no doubt that is taking money away from the rights-holder. If I burn up some copies of the latest video game, and sell them to people, that means those people were indeed willing to pay for that game. It also means that that money is going to me instead of the people it should be going to. By buying the game from me, the bootlegger, they have proven they were willing to pay for it. In this case, there is a demonstrable and quantifiable damage.
If I give someone a free copy of Windows 7, we can't assume they would have paid anything for it. If piracy were not possible, they probably would have continued using Windows XP or Ubuntu or whatever. But if I sell someone a copy of Windows 7 for $5. That means I have demonstrably "stolen" $5 from Microsoft.
You see, the way they do the math with copyright stuff is all backwards. Let's pretend the copy of Windows 7 that I sold would cost $200 at retail. I sold it for $5. Right now, they would argue that I stole $200 from Microsoft. That is bullshit. Those $200 don't actually exist. There is no proof that anyone was willing to give Microsoft $200, and did not do so. There is only proof that someone would have given Microsoft $5, if they had put their product at that price. I'm still wrong, because I stole $5 from Microsoft, but not $200 wrong. If I gave the copy away for free, I would count that as stealing $0 from Microsoft. There is no evidence to suggest that Microsoft would have sold an extra legitimate copy had my illegitimate copy not existed.
The assumption that every bootleg or pirated copy of something is equivalent to a lost legitimate sale needs to go away.
As Timo said in the other thread,
Posted By: TimoThe fact that there is no way to prove the loss of a sale in an individual transaction does not mean that there is no provable loss of sales due to piracy in general.In any case, Scott, you yourself have said that you don't wish to have a legal discussion, yet you resort to a strict burden of proof of loss of sale due to an individual as if you were trying to enact a law. I also think that in doing so, you're entirely missing the moral questions.
Comments
Yeah, we invented this great technology that will vastly and rapidly change our society for the better. But people don't like change. It will disrupt our current business models and economies in the short terms. Lots of people will get upset. Yeah, let's just use laws to hold us back and make the old geezers happy, since only old people vote. Sounds like a plan.
Copyright issues aside, my opinion is that commercial piracy is only an issue when people are misled into thinking that they are contributing to the original creator of the content. Rather than make an arbitrary distinction between commercial and non-commercial sharing, it's enough that people have the tools to make an informed decision. If this requires legal recourse, then I think the maximum effort necessary is to enforce something along the lines of the Creator-Endorsed Mark.
Skip to 30:40 for about eight minutes of positions on piracy, the interweb generation and Google Books. I find is interesting that a person who essentially is at the head of European Digital Rights seems to "get it" and is planning to do something about "it" (and that one of the ideas is one I mentioned in another thread). Ars Technica has a related article.
PS: The first 15 minutes are an interesting insight into the philosophy behind social market economics (or as you might call it mixed market economics).
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/dvds-and-blu-rays-will-now-carry-two-unskippable-government-warnings/
WTF? Seriously? It's like they want people to pirate.
1) Make a DVD/BD player that is region-free and automatically skips that shit.
2) Sell it through a weird Chinese import/export junket that's probably run by Triads. DealExtreme is probably your best bet.
3) ????
4) PROFIT!!!! In the UK, they actually had a preview before The Avengers for the new Ice Age movie that stressed how "seeing it in theaters will be an experience worth paying for" and "the ticket sales from other Ice Age movies provided the support necessary for this fantastic new film!"
If all my blood hadn't been trapped in my raging Avengers nerd-boner, it would have just rushed to my brain and killed me by aneurysm.