So what if you don’t distribute the unlicensed version to others, and you buy the liscenced version as soon as it becomes available in your language. In that case, you haven’t reduced their sales of the show one iota. Do you still contend it’s immoral?
Take the scenario I laid out and follow it to its conclusion. The author never puts out a legal copy because the market has been destroyed by illegal copies. You never have an opportunity to buy it, and he never makes a dime from it. Darned right it’s immoral.
P.S. I’d be interested to know how many of the people who say, “I’ll pirate it now and then buy it when it’s legally available” actually will. My experience in the shareware world says that well over 99% would enjoy it for a little while and forget about it. When the legal copy becomes available, the thought of paying up won’t even cross their minds.
P.P.S. I’m neither stating nor implying that you’d be one of those that wouldn’t pay up. For all I know, you keep detailed files of everything you pirate and arrange to get checks to the artist/author as the opportunity arises.
P.P.P.S. For those who do this, why don’t you just mail the artist/author a check (or send them a PayPal payment, or whatever) right at the moment when you pirate their work?
It also does not help anti-piracy efforts when it’s the authorities themselves doing the pirating. A DVD burner and pirating operation was recently discovered in a Bangkok army camp. Story here.
Well, I made a conscious effort to buy CDs of all the audiocassette tape copies that were given to me way back when I was a young teenager. On the other hand, I never made the effort to upgrade my purchased bootleg copies of the Tick cartoons, because I never actually got around to watching the bootlegs even once (and thus didn’t feel obligated). So, you tell me.
(Oh, and with actual shareware, aren’t you allowed to enjoy it for a little while and forget about it? I thought you were only supposed to buy it if you liked it and kept using it, not if you rapidly discarded it.)
In the last dozen years at least the only pirated content I have gotten are all purchased homerolled DVDs made from old VHS tapes recorded from television broadcasts. And I haven’t gotten that much of that. So it’s fairly easy to keep track.
- It has no market price, as it hasn’t been released. 2) If they actually wanted my money, they’d release a DVD. 3) If they release a DVD, I’m going to buy it, 'cause my bootlegs are crappy artifacty buggy low-res TV rips. So they’d get my money if they did.
None of them hold water. They are all just rationalizations for being immoral and breaking the law.
That’s not true. There are many other viable business models. The economic problem with unenforceable copyrights, for content creators, is that the goods they create become non-excludable (ie, you can’t stop people who didn’t pay for them from enjoying them). Your solution (which I think will never happen for a variety of logistics reasons) is to implement another way of effectively making the good excludable. If we build a fence and charge people to get past it, our information is worth something again. Given the nature of copying information (you only have to make one mistake, and it’s uncontrollable), I don’t think this is too likely to work for long.
One obvious set of solutions to the problem of non-excludable goods is to embrace the non-exclusivity and deal with the fact that there will always be free riders. One way of doing this is to implement a tax. Everyone will pay a little bit for content production, and there will be some method of paying various creators for their effort. This also leaves something to be desired, but it might not be as bad as many people think, and it’s certainly going to be easier to have the government collect taxes from everyone than it is to enforce on theatergoers the kind of security that would be required to keep a movie inside a movie theater.
Another way of embracing the non-excludability of goods is to move to a patronage system. The basic setup of such a system is that a given creator will agree to release his work to the world after a certain amount of money is paid to him. This amount can be whatever the creator wants it to be, as long as he can convince people to pay it. This is one of the “best” models for future payment, both because it doesn’t require onerous security, and because it’s completely compatible with copyright laws. Most other solutions require massive engineering or legislative changes. All that this one requires is for individual creators to start doing it.
I don’t know if anyone in this thread seems to really understand how software industry works. Other than games, most other software survives by continually updating the same product. Think operating systems, antivirus and other security products… it’s not the same as making a song. You don’t just create software, release it and you’re done, and then just rake in the products. Releasing software is a constantly demanding job; there will be more and more things that will crop up with time that need to be fixed. New operating systems require new versions of your products; new service packs and updates require testing to make sure everything works. It’s constantly a work in progress. Pirates increase the strain of resources on support, testing, development (in our company, the vast majority of development time is essentially fixing things - adding ‘new features’ means expanding support to new technology as it’s released, so our product doesn’t become obsolete).
There is a time for free software, and if hobbyists can do it and serve the market, great. Most software companies need payment in order to provide software that works properly and continues to do so. This is not cheap.
There are horrible, horrible anti-piracy measures out there - and by all means boycott such companies - I sure do. I didn’t buy Bioshock or Mass Effect even after they recanted, and I agree that used PC games are a very, very sore spot. However, it’s going to be a really choppy sea for software developers that basically rely on an honor system. As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve seen it in action - people pirate software without thinking. They become downright petulant about it when we expect them to pay.
Here’s a possible backup to some of the arguments on this thread. One of the commenters here (very first comment under the main story argues that everyone, from writers to musicians to (presumably) game creators can make more money without copyright. He claims that, as a writer, he repudiates copyright on everything he produces, actively encouraging people to reprint and steal his work at will, and that he makes more money from it than if he’d kept copyright.
I know I’m late to the game here and this thread appears to be winding down, but here is something I feel I need to point out: Many people make a distinction between taking physical property vs taking information, and they argue that taking information is ok because the creator has his/her original still, unlike in the case of physical property.
What these people are missing (IMO) is that all of our rules are made up and taking something physical from someone else is no more inherently wrong than taking information. The reason we consider either action wrong is because society has established rules regarding both phsyical property and intellectual property, and those rules are generally put in place for economic reasons.
When you realize that all of this stuff is just made up anyways, it tends to remove the emotion from the question (regarding rightness or wrongness) and moves it toward the more appropriate question of what makes sense economically and for society as a whole.
Excellent points.
At last! Someone who has said it like it is.
If you dislike a law, and consequently break it because you think it is immoral or inconvenient or it’s just easier for you to disregard the law - that way anarchy lies. Work towards getting the law changed if you don’t like it.
What I find immoral is that a company can continue to charge the same price for a product, long after it has shipped enough units to cover it’s production costs, and has turned a profit. If they have no consideration for the customer, other than, ‘How best can we fleece them?’, why should I have any consideration for their difficulties? Like shipbuilders, they have had their time, and they either diversify, or die.
How much profit would you find acceptable before they - what? Stop selling it? Give it away? Presumably they’re still selling it because people want to buy it.
I presume you think the ‘fleecing’ bit is where they charge you something for it. If you don’t like the price or their practices - don’t buy it. Basically it’s capitalism: no, they don’t really have any consideration for you. If they think they can increase their profits by appearing to have consideration for you, they will. But I don’t think they *really *like you.
True.
It depends how greedy you are. Take an example like the PS2 game, GTA: San Andreas. The distributors had no qualms about selling the 100,000th or 500,000th for the same ridiculous price of £40 + , and only drop the price when nobody wants the product anymore.
No, the fleecing is when they charge as much as they can possibly get away with. Is maximising profits more important than having a happy customer?
Yay, we agree! 
They pirate because they can. It’s quick and easy and they know they won’t get caught.
We all break and disregard laws wether we feel they are moral or not. I drive over the speed limit most of the time, i drank long before i was 21 and i still smoke pot once in a while. Thats just of the top of my head, just because i have no problems breaking some laws doesn’t mean im ok with robbing old ladies of their insulin money. The problem that the music and gaming industries currently face is that they’ve made it VERY hard for people to give a shit about piracy. Porn is pirated a lot more than music or games and yet nobody gives a shit, i’d love to know how many of those condemning people who download games or music happily download porn without a second thought. Nobody cares about the porn industry or the RIAA, people used to care about their favorite gaming companies and some still inspire confidence and respect (<3 blizzard) but for the most part they are just tired of getting fucked over.
On the list of reasons for going into business, I would have to say, yes.
That’s my point: market forces.
(My bold). If you had a product to sell, wouldn’t you want to make as much profit as could? (I’m making an assumption here: that you are, more or less, a capitalist.) Presumably, most customers are reasonable happy, otherwise they wouldn’t buy it at that price. Which leads us back to the thrust of this thread: do those that aren’t, pirate it?
Yes. I hate to say it, but that is the rule more often than not. (The what-you-can-get-away-with principle.) Maximising profits *while *keeping the customer happy is the ideal, of course.
One out of three ain’t bad!
I completely agree with you. In fact, I nearly wrote a post about breaking the speed limit when I can get away with it. But none of that detracts from the fact that it is illegal. When I speed, I know I’m breaking the law, and if I dislike the law, it’s no justification for breaking it. When we (the royal we) download music illegally, we know that we’re breaking the law, and depriving musicians and record companies of their income. As I’ve said before, disliking a company or a musician in no way justifies our actions.
“Okay, we shipped enough units. All of our costs are covered, and we made four bucks from that last one we sold. Let’s give it away at below cost from now on.”
“What? Our shareholders actually want a return on the money they invested in our stock? We need some cash to develop the next big product? We have to pay the people that are doing bugfixes and product maintenance? Advertising costs money? We have to staff the support forum and the tech support phone lines?”
What you need to understand, Ivan, is that the goal for most tech companies isn’t to make a product pay its production costs. The goal is for a product to pay for the development and production of the next product–and still make a profit, of course.