Why do pirates, pirate?

Great Debates
61

I’m not an anime fan, so I don’t speak from personal experience, but I think in many cases a hardcore anime fan would have some idea whether an anime is going to be released in the U.S. For one thing, some hardcore fans write to studios specifically to request a translated version of a popular show, and if they receive a response or if requests to the studio prompt them to make a statement on the matter, than the contents of these communications inevitably find their way onto internet message boards. On the other end of things, a sufficiently knowledgeable fan probably has a reasonable sense of when a show is so obscure that it’s highly unlikely to ever be distributed internationally. Yes, they can’t know with certainty, but from a moral standpoint what’s wrong with making decisions based on a reasonably safe assumption?

Likewise, maybe some particular anime creator hates all non-Japanese speakers and genuinely doesn’t want them to enjoy his work, but unless he’s made documented statements to that effect, this is highly unlikely. What’s wrong with making a decision based on the reasonable assumption that the creator won’t particularly care if you watch the show without paying for it unless this effects his ability to profit from it?

In terms of legal questions you have to have hard line rules, but in terms of moral questions in some circumstances it’s perfectly reasonable to say “I have good reason to think this probably won’t harm anyone,” and make decisions accordingly.

That’s exactly what I’m telling you is true, at least in some cases. (Although with “you” refering to some hypothetical person, since I personally don’t even regularly watch anime, much less download it.)

Suppose the creator of Anime X has no intent to ever sell it in the U.S., and doesn’t particularly care if Americans watch it or not, but later that creator becomes well-known in the U.S. through people watching bootleg copies of Anime X. If this recognition then allows them to make a profit by selling some future Anime Y in the U.S., then they’ve absolutely benefited from the illegal downloads. And this is a perfectly reasonable scenario.

I’m not saying anyone downloads anime illegally for the purpose of benefiting the creator. Obviously, they download it because they want to watch it. I’m just saying in some circumstances it does end up benefiting the creator. If all of the involved parties benefit and no one is harmed, how is this immoral? I think that for an act to be immoral you have to have a reasonable basis for expecting someone may be harmed by it.

62

I don’t pirate games – hell, I don’t even play games. I occasionally burn others copies of my CDs or accept a burnt copy from them. Very rarely I have received pirated software. So maybe this whole post is off-topic. Decide for yourself. But I don’t feel bad for the ‘victims’ of piracy or feel guilty when I infrequently ‘steal’ their work.

Simply put, I don’t agree with copyrights and patents.

Average, everyday working people create, increase our quality of life, and produce valuable information to society all the time for nothing but a one-time paycheck. Information is valuable – until it is distributed. Then it is worthless. It is valuable because of demand, but worthless because of its near-infinite supply. Most of us don’t even realize it, but we’re paid because of our potential to produce valuable information in the future. A milk cow is only worth money for the milk it will deliver tomorrow. No matter how much milk it gave us before, it is worth nothing if it can’t produce any more. For some reason, inventors and artists have tricked us all into paying them in perpetuity for the milk they gave us yesterday.

By a quirk of circumstance, our society has until recently been fooled into thinking medium and message were economically inseparable, at least when it came to music and movies. And now that business model is falling apart because technology is separating the information content from the medium and exposing the flaws in the system. People bought records because vinyl, as the only method of playing a song, was valuable to them. Movies were an excellent experience all around – AC, comfortable seating, great sound. Who cared if the movie was any good? That was only half the point. Anybody can tell a story, but it takes celluloid and a projector with a huge screen to be worth 8 bucks.

Consider books. Text can be digitized and zipped around the internet for damn near free, but the book industry has largely been spared the recent upsurge in internet piracy, precisely because the computer screen is such a terrible medium for reading books. Books were bought, and still are, not because of the content but for the pre-filled container. They are portable and easy to manipulate. Look at the price structure. Nobody pays less for a bad book; they just don’t buy it at all. But they do pay less for paperbacks and more for hardcovers with nice glossy illustrations. Large books demand a higher price simply because they cost more to make.

I do feel sorry for the software guys and engineers, simply because they are making money off of the ‘go to work, get a paycheck’ model while the company owns the copyright and/or patent and some guy with a marketing degree is collecting the royalties.

This is where I differ with mainstream thought on the subject. Does my boss own his management technique? Is it HIS? Can nobody else do anything whatsoever with it? Do I own the way I organize my files? Both cases are of valuable, productive information that has been created by people, copied by others and passed on with modifications to the community at large. Technical manuals are filled with this stuff. Society as a whole benefits whenever smart people go to work, whether they be songwriters or bankers.

As it stands now, I don’t know how give songwriters, movie makers and game producers incentive to keep doing what they do. Their work is valuable, don’t misunderstand me. It is just that their product is worthless, or very near. Maybe advertisements on the box and elsewhere would be enough, like they are with TV and radio. I would support a vastly reduced (say, to five years or less) term of copyright for the purpose. I don’t know the solution but I know the current and recent business model, as backed up by the US and other countries’ Constitutions, is the problem. And treating average citizens like criminals is not the answer.

63

If copyright becomes unenforceable then the only viable business model for creative work will be to physically control the venue where it is displayed.

The movie industry could operate profitably with only theatrical releases. It did so for years before VCRs became popular. The videogame industry could revert to its old arcade business model. Musicians can abandon the recording studio and make their money off live performances.

Most creative types could survive just fine without copyright. They’ll just move their act behind closed doors and charge admission to get in. What will vanish is the sort of home entertainment that most people have come to expect as the norm.

64

That’s, like, your opinion, man.

And I don’t believe you. I think there is a continuum of ways to handle this situation, with granting full monopoly rights to creators and punishing anyone who misuses their ‘license’ on one end, and actively discouraging distribution on the other.

And copyright is unenforceable. That’s not an opinion, but fact. ‘Licenses’ are a joke and people are only paying for convenience and a clear conscience.

The way I see it, the old way is already on the way out. Copyrighted content is on millions of computers worldwide, it is spreading, and the publishers have no control over personal hard drives. They used to have control over the medium, and were fooled into thinking it applied to content too. Now they are facing the facts that they have no control over content, and are scrounging to gain a semblance of what they lost by trying to take control of people’s hard drives and the internet. It isn’t going to happen. Either copyright will be reformed, which is unlikely, or the recording studio lobby will pressure the government into waging war yet again against a majority of its own citizens, a la the drug war, which is already starting to happen.

As far as I can tell, the artists aren’t being effected one bit by this, but the record studios are going crazy trying to tell us how all their mistreated musicians are being put into the poorhouse.

And I realize this thread started off about games, but I have no experience with them. Everything I say applies to music and to a lesser extent movies. For all I know, gaming is a completely different industry with different dynamics and none of this applies. But I doubt it.

65

What’s with the drippy hippie shit? I’m talking business models here.

You said “I don’t know how give songwriters, movie makers and game producers incentive to keep doing what they do.” I’m pointing out that’s not really a problem. If they can’t make money on DVDs or digital downloads they’ll make money on live performances or videogame arcades instead. The key is controlling access to the content. If copyright becomes unenforcable then all content producers have to do is switch to a different business model where they control people’s ability to physically enter the venue where the content is available. It’s not like this is something revolutionary. Videogames started out on an arcade business model and could easily return to it. Movies used to only be shown in theaters. We can return to that.

Well then what do you propose? In you last post you said you didn’t know what to do to make sure creators got paid.

I’m not talking about actively discouraging distribution. It’s simply free enterprise in action. If studios can’t make money from releasing DVDs they’ll just stop doing it.

66

This is just flatly untrue. Every EB Games I have ever walked into has a rack of used PC games for sale. I own many games I’ve bought used.

67

Except they don’t control alternatives to the content. People went to movie theatres and arcade machines back in the day because, hell what else were you going to do on a Friday night? Now with youtube and flash gaming and internet message boards, there are a lot more alternatives to captive business models and the former economics might not work out anymore.

Besides, even if you control access, people are still going to try and find ways of jailbreaking it. They’ll sneak cameras into your cinemas and buy 2nd hand arcade machines and reverse engineer the ROMs…

68

Sorry, I like to quote the Dude from The Big Lebowski when people assert their opinions with such conviction. It was a joke, sorry.

And I’m saying that copyright is already unenforceable, and the industry isn’t returning to that.

I already gave at least two examples of how we could incentivize artists. 1) Advertising. 2) A reasonable short-term copyright.

They could also simply make money off the package, like they did before and book publishers do now. People will still buy cds for the fancy artwork, lyrics, and convenient package. They just won’t pay as much as before when the content is available for free online.

People lose money when the business landscape changes. Ask the whale-oil and hansom-cab magnates. I won’t shed a tear if rock musicians in the future aren’t as wildly rich as they are now. I will be upset if they can’t make a living, but I don’t see that happening ever. Our society loves its entertainment and won’t stop paying for it. They are just not going to pay for it over and over in perpetuity any longer.

69

But I thought you said copyright was already unenforceable. How is does making it short-term change that?

Advertising will provide some income, but it’s very easy to strip advertising off music. It’s not like you can embed it in the performance the way you can do product placement in movies and games.

No, I suspect the real long-term business model is going to revolve around live performances. The internet will be flooded with tons of free music from bands who are trying to get a fan base. But they’ll make their money off ticket and merchandise sales.

70

It would be enormously easier to enforce copyrights on music less than 2-3 years old than it is to enforce essentially the entire catalog of 20th and 21st century music. If there was a copy protection scheme that automatically disabled after a few years, only the most hardcore consumers would take the trouble to strip it when they can just wait awhile.

Also, It would crack down on institutional piracy, as companies are under closer scrutiny than your average joe. Sony wouldn’t be able to just blatantly plagiarize or republish a Time-Warner work as soon as it was released. This would allow publishers to make money off the medium without fear of diluting their consumer base.

I actually think the change in philosophy would keep people honest. Instead of artists owning their work and charging for it forever, fans would know that they can either pay now for the hot new music, or wait it out and get it free or extremely cheap later. It shifts the paradigm from “Artist owns the music and is generously letting the fans have access to it” to “WE (the consumer) own the music and are generously letting you (the artist) make money off of it temporarily in order to give an incentive to make more”.

Piracy would still happen, but it would be smaller in magnitude and easier to contain (maybe I’m just an optimist here?).

All in all, I don’t know what will happen or what will work best. I’m just illustrating the fact that there are more options than just 80 year copyrights (and the associated anti-piracy tactics) and keeping everything behind closed doors.

71

Maybe part of it is me living in a very urban area were consoles are a lot more popular than PCs, but either way im sure you won’t see any new games being resold anymore because they only allow you a certain number of installs.

72

Which ones, specifically? “Spore” has been mentioned but you do know they backed down from that, right?

Of the top 10 PC titles right now, which allow limited installs?

The reason used PC games aren’t as easy to come by as console games is that PC games aren’t selling as well. Hell, I find NEW PC games are much harder to come by than new console games. And frankly, the marketplace doesn’t seem very impressed with the crop of new games out there. Here are the top selling PC game titles for the week of July 27:

  1. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
  2. Nancy Drew: The Phantom of Venice
  3. World of Warcraft: Battle Chest
  4. Spore Creature Creator
  5. World of Warcraft
  6. The Sims 2: IKEA Home Stuff Expansion
  7. Diablo Battle Chest
  8. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
  9. World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack
  10. The Sims 2 FreeTime Expansion Pack

I mean, what a lame-ass lineup that is, huh? Aside from the continuing phenomenon that is World of Warcraft, which is subscription-based anyway, it’s all expansion packs (counting the Creature Creator) and reissues of old games. “IKEA Home Stuff Expansion” for the Sims, holy crap.

73

Spore and Mass Effect were going to use a method of copy protection that “phoned home” every ten days to their servers to validate your cd key, you couldn’t play the games if your internet or their servers were down. They backed of from this and went with the bioshock “3 installs and you are out” method after massive complaints.

74

The more I read of your posts, the more I realize that we agree with each other on the vast majority of the issues. It all comes down to this one: I believe that copyright law exists to provide the creator of a work with full legal control over its distribution–including the ability to limit or prevent distribution. Financial issues were clearly the prime driving motivation, but I believe that the law was written the way it was on purpose.

You stated above that the intent of the law was to control the flow of money only. This would mean that the intent of the law does not match the implementation of the law.

It’s really a moot point, though. Copyright law says you can write a book and prevent it from being published. Neither of us is a lawyer (at least, I don’t think you are), and it appears that neither of us wants to dig through historical law documents to find out how it got that way.

As is the scenario that the creator of Anime X can’t afford to arrange U.S. distribution until his work achieves some measure of financial success in Japan. By the time he can afford to distribute here, the market has been destroyed by illegal copies. Again, your ethics and morals are your own, but don’t try to justify them by saying you’re not hurting anyone when you pirate copyrighted works (unless, of course, the copyright owners have clearly stated that they don’t care, in which case they’re not really pirate copies).

Unfortunately, that’s becoming a more and more common feeling. You want to enjoy the fruits of creative people’s labors, but you don’t want them to get paid for it. If I create a book, song, movie, videogame, or painting and nobody buys it, then I will find something else to do with my time, unless I’m independently wealthy or so caught up in my art that I don’t care about the money.

I’m biased. I’ll admit that. I have a patent and 23 published books. I get no royalties from the patent, but without the possibility of patent protection, the company I did the work for wouldn’t have paid me for my time. My royalties are the only payment I get from writing the books (the up-front check is an advance against future royalties). I would not have put thousands of hours into writing if I couldn’t look forward to the royalty checks. And I already mentioned upthread that I’ll never create another computer game after my experience with shareware.

  1. You can’t make any money selling advertising on the packaging if people are downloading the content without packages, and stripping advertising content from standard file formats is quite easy.

  2. If copyright is already unenforceable, then how can artists be provided incentive by a short-term copyright?

75

InvisibleWombat, did you read any of what I wrote? I know it is mostly a hijack, but if you are going to quote it, it would be nice if you didn’t ask questions I already answered and bring up points I already addressed.

I only put short-term copyrights out there to illustrate one bit of gray on a line Pochacco thinks is black and white. I’m not married to the idea or anything, I’m just philosophically in tune with copyrights as limited to a practical incentive for artistic creation, opposed to a ruthless, lifelong monopoly.

I made a distinction between content and packaging. Until now publishers have been selling packages when they thought they were selling content. That distinction is coming to the forefront now that digital technology makes it easy to separate them. Now that packaging is optional and information can be transferred for almost free, the unpleasant fact is laid bare that easily copied information, while valuable, is worthless economically. Or are all the locals, who freely breathe the oxygen my plants produce, pirates for not compensating me? If you can’t contain it, and it is easily obtained for free, people won’t pay you for it. That is an economic fact, not some immoral opinion on my part.

My claim is that publishers can still make money on the packaging, and that artists don’t deserve more than a one-time paycheck on their content, any more than a plumber deserves lifelong compensation for the novel solder joint he came up with. Or a scientist deserves lifelong compensation for research she did fifty years ago. In all cases society is better off because of creative people’s work. I don’t see why artists are somehow different enough to own their creations, while when it comes to any other kind of skilled labor, creative work is expected to immediately be freely available for copying and modification.

The only question in my mind is how to restructure the industry so that artists can keep working for a paycheck while the rest of us don’t have to be subject to the draconian measures we already have propping up a dying business model.

76

All of it, actually. You made two directly contradictory statements (copyrights are unenforceable, and short-term copyrights could provide incentive for creative people), and I put them side-by-side in the quote box and pointed out the discrepancy.

Cats are very hard to contain and are easily obtained for free. Does that mean it’s moral for me to take your cat if it gets out? I don’t believe that anything you can steal easily should be free.

Still true with a few things, but going away fast. Where’s the value in packaging for music? Why would a publisher pay an artist a thousand bucks for a song when the public is saying things like “I don’t feel bad for the ‘victims’ of piracy or feel guilty when I infrequently ‘steal’ their work”?

You don’t get it. The vast majority of artists get less than a one-time paycheck, not more. Royalties aren’t a fat reward for snooty artists that are better than you. They’re a way for publishers to push the risk back on the artist. If my book succeeds, I make a bunch of money (and so does the publisher). If it flops, the publisher doesn’t have to pay me anything. If the publisher paid me a (fair) flat fee to write it, I’d be happy, but they won’t do that because they’d be taking all of the risk.

Here’s the problem: I don’t believe that my writing and creative skills make me in any way different from a plumber, doctor, musician, or woodworker. You are willing to pay for what they do on an hourly, daily, or by-the-job basis because it directly benefits you. You are not, however, willing to pay for what I do, even if it does directly benefit you.

As long as artists and writers can’t get paid a salary for their work, we’ll have to depend on royalties. And as long as we depend on royalties, we get screwed every time you “steal” our work.

Yep. It sure is draconian for people to expect to be paid for what they do.

77

So did Pochacco. Read post #70.

And yet most people would disagree with you. Stray cats are picked up and taken home on a daily basis. Most of us give the owners a fair chance to claim them (and the cats a chance to find their way home) but a stray cat is undoubtedly fair game for the taking if you want it. The only way this differs from music is that musicians voluntarily let the cat loose and expect us to pay them for it.

I don’t know what kind of packaging will sell. CDs with fancy poster-sized artwork and an in-depth artist biography? USB drives with the album endoded in every possible codec? Anyway, where are you getting a thousand dollars from? If the market sets an equilibrium price per song far below what we were used to, that doesn’t make the people who take advantage criminals. Publishers need to do some R&D into what kind of packaging will sell, since the price of their content is in the gutter. The only thing holding the charade up is copyright.

Artists will still make money on live shows. They can still record and distribute their own work. Why you are defending the publishers who take advantage of artists?

This is what shows you didn’t read what I wrote. I repeatedly insisted that I want the artist to get paid. Hell, I’ll pay them, if they’d accept a substantial pay cut. I only object to them getting paid over and over again forever after on something that didn’t take them a week at most to work on.

So you agree that the royalty system is the problem? And it is a joke to call taking something that is freely available ‘stealing’?

“Draconian” refers to corrupting consumers’ computers, refusing to let them freely use the product they bought, and suing millions of teenagers at a thousand dollars a song for doing what amounts not paying me for the air my plants provide them.

78

Exactly. Now you’re getting it.

If easily copied information is worthless then creators will put their effort into creating things that aren’t easily copied. Musicians will spend more time touring and less time in the studio. Game designers will make arcade games, not games you can play on your PC at home. Movie studios will stop releasing DVDs.

In fact you could eliminate copyright entirely and creators could still make a living.

Paradoxically, the biggest impact would be on the consumers. There will be tons and tons of free stuff but most of it will be crappy bootlegs or amateur productions. The professional work will only be available in venues where the owner has physical control over access.

Because it encourages wider dissemination of the work. Copyright protection provides an incentive for artists to distribute their work publicly instead of keeping it locked behind closed doors for a limited audience.

79

I wasn’t talking about stray cats. I’m talking about grabbing YOUR cat if he gets out. But that’s irrelevant. The point is that I don’t believe it’s okay to take something just because it’s hard to get people to stop taking it.

How, exactly, is a painter, author, or songwriter going to make money on live shows? A lot of songwriters can’t even SING! Being able to create is not the same as being able to perform.

I’m DEFINITELY not defending the publishers. I don’t like their business model, but my response to that isn’t, “screw it; let’s just steal the products and punish the artists for it.”

Of course I read it. But you didn’t even read what you QUOTED. I said, “You don’t get it. The vast majority of artists get less than a one-time paycheck, not more.” A typical first-time novelist gets an advance of $3,000 or less for a book that probably took over 1,000 hours to write, proof, and edit. Nonfiction authors get less than that. An “advance” is effectively a loan against future royalties. If the book bombs, the publisher can actually take back a portion of the advance. If you could provide authors with a paycheck at minimum wage, it would be a RAISE. So pardon me if I’m not impressed with your offer of a pay cut.

But they’re getting paid a pittance in exchange for not getting a paycheck up front! Sure, I did fine on the book that sold 50,000 copies, but how about the one I spent four full-time months on (and several part-time months) that only sold 2,000 copies? Oh, goody. I made less than half of minimum wage on that one.

And “a week”? Where did that come from? Songwriters, maybe, but not the vast majority of copyright holders.

I agree that the royalty system is a problem. I don’t agree that it’s the problem, and I don’t see an alternative–especially when people think it’s okay to steal copyrighted work.

It depends on your definition of “freely available.” There’s a dude on the street corner that’ll sell you a $200 stereo out of the back of his truck for $50. That’s “freely available.” It’s also stolen property, just like the bootlegs you’re buying (or trading, or taking for free, or whatever).

I do not, under any circumstances, condone what those twits are doing. DRM has been an unmitigated disaster. If that’s what’s pissing you off, then it changes this whole conversation.

80

DRM is what’s pissing me off. I see it as the death throes of a dying business model. Copyright itself is something I don’t agree with philosophically, for reasons already stated. But I’m realistic enough to see that I am in a tiny minority for those beliefs and expect that copyright will keep on chugging along long after I’m dead and gone. Copyrights don’t piss me off; I just don’t believe in them.

It sometimes pisses me off that people assume because I disagree with copyrights that I rampantly pirate copyrighted work. 99% of the music, movies and software I possess was bought legitimately. It’s not an opinion I frequently share, though; mostly because it never comes up in conversation, but also because since my high school years, it’s the only opinion I’ve held that I feel is so extremely rare. Even your million-copies-a-day bootlegger will say he agrees with copyrights philosophically. He’s just trying to make a buck and stick it to the man.

Copyright isn’t quite a success story these days. And I happen to believe that there are other ways to incentivize distribution. Just because I don’t have a well thought out, bullet-proof plan to implement a replacement to the copyright system doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.

Anyway, I’m obviously not going to convert anybody. At least I got to share my unique perspective, which was the point of this thread anyway.