A large part of Steam's success is that they built a better product than the one offered by piracy. That's worth paying for.
Granted, this isn't a cure-all. I'm sure some people still pirate games, and it's probably impossible to estimate how many represent "lost sales." Moreover, games are one of the trickier things to pirate, often requiring some technical knowledge (using disk images, keygens, cracks, etc.). Music is obviously much easier to pirate.
If I want to charge $600 for my book, I should be allowed to do that, just like you're allowed to not buy my book. I don't see an effective moral framework that would allow someone to only obey personal property rights if they thought the rights were "reasonable".
Edit: I've said some unpopular things on HN today, so I'm now being rate limited in my responses. Here's my response to one comment:
> Copying your book does not prevent you from attempting to ask for compensation or from attempting to sell it
Yes, it absolutely does. You're working in the world of "is" not "ought". This is firmly an "ought" conversation. You "ought" not copy my book, because as part of me giving it to you in exchange for money, I asked you not to do that, and you agreed.
> but you are competing in a market where your product only carries as much value as your customers perceive it to hold, and not what you declare it to be.
This is only true if people are willing to take my product without compensating me at all, which is exactly what I said originally is "holding the content creator hostage".
If you don't pay my (possibly absurd) price, you don't get my work, period. There is no working moral framework in which you get to decide if you deserve to steal my work or not.
Copying your book does not prevent you from attempting to ask for compensation or from attempting to sell it; but you are competing in a market where your product only carries as much value as your customers perceive it to hold, and not what you declare it to be.
There are animals that own objects where that ownership is not enforced through any societal methods.
Do you have a non-circular distinction between the two?
> And they use violence to enforce it.
Is that relevant?
> And if they leave their possessions, even for a moment, they don't have them anymore and another animal takes them.
It's not often that nests get stolen when they're left unattended.
Yes, ownership cannot exist without societal structure, it's a legal term invented to describe something so it's only relevant where law exists (i.e. society), which was exactly my point a couple of posts ago. That does NOT mean that ownership is "possession plus society". It simply means that ownership is a concept that cannot be defined without societal structure.
And it's very often that eggs inside nests get stolen when left unattended. They are food for other animals. How is the frequency with which something happens relevant here? I don't know what point you're trying to make; do you not understand what it means to own something? Do you believe that when you leave your home for work in the morning it ceases to be yours? Do you really believe there is no difference between a crow picking up an object and a contract assigning legal ownership of an object to a person? Is this a Socratic dialogue?
Getting other people to "support" it sounds like society. Is that the only difference? If possession is exactly the same as ownership-minus-society, then the original argument that ownership only exists because of society is pretty circular. If that's the case then I reaffirm there's a huge difference between society-only 'ownership' like IP rights, and society-optional 'ownership' like physical possessions.
> I think the fact of violence is extremely relevant, and that you are discounting the impact it would have on you.
I'm not discounting violence, I'm just thinking about how the enforcement of laws is backed by violence and wondering what distinction there's supposed to be.
But good luck having a particularly big advantage in a fight against most fellow adults of your species without using society to get there.
But good luck having a particularly big advantage in a fight against most fellow adults of your species without using society to get there.
This sounds like a roundabout way of restating the libertarian trope about the state having a monopoly on violence. Look, let me just ask you directly: how much experience you have of real violence? Have you ever fought for your life, or put it in serious jeopardy? I don't mean an everyday bad situation, I mean one where you were genuinely on your own with no prospect of assistance.
Where I had no prospect of assistance and my opponent had no prospect of assistance and there were no weapons created by society? Because I'm not trying to make an argument about ordered society vs. anarchic society. I'm talking about a situation where there are absolutely no societal interactions at all wrt ownership. And I've certainly never been in a fight like that. Or a non-fight like that.
I feel like you've done a good job of demonstrating that some forms of society will ruin ownership. But that's not the same thing as a total lack of social constructs.
Absolutely, and I think most people recognize that piracy is morally dubious at some level, but that it's more along the lines of speeding than grand theft.
In fact, that model may be a good compromise. Instead of getting hauled to court and slapped with a multi-million dollar judgment for using filesharing software, or literally sent to jail, you get a $100 ticket for it. That sounds a lot better, doesn't it?
>I don't see an effective moral framework that would allow someone to only obey personal property rights if they thought the rights were "reasonable".
Intellectual property is not personal property.
Personal property is an object or parcel that you can possess and pass down. There is one unit of it. You can protect it and stop people from taking it. It's a real physical thing that can't be trivially copied or spread.
IP is a time-limited government-granted monopoly on thoughts ("intellect"), and it's much more dangerous and treacherous than we give it credit for.
These are limitations on how people communicate, discuss, and share -- they are limits on speech. It's funny that we're so sensitive about censorship of political and religious speech in the U.S. and then so flippant about the extreme censorship in place on the use of cultural icons. You must not represent Mickey Mouse on terms that may upset or threaten The Walt Disney Company, or they will bare down on you with overwhelming force [0] -- in the case of TPB, Disney and its cohorts called on their proxies in the USG to threaten international economic sanctions if the speech, which didn't even originate from TPB (they merely indexed it), wasn't controlled to allow them to make more money. [1] That's insane.
Kim Dotcom is another case where an international incident was caused on behalf of the copyright lobby. It's clear that they don't care what the law is in your country -- they can and will use military force to get you to stop speaking in a way that they feel threatens their profit. Why are we just casually ignoring this disgusting hijacking of our government by BigCorps?
Copyright and patents have a purpose, but they are easily abused and need to be carefully monitored. We have let them go completely out of control.
Before 1976, works were copyrighted for 28 years. I personally think that's a little long, but it's not horrifically unreasonable. There was an option to file an extension and double the term for up to 56 years of coverage.
That has been retroactively multiplied by about 2.5x since, with copyright now lasting 2 full lifetimes by default (life of author + 70 years). If you make something at age 25 and live until 80, that's an absurd 130 years of copyright protection. And that's by no means an atypical case.
Additionally, fair use is a nearly impossible defense for anyone who's not a megacorp, so it doesn't really help, and since software is a fundamental part of the functionality of most durable goods we possess, copyright's aggressive, near-eternal monopolistic protections have legally boxed people out of their own belongings. (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074894)
Copyright is out of control, and the only reason people tolerate it is because they don't understand how deep it goes, and I'm sure that has nothing to do with big media companies controlling the political dialogue for the last 100 years...
[0] http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1989-04-08/news/89040900...
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/sweden-threatened-with-trade-sancti...
Are you referring to the "lost sale fallacy"? That's one argument, but another is that the content creators DO make money anyways.
Particularly, if you make your content affordable (see textbook prices) and usable in whatever way I want (e.g., I can't play iTunes shows in MPC and have to rely on the platform I bought them on), my incentive to pirate your content goes down dramatically.
Doing the latter is absurd, though; how do you protect your content from being shared? I don't know either.
I guess I'll pirate decrypted copies of it. It IS "wrong", I don't pretend otherwise, but it's cutting the Gordian knot of unfavorable economic paradigms. Kind of like slavery. Except way less worse. See lost sale fallacy.