Theft is about taking rivalrous goods. If I steal your apple, you no longer have your apple, which is injurious to you. That's why theft is illegal. Piracy and copyright are about, literally, copying. If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3 and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually just a better more abundant place now.
Copyright is about granting limited monopolies as an incentive. We make it illegal for people to copy based entirely on the idea that more people will create stuff if they know they can monopolize the profits for a time. Which is sensible in some cases, but I personally believe people would still create all kinds of stuff, if not more.
Regardless, I do think lost sales exist. I made a paid iOS app that was cracked and saw my sales drop. But I also think it's important to recognize that this is still not theft. It's a copyright violation. These words mean different things.
Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome.
Revenue go down? You can't pay your bills. You make less stuff even though people want what you are making. Everyone is worse off. Bad outcome.
In the end, we want more good outcomes and less bad. There is a lot of conversation around piracy's relationship to the bad outcome. But, a lot of it is armchair-CFO arguments and based on looking for excuses. People directly affected by piracy report that the relationship is either quite clear or that they have given up and don't bother fighting or even measuring it.
Should piracy be legal? Maybe? Doesn't really matter at the consumer level. There is it de-facto unenforced 99.9% of the time anyway. What matters for producers and consumers in practice is the practice of DRM. In practice, the vast majority of software work these days is on server-side products and a huge component of that is the implicit DRM aspect.
Desktop software has relatively been in a terrible lull since the consumerization of the internet. A lot of it is due to the awesome features of the interwebs. But, a whole lot of it is that it's a lot harder to actually get paid for desktop software vs server-based. It's a damn shame. But, no one knows what to do about it.
But it's a distraction gladly used by those who want to promote more copyright restrictions - everyone learns as a small child "what's yours is not what's mine", and everyone learns that theft is bad.
So calling piracy theft means everyone has the gut reaction that it's bad.
Calling piracy an infringement of a monopoly has a very different flavour to it.
Copyright monopolies do serve a purpose. But one shouldn't try to distract from this purpose by calling piracy theft.
Before "copying" music or books was cheap, the situation was quite different (tunes and books were copied left and right, nobody cared, but you had to pay the musicians to perform a tune, and the scribes to copy a book), but theft still existed, and was punished.
And we all want to be paid for our work.
But apparently people think software must be free. And I've known people making $30,000+ a month who pirated games. I've known lawyers and high-profile accountants begging on forums for a $150 program (paid once for a lifetime license) to be cracked. Those people made at least $10,000 a month in a third-world country. Basically one level below the millionaires. WTF, right?
I've read enough history to notice that the vested interests are always fighting a losing battle (only long-term and in retrospect anyway). So maybe we need another approach because rebelling against reality gets us nowhere IMO.
Sorry if this is too philosophical but I thought I should offer you a point of view that doesn't involve a work life which is comprised of a constant game of tug of war. At one point we all should accept the world as it is and try to work around its flaws.
One example: there are games that can detect that you are running a pirated version and they deliberately hide part of the in-game content from you (I think Witcher 3?). That alone was enough for a guy I knew to begrudgingly buy the game (he wasn't poor either). As said in another comment also in reply to you: if piracy ushers in inconvenience then they'll buy.
We can never get rid of piracy. There's a ton of extremely sharp reverse engineers out there. But we can make it hard enough for the users of our pirated products so they just give up. I've seen it applied successfully but I'll admit that it's a hard thing to pull off.
Or ultimately, if that constant arms race tires us, we should branch out to other (sub-)careers. I myself am seriously considering exiting web programming, I am sick of it already, for many reasons.
Even in the video space, the analog hole is slowly being patched with hardware attested DRM and HDCP, so pervasive now that they're baked into web standards. Dolby Vision has yet to be cracked IIRC, which means pirated movies/TV can be worse than the legitimate one.
There'll probably always be insider leaks though (ie. someone with inside access to a master copy leaks it).
That's why I said they lose eventually and only in retrospect. In the meantime (decades or centuries) they dominate indeed.
But entropy is always at work. The last 3 years we've seen a torrent of "X site has been breached" and I have no doubt that 80% of all breaches never make it to the news. Which means the vested interests' techniques (SaaS / hosted services like games) aren't fault-proof either. The pendulum is still swinging.
As for stuff like HDCP and Dolby Vision, yeah, those are worrisome. :|
This is a very limited view of the of the effect of copyright. The goal is not to make sure any one specific person or organization has the funds to create but to encoourage the total sum of creations by anyone. As such, any analysis of the effectiveness of copyright will have to also consider the detrimental effects copyright has on other people creating things. And these detrimental effects are not at all theoretical. There is lots of imaginarity "property" that people are sitting on and doing nothing with the monopoly they have been granted as an incentive to produce more while still preventing anyone else from building on those works. Licensing something or heck, even figuring out who owns the rights, is prohibitive enough to outright kill many endeavours that would have enriched society. And that is before come to the hyper-inflated copyright lengths we have today where creators are incentivized to keep milking something they have made decades ago instead of being required to make something new if they want more profit.
I agree that DRM sucks, but that is not an argument for stronger copyright enforcement. DRM very much relies on copyright laws that make breaking it illegal in order to remain effective. And even then, it has only ever been effective in preventing the average user from circumventing it. If you could freely distribute DRM-defeating measures then publishers would be incentivized to remove it for everyone.
It seems you haven't considered the point of view of, say, someone who makes music and sells recordings of it for a living. I hope you can imagine how it would sound to that person when you tell them that the world is "actually just a better more abundant place now" you have got their music without paying for it, and they're out of a livelihood.
I think that, at best, it would sound like you haven't thought much at all about what you're saying and how it applies to the real world and the people in it.
But the reality is that there are infinite business models that simply don't work, and it's perfectly fine. There was a time before you could copyright music and people still made music. That was perfectly fine, too.
It's likely that there'd be a much stronger market around live performances and experiences, remixes, and lots of other stuff that's hard to imagine. I think you're neglecting to consider the complexity and self-organizational nature of markets. We don't really need a higher power to artificially create and protect specific jobs, especially around the arts.
Ok great, that's where I live, I guess.
What type of music are you talking about there? Seems you have a very small range of musician in mind with those comments. Like, rock/pop music or whatever you call it. "merch"? Doesn't exist for most musicians, I guesstimate 99.999%
It seems in these music "pirating" discussions, for their mental image of a musician, a lot of people imagine millionaire rock/pop musicians, signed to huge record labels, and they feel fine about screwing them however they can. I suggest they are a tiny, numerically-insignificant minority of the musicians in the world. And it seems to me that when you say "As a musician you make your money" you are thinking of these people.
And that's a failure of those musicians. It does not mean that society should implement draconian measures to ensure that they have another specific way of being paid.
Presumably "someone who makes music and sells recordings of it for a living", the people I was talking about, won't "feel as the gp". It doesn't seem like your criticism really touched on what I said.
(Maybe you are also assuming "No-one is entitled to make a living selling their music" or something like that.)
Sorry, but I'm convinced this exchange is pointless.
You literally were triggered by "What?" in your previous response so maybe you should take this guideline to heart yourself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations
How do they "adapt" to putting food on the table when they're not getting paid for the work they do?
As a creator, there are many things I want people to copy, fork and share - all my open source stuff. Then there are things for which I expect to get paid for - my training videos. I'll be upset if someone started distributing or copying them for free.
As a creator I should be able to make that decision - not the consumer. Or you are claiming that digital goods are not goods at all.
There are theoretically infinitely many business models that don't work well in reality, so nobody has them as a career, that we could create laws to artificially protect.
A lot of content, and software, takes a huge capital investment to create. Blockbuster movies can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, AAA games can certainly cost tens of millions. This is also why open source and and Libre software never took over the world the way many of its proponents assumed it would back in the 90s. Many applications take more than just coding chops to create, it takes QA engineers, artists, designers, project managers, market research and domain experts dependent on the market segment (medical experts, radio engineers, etc). It can take a huge capital investment to put all that together and that money needs to be made back somehow.
Even music takes recording studios, sound engineers, session and backing musicians, artists for the album covers and posters, music video production teams, etc, etc. It’s a serious business. A committed artist in their bedroom can work wonders, but not all music and associated material can be produced in a bedroom.
You can imagine a world in which we have laws allowing broad recipes to be patented. For example, some restaurant chain might register the patent for spaghetti, and you could only ever eat spaghetti at their chain. 100 years from now, we'd likely have some MegaBlockbusterRestaurant chains that spend ridiculous amounts of money on developing new and unique recipes they can monopolize. And someone from that era might say, "What if we stopped allowing this?" And someone could reply, "But tens of millions of dollars are spent on this. It's big business!"
And they would be right ofc. It's a factually true statement. But… so what? I don't mind living in a world where everyone can remix everyone else's recipes, even if it means we don't end up with MegaBlockbusterRestaurant chains.
Perhaps a world with no/weaker copyright laws might be one where money flows toward live performances over recorded experiences. Not necessarily worse imo.
Or even towards patronage. Crowdfunding is already a thing. Government grants are already a thing.
But games, music, visual art, after a certain degree require so much time and effort that it's not viable or fun to do as a hobby of you need to earn a living elsewhere.
I would've out out my debut album out years ago if I didn't need to worry and stress about rent.
In what way is copying "taking something"?
According to this definition, dumpster diving would be theft. The harms caused by theft and copyright infringement are different. Calling them both theft is just a marketing ploy. Stealing something deprives the owner of its use. Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government to an artist on a piece of intellectual property. This is socially beneficial because it means more people can make a living by creating art. Copyright infringement means evading this monopoly, and is harmful for the same reason that granting the monopoly is beneficial.
For example, dumpster diving is neither theft nor copyright infringement. It's not theft because taking food that has been thrown away isn't depriving anyone of its use. It's not copyright infringement, because we as a society do not deem it socially beneficial to grant anybody a monopoly on food production. This is true even though the dumpster diver is taking food without paying the farmers who produced it.
In many jurisdictions, it legally is. Morally, I agree that's bullshit.
But taking something without paying for it is not always theft; and one could imagine thieves paying a token amount for something in order to claim it is not theft.
Most importantly, copyright infringement, unlicensed use, and piracy usually fall into the category of "IP theft," which differs from real theft of physical property in important ways such as the harm caused to the owner (e.g. potential lost sales or licensing revenue vs. losing a physical item) as well as associated penalties and remedies.
> In the case of games, music, etc, you don’t pay for the file itself but for the work the artist put into it.
You're paying for the file and the rights to use it.
A lot of countries already have this. There's an additional tax on media storage devices such as CDs, HDDs etc. The money is then given to some copyright association that supposedly hands some of it out to the content creators.
You aren't paying for the work the artist put in, if you were that would be called a commission. You are paying for the right to experience a copy of the artist’s work. Usually you’re not even paying the artist, either. The studios and publishing companies reap the profits. It’s not different for studio developed games.
Do I pirate things these days? No, I am capable of paying and we’ve figured out streaming. Will I buy a proprietary product without trying it first? Probably not. Would I pay if I didn't have the means? Absolutely not.
I firmly believe that once a work of art has been created, it is oppressive to try and dictate who can experience it. I’m copyleft, not a rampant pirate.
As a rule, you don't buy software, you buy a license to use it. So effectively you're stealing that license and the income it would generate for the creator.
Music and other media are the same. You don't pay for the bits, you pay for a license to access and enjoy those bits.
Which is why it doesn't matter if the delivery system is paper tape, carrier pigeon, optical media, or instant download from a server.
In the world if matter, things have copies and we can count them. In the world of knowledge there's no such concept and it lives by different rules. RIAA and other luddites try to turn ideas into stones to sell them.
so things that have low cost of materials / low cost of delivery, but high cost of skills required shouldn't be expensive? or what?
I don't understand how is this even relevant that software can be distributed very cheaply.
Creating software, or even better - the game requires significant investment and risk, so I don't understand how anyone would want to act as if that pirating was OK.
I'd argue that software isn't built, but discovered and selling the same knowledge of how to sail the discovered island is a challenge, as we know. SaaS is essentially hiding that knowledge and selling bits of derived knowledge specific to each customer. SaaS doesn't attempt to sell the same knowledge twice. Otoh, the movies and music industry hasn't figured out this derived knowledge trick, so it struggles.
Imagine if someone told you "Oh, that physical book you bought, with the pages and the words in it? Yeah, actually what we sold you was a license to a book." It's nonsense. We only played along in the digital realm because it was the only way for commercial digital artifacts to exist given the greater ease of making perfect copies of digital artifacts compared to physical artifacts like books.
That said, XaaS is now making that social construct physically real. It's still hamstringing one of the best things about digital artifacts, but at least it's honest now.
My app is practically almost free except for a nag dialog, and I still make a living from it.
Piracy may matter to big companies that have lots of employees who try to extract every possible cent from their audience.
If you just want to make a living from your software, you should not waste time worrying about piracy.
There are specific niches and specific relationship models where piracy won't do this. But there are far more where it will.
Ultimately it comes down to the ridiculous notion that because cost-of-copying is effectively zero then so is product value.
This handily ignores the hours/days/weeks/years of development effort that can go into a product, and the use value - which may translate into income - that it offers users.
As a creator you certainly have the option to decide on the relationship model you want with your customers. Piracy removes that right.
But that right is entirely artificial in the first place. It was given in order to encourage more creation. Saying that some creations would have been encouraged had that right been enforced (not even that is a given - a pirated copy does not equate a lost sale 1:1) is not enough to justify copyright without weighing that against all the negative effects of copyright - overhead to licensing, enforcement costs paid by society, people prevented from creating derivativees, etc.
I don't necessarily think AAA game studios are trying to extract every cent. But they do exist in a pretty unique situation in software. Since they invest a ton of money up-front to produce a game, and something like 85% of their sales occur in the first month or so. And those profits are invested back into the creation of the next game.
Piracy is very much an issue in this situation. Delaying a crack by one week is probably the difference between solvency for studios.
It is absolutely the case that some game studios might not be effected by piracy. Either because they don't make their money from the game, but instead from selling in-game items, their product needs online support for maximum fun, or some other reason. But the industry is definitely big enough for piracy to be both a problem, and not a problem for different players.
While this is true, the ones who don't tend to get eaten by the ones that do, eventually. Fantastic game studios are one flop away from closing their doors most of the time, so attrition is high, and the allure of recurring revenue via predatory microtransactions is hard to ignore.
The PC and Android gaming markets are slightly different beasts.
This mindset is not compatible with creating multi-billion dollar software like Windows or GTA 5. The only way to do that involves financial structures that are more complicated than just making a living.
That's not to say I think such software is necessarily a good thing, just that it wouldn't exist without aggressive profit optimization.
The argument is that your living could be more substantial, if you did worry about it.
Really? Maybe times have really changed but I know a lot of people, myself included, who pirated software - starting in the mid 90s for me - because we couldn't buy software since we were too young to make money and lived in constant fear that the one time our parents do buy some game or piece of software it turns out to be total crap. At this point, even though my education have led me to a more nuanced and philosophical objection to the enforcement of intellectual property in the manner at least the United States does, and equates physical property either on par with it or even underneath it, the only times I pirate software now is if there's no trial version, and if it's something I really want to use long term I'd purchase it anyway. Effectively the only long term sort of piracy I conduct at this point is to circumvent blackout rules on sports streaming because for whatever reason a whole fifth of MLB is blacked out on mlb.tv where I am but the biggest streaming package only shows 2 of those teams. Access, ultimately, determine whether someone pirates. That includes cases when access is outlandishly expensive or simply barred, and even knowing my share of anarchists and career criminals as defined by state I really don't see people who are ideologically committed to piracy in an absolutist sense. It's like, if I can pay $25 a month for unlimited access to JSTOR it would entirely be for my intellectual curiosity but I'd do it, but that's not an option so sci-hub when the article isn't available is kind of the only reasonable option. The alternative is simply to give up and find something else to be curious about.
Some aspects of reverse-engineering/cracking in the scene was gamified to such an extent where it became a prestige sort of thing, a competition for its own sake. That tends to stop where-ever your rivals stop, and as a result it's never a sure thing that patches would be cracked, for example.
Totally agree. Netflix’s streaming service is a great example of this. Initially, Netflix provided easy access, so most people I know stopped pirating films and shows. Mostly with the exception of new episodes of shows that aired in Australia weeks (or more) behind the US air date. Nobody wants to be weeks behind on GoT, not when the internet explodes as the episode airs.
Then Netflix’s Australian library was gradually gutted. VPNs were a pretty good way around the lacklustre Australian offerings. Then that became a tenuous workaround at best, especially as major studios split and made their own platforms, each at least $10 a month, with no guarantee that the things worth watching were available to Australians. So what do a bunch of people with VPNs do with nothing to watch? They pirate.
Sci-hub is unfortunately so necessary. The whole situation feels a bit like Spotify where the creators of the content that these journals/companies charge for don’t really get any of the money. What an ’innovation’ that is.
It's not about survivorship bias. It's about where he was starting from and the risks involved given that. An indie game dev's largest risk is remaining in obscurity and never making anything. In comparison, piracy is basically a non-factor. Of course large, well known studios care about piracy. Because they're already large and well known - they don't have to worry about making literally $0 in revenue on a title.
I used to think as you do. This is a much larger issue than trying to preserve the business model of a lobbyist.
licenseText.length > 0Even if your parents are willing to sometimes buy you games or software or whatever, there's got to be an element that a much easier path is just downloading it once a crack is available since you're more worried about burning that extremely finite supply of political capital then someone else's profit.
To repeat, this is on average and works given 90% of games die after first weeks of sales in any case. Economies of megahits are way different.
I'd like to read more about this. How much revenue is actually lost? Is there a proof that this revenue would have continued coming in? If so, what is the estimated percentage of that revenue compared to all-time revenue?
I am leaning on the side of "piracy doesn't matter, pirates were never going to buy anyway" but there is a nuance. It's the same as torrenting movies as opposed to subscribing to a streaming service. If the streaming service is VERY convenient and affordable, torrenting drops. Recently it started increasing again because streaming services fragmented the market a lot and everybody wants you to subscribe to their service while realistically people want ONE entry point from which they can search and watch for anything and everything.
To me the keyword is: convenience.
If piracy is convenient and easy then yes, I'll agree with you that a real revenue will be lost. I am sure of it.
But if piracy requires people to go through a bit more hoops than they wanted then I am very sure they won't bother. Seen it happen before my eyes years ago.
But IMO it's really important to answer my questions above because without their answers the "we lose revenue on the day our product's DRM is broken" proposition remains mostly a theory. Still, I am willing to have my mind changed by looking at data. Do you have any links?
(Another, albeit unrelated, example is that many people held off their Cyberpunk 2077 buy because they wanted CDPR to fix the most egregious bugs first -- and some people shared on gaming forums they won't pirate CP2077 because they are afraid the pirated version will be buggier than the retail one.)
From the consumers: Piracy doesn't matter. Pirates were never going to buy anyway.
From the AAA producers: >50% of lifetime revenue for a game is made in the first 3-6 months after release. During that time, they sit and wait in dread for "Crack Day". The exact day the DRM crack is released, revenue permanently drops hard.
I've read similar stories from small non-game desktop ISVs here on Hacker News. That they can clearly see on their revenue graphs the release dates of updates that contain DRM changes. Of course, most people on HN work on web-based software. Web based software has pretty much completely overtaken desktop software because of it's many advantages --such as being impossible to pirate.
I wonder how many people here have actually worked on a pirate-able product? Phone apps are technically pirate-able. But, like console games, pirating is such an inconvenience (compared to desktop piracy) that it is relatively rarely done. But, even on phones, most of the revenue is to unlock server-based features. I can say from experience that app hacking for client-side features in phone apps happens quite a lot despite the inconvenience.
Meanwhile, Minecraft was a story of someone in exactly the opposite situation from a AAA developer. Having zero reputation and zero marketing budget, it made complete sense for Notch to give away his game for free at first and slowly increase the price as consumer awareness and confidence grew. At all points Minecraft was the Indie Dream Story of starting as a nobody and gradually growing an audience who hands you money out of respect for your product rather than as a requirement of transacting with you to attain it.