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| Since all of these songs are always instantly available | to me, these artists are still within reach, even the | one-hit-wonders from yesteryear. If I hadn't downloaded | Fastball's "Outta My Head" back in 1998, I would never | have gone to see them perform at the Viper Room in 2008 | (it was the illegal download of a B-side that made me | appreciate them more than hearing "The Way" on the | radio).

While that may be true that the piracy had an unintended benefit for the band. I think you're making an appeal to the fallacy "the ends justify the means".

In this case, the record label and by extension the employees of the record label lost out on their share of the $1 you should arguably have spent on the track. (assuming an itunes download at approximately market price).

So that works out to say $0.80 cents not paid to the workers at the store, the marketing department etc...

In the end, the band might have benefitted on balance, but in an alternative scenario, you PAID for that song, liked it and still went to see the band at the Viper room.

I'm fully aware that there are a number of people who violently disagree with me on this. In my own opinion, the question of whether it's "better for the music industry overall" or not is irrelevant. The people who own the rights to the music, own the right to decide whether it's OK to get the song for free or not. If that costs them a customer at the viper room in 2008, it's their choice.

"Theft plain and simple" is probably an overstatement - but (again, in my opinion) - there is definitely some moral ambiguity to this.

Let's imagine that for some reason at YC11 a band shows up. In their pitch meeting PG and team feel suitably Rocked and Rolled so he decides to throw in the seed money for their studio time. The terms are that YC gets to keep 80% of the money from record sales (come to think of it, this happened on an episode of Dragon's Den UK).

You download the song. Go to the concert. What happens to the share owned by YC? Do they make money? Do they deserve money?

I do understand where you're coming from... but I also disagree.

It's not "The ends justify the means." It's "This is not theft. It's something quite different that can actually be beneficial in ways that theft reasonably cannot."

To wit: What share does YC get if I never become a fan of the band at all?

Let's imagine that for some reason at YC11 a band shows up. In their pitch meeting PG and team feel suitably Rocked and Rolled so he decides to throw in the seed money for their studio time. The terms are that YC gets to keep 80% of the money from record sales (come to think of it, this happened on an episode of Dragon's Den UK). You download the song. Go to the concert. What happens to the share owned by YC? Do they make money? Do they deserve money?

You're addressing a whole other issue here. First off, there is a movement among record labels to grab a portion of revenues beyond record sales (the 360-deal [1]).

Second, you raise the question of whether record labels are needed at all in the first place. Similar to bootstrapping a startup, a musician can take a very DIY approach to their careers. In fact, one could argue that a musician is virtually identical to an entrepreneur. They build their band/company by creating music/a product that fans/people want.

Startups are incredibly cheap to do today because of changes in technology--open source, cloud computing, etc etc. In that same regard, starting out as a musician does not require the millions of dollars from Warner Bros. execs that it once did either. Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) can produce quality recordings, social networks allow for cheap marketing, CD pressing isn't required for distribution, and on and on and on.

As "founders", musicians deserve to be rewarded for their work. Not to be screwed over by record labels ("VCs")[2]#.

---

# I am in no way suggesting that VCs regularly screw over startup founders

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360_deal

[2]http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

In this case, the record label and by extension the employees of the record label lost out on their share of the $1 you should arguably have spent on the track. (assuming an itunes download at approximately market price).

The year was 1998, and there was no iTunes. My only other alternative was to buy the full CD at $12-17. As a poor college student, I could only afford to buy maybe 3 CD's a year, and Fastball's album would not have been one of them. I would therefore never have heard the song (or paid for it) and never would have gone to the Viper room.

Then so be it.

You're using a post-hoc justification of the end result to claim that the piracy was acceptable.

It wasn't.

First. Pirates, most of the time, take away from the potential revenue of a copyright owner. You can argue that you wouldn't have used that product otherwise anyway, but thats not always true.

Second. The reason the music industry is booming with the likes of iTunes is the convenient access to it. In the past, it was more convenient to pirate, now its more convenient to buy than it is to pirate.

In the past, it was more convenient to pirate, now its more convenient to buy than it is to pirate.

I'll agree with you there, but I don't think legal music downloads could have succeeded if they hadn't been illegal first, in the same way that freemium services become so popular based on the free option, only later to make money with the paid plan. Take my generation, who went to college from 1998-2002...we got so used to downloading illegally (the scour.net guys were in the next building over from me), that we still download today, just on iTunes since we have money now.

The problem is there have not been big enough studies into the effects of piracy. It's very difficult to control for the various factors such as the overall economy, purchasing reasons, packaging and ease of use, etc.

Anecdotally, it appears to vary widely from person-to-person, year, type of content, etc. But I find it interesting that technology-minded people tend to emphasize the positive aspects without any real evidence that on the whole they outweigh the negative. You've never bought $1 DVDs on the corner, but it's very common for others.

Do you hold the same opinion when it comes to software? And by software I mean code you've spent months laboring over that you perhaps hope to make some sort of living off of.

I do.

I would like to see something like a Netflix or Hulu for music. Something where you have unlimited access to all the music you want to listen to, but musicians are fairly compensated for their work. The Internet has made the information cost of music distribution vanishingly small, but there's no way for producers or consumers to take advantage of this.

Actually, now that I think about it, there were once services like this... anyone know what happened to them? The closest thing I can think of is Pandora, but having to be at the mercy of the site's RNG only suits certain listening patterns.

I think you've described Spotify.

If you're not in a country where Spotify is available check out Grooveshark instead.

I love it that people who simply take anything sold under terms they disagree with also demand political correctness from the rest of the world and, particularly, from the industries who they're taking things from.

Believe it or not, people don't like being called thieves, especially when they're not stealing anything.

I may be a pirate, but if US TV companies actually gave me a choice to buy their programmes with some degree of timeliness, perhaps I wouldn't need to be.

Just so you know where I'm coming from: I actually think what you'd doing is a form of theft. I don't think the word is inappropriate. You are free to disagree. I think many objections to the word "theft" in this context are reasonable, even I don't agree with them.

But I am genuinely amused that people expect political correctness from people whose livelihoods they are probably disrupting unlawfully. (I chose my words carefully there).

It is especially interesting to hear this from a Cocoa developer, by the way, considering the rate at which Cocoa apps are pirated. (I'm not calling you a hypocrite; no, quite the opposite. "Suicidal" might be a better epithet here.)

If you're someone who makes copyable content for profit, it's best to think of purchase rate instead of piracy rate. You make as much money from someone who pirates your Cocoa app as from someone who uses Linux. But the Linux users aren't "stealing" your revenue.

Anyway, I wrote a book. It ended up on Scribd, Google Books, and the Pirate Bay. I still made plenty of money. Could I have made more? Maybe, maybe not. I certainly don't know what percentage of the pirates would have bought it had it not been available on TPB. My estimate is zero, which means piracy cost me nothing.

Piracy, in my opinion, is just a scapegoat for "nobody wants my crap anymore". Yeah, piracy happens. But even in the absence of piracy, it's possible that nobody wanted to pay $50 for a season of a TV show anyway.

So basically your argument is that when people like something, even if it's trivial for them to pirate it, they'll pay.

Yeah, I respectfully call bullshit on that.

How can you call bullshit on the notion of people paying when they can pirate instead? Everybody's aware of file sharing at this point, and nearly everybody has internet access. Somehow, the content control industry keeps getting money, mostly from sales of their content. What is your explanation, if it isn't that people pay for stuff they like despite free options?

You are drastically overestimating the technical acumen of the average buyer of online music. Most of the people buying music from iTunes are the same people writing 'patio11 support emails complaining that his bingo card generator broke their internet.

Even among those of us _with_ the technical acumen, piracy is just too much of a pain. $36/year for Pandora is far worth the dozens of hours I'd save, and I have accounts on a few private trackers.

A non-negligible percentage will, no? 70-75% of downloaders paid $1 before or after downloading Stephen King's "free" book The Plant. Radiohead had success with In Rainbows too.

There's a large group who consider paying for things to be a moral issue, paying even when they're not being monitored and the content is easily copied.

What's interesting is that iTunes would never have existed if not for MP3 downloads, but also because of Napster-style ease-of-access to a large catalogue of music.

This popularity seems to have been the big catalyst for trolls trying to make a buck, which means the whole blasted thing is deeply mired in a lot of people's long-term interests.

To me, this means the whole thing is going to be completely lacking a sensible view for decades -- both POV's that support "in the public good" (e.g. being able to use excerpts of copyrighted material for publication/research/etc, make digital backups of your property) as well as being compensated for the service (e.g. selling copies of your music to pay the bills so you can write more songs).

It is especially interesting to hear this from a Cocoa developer, by the way, considering the rate at which Cocoa apps are pirated. (I'm not calling you a hypocrite; no, quite the opposite. "Suicidal" might be a better epithet here.)

There's nothing I can do about piracy. The options are to either (a) treat it as the enemy and fight it or (b) accept the benefits it brings and write off the losses.

Judging by the progress the RIAA and co are having with option (a), I think option (b) is a far more rational alternative.

Personally, and I know I'm going out on a limb here, but I think you can help yourself by not socially norming piracy into a badge of geek cred. But then, I don't believe in the supposed benefits of piracy.

(Actually, piracy directly benefits my line of work, and nets some interesting intellectual challenges for me and my field, since it's driving plenty of businesses into the arms of DRM-style schemes. It will not surprise you to learn that I also believe the pirates are going to lose the technical battle over DRM in the long term, too. So, in behalf of everyone who enjoys writing kernel debuggers and hypervisors: thanks for the extra billable hours!)

There are a number of things you can do:

1. Legal: pursue copyright violators, possible DMCA claims against those who circumvent your protection scheme (if you have one)

2. Technical: build in DRM. If not, at least add forensic marking to allow you to track the source of your piracy to know if it's hurting actual sales or not

3. Social: stop propagating the meme that copying commercial data is ok because you are knowledgable enough to do so and it doesn't hurt anyone.

The RIAA has an uphill battle because of no option #2. (CDs have no DRM, despite efforts to retrofit it). They are trying #1 and #3.

Also, I have a counter-example to Felten's claims that DRM never prevented piracy. With BD+ (Blu-ray), we have had some discs survive 60 days before they were cracked. In that time period, there were no high-def rips available on Bittorrent of those movies.

While there are still no large studies showing how many potential pirates purchased a disc due to the delay in availability, I wholeheartedly disagree with "There's nothing I can do about piracy".

That's a valid point. Unfortunately nobody likes to be called a hypocrite (even if they are), so you're getting undeserved down-votes. (edit: happily, by the time I finished my comment you'd been upvoted out of the gutter)

I'm not saying I've never pirated anything, but I find the sense of entitlement some people have about it makes honest discussion difficult.

Activities that are actually theft do not require this little semantic pas de deux every time they come up.

Sort of like how anything that is actually a science doesn't need to include the word in its name.

Yes, the semantic flaws in the content industry's criticism of file sharing are indeed a great injustice.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. But in this case, it's not some sort of picayune hair-splitting going on. The word "theft" has visceral, ancient connotations for most people. Those with a horse in the much more abstract copyright infringement race would very much like it if everyone would please ignore any and all subtleties and call it "theft".

Squatters also deprive landowners of the potential use of their property, may cause damage or other economic harm, but unless they're taking items from the land and not giving them back, we don't call that theft. We call it trespassing, maybe vandalism. If my neighbor opens a sewage plant in his backyard, it certainly would deprive me of potential sales or rentals of my property, but we still don't call it theft. In fact, we have to make up special zoning laws that restrict what people can do with their property to address just this case, because no preexisting concept works. (Sound familiar?)

These distinctions matter. If they didn't, we wouldn't be arguing about it, would we?

Yes, I do think it is a bit rich for people who are using luxury goods without paying for them because they disagree with the terms they're being sold under to complain about the specific words the sellers use to refer to them.

Just be happy they haven't wised up and started calling pirates "content rapists"; rape is also pretty hard to quantify in dollar terms.

I'm not arguing that copyright infringement is right any more than I'm arguing trespassing or operating a sewage treatment plant in a residential neighborhood are right, only that they're not automatically "theft" just because they're bad.

We have distinctions between different crimes for good reason. Death penalty for speeding? I'm sure some who have lost their loved ones to reckless drivers might agree. But we as a society have pretty much decided that while there should be a punishment, it should not be that harsh.

The only problem with this argument is that it's made only with regard to you, the consumer, vs. the content creator/distributor. If theft is defined only as the removal of a physical good from one individual to another without consent, then indeed, it's not theft in that sense. However, if theft is defined as depriving an individual of what they are due for providing some product/service, then this is theft.

One way or another, somebody took the time to learn to play some instrument, write a song, record that song, then get it distributed in some manner. All of that costs both time and money, just like designing and building a car or a laptop or any other physical good. If depriving someone of compensation for something they worked to create and distribute isn't theft, I don't know what is.

You know, if it were theft, I think the cases would be tried as cases of theft. I love a semantic argument as much as the next guy, but I find I'm most successful in those arguments when I avidly defer to time-proven definitions. And when those definitions have been so thoroughly debated that they have been intrenched in law almost universally consistent across multiple nations and languages, I really defer to those.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Comparis...

I hope you take the opportunity at some point in your life to revisit your opinion on this issue.

It's still not theft -- i.e. taking something from. It's explicitly a lack of compensation, which is still not "taking something from" -- though there are laws which require compensation for services provided, they vary hugely across the world, and can get people in trouble when they apply their local knowledge in other jurisdictions. Several countries don't apply copyright/patent/IP or even contract law(s) in anything remotely like a USA style (for want of a better sterotype).

"Depriving" is a somewhat loaded term that implies a "take" behaviour to you, but it's just not strictly true.

Devils advocate: there are obviously a lot of people that write programming code here. That is something created within each person's mind, and brought into existence -- just like a song. How would any of us view having our computers hacked into at the leisure of would-be users of our programs who sought to copy our code and then use it? Would we view this as theft?

It depends on the jurisdiction but other crimes are defined as taking place in such a system, such as trespass, gaining unauthorized access to a computer system, copyright infringement, and invasion of privacy.

These things can be considered, in some cases, to be even more severe than theft. "Theft" is a highly charged word even though copying source code from a nuclear missile silo would be punished more severely than the theft of a chocolate bar from a 7 Eleven.

Here I don't mean to focus on the methods to get the finished product, but rather copying the product for use. The OP explains that since nothing is actually removed it's not theft. I disagree. If I want to open source some of the code I write, I'll do it. Aside from that no one should be able to copy and use the code I've written (and open it up to possible distribution) without any regard for my opinion on the matter. To me I'd consider that theft.

The OP explains that since nothing is actually removed it's not theft. I disagree.

It depends whether you're referring to your own personal definition of "theft" or a legal or common definition (of which there are many). If the former, no-one can quarrel with you, of course ;-)

If the latter, in some jurisdictions, permanent deprivation of property is required for "theft", so copying files would not count. Where permanent deprivation is not required and non-tangible property counts, then sure, it'd be theft.

Even forgetting the definition of theft, sure, no-one should be able to obtain and use your code without permission, but if they were to do so, it doesn't necessarily mean they have committed the legal offence of "theft." You are free to consider it such but legally it may not be such.

I didn't mean to get into the semantics of "theft". If you notice, I said "To me I'd consider that theft".

What is significant, I believe, is the moral weight of categorizing it as theft, rather than specific technical definitions and jurisdictions. I believe the same context is meant by the Obama administration's choice of words. We are at a time in history for which there is no precedent for all the things we are able to do. It's for this reason I bring up these arguments with an audience which seems to largely favor making free use of any product deemed fair game by their own justification.

OK, I appreciate your argument now :) It is cool for you to frame things within your own value system and I can't argue against your opinion, but it's a shame that the executive branch is being lax with the definitions of words that have special definitions in their realm.

I think they're trying to be very clear about how they view digital piracy. It's like Bush trumpeting "terrorists" or "axis of evil". You can apply a terrorist label broadly or narrowly to a person, but there is little doubt about how seriously the govt. might take action based on such a word. I think it's a similar thing here with the word "theft". If existing laws don't hold up to what they feel is fair and just, they may seek to craft new ones that do.

I would view that as the digital equivalent of trespassing.

As far as how I'd view it if people "pirated" software that I'd worked on? Well... I'd view it about the same as I did when I last found a copy of said software being shared: it's copyright infringement, not theft.

> If someone breaks into my car and steals my iPod, that's theft. I, the original owner, no longer possess the item.

Theft covers more than just the taking of physical property. You can steal an idea, for example.

That's just slang! You can't actually steal an idea!

Once someone has made it possible for the idea to be shared -- even if they wrote it down and locked it in their safe -- then the information is already potentially accessible!

Breaking-in to someone's home to steal the paper you wrote your idea on is explicitly the theft, and getting the idea written on it is a side-effect.

Looking at the OED definition: http://is.gd/eSaRt

first example:

> dishonestly pass off (another person‘s ideas) as one’s own: accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying

> You can steal an idea, for example.

How so? I can't even really write about it without getting mired in semantics, but here goes...

Suppose, one icy winter, I see you scraping your car's windows with an inverted plastic coffee mug. I'm having a lot of trouble with my store-bought flat, shovel-shaped scraper. I copy your idea: I bring a plastic mug out to my car, and use that mug to scrape frost off my car's windows the next day.

Did I "steal" your idea? How did I do that? You still have use of your plastic coffee mug. What's missing?

And then there's the issue of independent invention which happens a lot more than "copying == theft" folks ever admit. I invented the round windsheild frost scraper in the mid-80s. Unfortunately, someone else did, too: I found a round scraper in a K-Mart once, with a patent number on it.

Did I steal his/her idea? On my mother's grave, I did not. I invented it independently.

Similarly, I invented the same propulsion system that Freeman Dyson did in the 60s for "Project Orion". My sister claims to have invented "curtain walls" in high school, a long time before she went to college for an architecture degree.

Describe how I can "steal" an idea.

You steal an idea by passing it off as your own.

A facile answer.

How can you tell if I invented the circular ice scraper, or the folks who hold a patent on it invented it? If they invented it, why do I still scrape frost and ice off my car's windshield with a yellow plastic coffee mug, manufactured by "Tupperware"?

Stealing an idea is metaphorical. And generally speaking, I'd say it refers to taking credit for the idea, not simply taking it and understanding it for yourself. Credit as originator is scarce. Instantiations are not.