Piracy for the Masses
January 1st, 2005 3:59 am

In response to Nick Bradbury’s startling statistic, I dashed off some thoughts on piracy.

Here’s my overarching theory on piracy. 90% of the people who pirate anything (movies, music, software, etc.) would never buy it if piracy didn’t exist.

I think that the majority of folks simply like free things and if they can’t get it free, they just walk away from it. It’s a kind of theft by convenience.

Many people have probably downloaded at least one “pirated” album. Now, did that mean they didn’t go to the store and buy it because they got it for free. I know that I have lots of music that I would NEVER buy, so if I download it, am I really harming its creators?

Maybe then, the real value is not in the actual file, but in the experience it gives. In that case, how does software fit into the picture? What is the subjective experience that one is ostensibly paying for?

If someone successfully cracks FeedDemon and then uses for a day, but never comes back to it, have they harmed you? What quantity of usage would they need to acheive to have “required” some form of payment? You say 20 days, seemingly, but what if those 20 days are spaced out over the course of a year?

Take a more “productive” application that might help you create something else that you sell. Does that software have more intrinsic value because it is capable of creation of saleable goods? Is a programming IDE more valuable than a MP3 player application because it can create value and not just experience? When we answer these questions, we must then tie a value to those potential creations or experiences.

So, if the very nature of the value of software or other digital goods is in question, it doesn’t make sense to try to apply the old-guard laws to a new-guard economy. It cannot be called theft if I listen to an MP3 once and then delete it, because that is no different than hearing the song on the radio and never buying the album because you don’t like it.

At the root is this question, is the person using pirated goods in place of something they would purchase? If not, then the case for the illegality of all this piracy becomes very indistinct in my eyes. If so, then I think the oldguard laws of theft and property apply the same as if I stole toilet paper from the grocery store.

So, then, it comes to us, the developers and creators of the goods to make our goods indispensable, so that the only options are to purchase or to steal, but never to do without.

Posted in Technology, Web Technology by Alex Ezell
RSS 2.0
Patrick Schriner
January 1st, 2005 8:30 am

I would like to add that some companies profit enormeously from piracy, especially private piracy. There is a reason why all MS Software has such a ridiculous copy protection, while all game software if pretty protected. If you want a monopoly, it´s (for starters) way more productive for your end goal if everyone can use your software, even if they don´t pay. Once you´ve reached your target and destroyed the market you can still think about tightening on piracy.

Corporate Piracy is completely different, and that´s where the money is made.

Of course “small” software, that are target at a small audience, can suffer substantially from piracy.

The Betamax Guillotine
January 4th, 2005 7:24 pm

The Philosophical Economics of Piracy
From Nick Bradbury This week, 90% of the attempts to activate FeedDemon have been with cracked serial numbers. via Spitting Llamas: -snip- Take a more “productive” application that might help you create something else that you sell. Does that software

Daniel Howard
January 26th, 2005 7:18 pm

To begin with, people clearly feel that there is a difference between tangible property and intellectual property. Even the U.S. government makes a distinction: the words in a book are copyrighted from a certain number of years but the physical book itself can be owned exclusively by one person for an eternity. Since the copyright and the physical book seem different and are governed by different laws and even are “violated” differently, people don’t really equate violating the copyright with the theft of the physical book. They just aren’t the same and every attempt in the world to try to equate piracy with theft is going to be ignored by most people.

Second, intellectual property just isn’t covered in religion. The Bible, the Koran and nearly all other religious texts don’t cover it. Piracy is illegal but is it a sin? I think that there’s a pretty good case to say, “No, it’s not a sin.” (I’ll leave the long and involved argument to others.) You may agree or you may disagree but you can conclude that it isn’t obvious. It isn’t obviously a sin so it’s going to have less force than an obvious sin like physical theft. Physical theft is obviously both illegal and sinful so people are more concerned about that than, say, cheating on their income taxes.

Third, while I agree that piracy is illegal and should be avoided, I have little patience for businesspeople who know that piracy is rampant but build a very consumer oriented product which is prone to piracy and then complain about how the pirates drove them out of business or limited their success. Piracy is a fact and, if your business fails because it ignores that fact, then you are a lousy businessman. If you started a software business in the last 15 years using the assumption that you’d never lose a sale to piracy, then that’s your fault, not the world’s and not even the pirates’.