Piracy is Theft? Ridiculous. Lost Sales? They Don’t Exist
torrentfreak.com
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A) Got the pirated version, but wouldn't buy it if they couldn't get it free
B) Got the pirated version, and therefore didn't pay for it
C) Learned about the book because it was pirated, and then bought it.
I don't have the statistics, but my guess is that most of the people are in the group A). Now the question is, which group is bigger, B or C. I don't know myself, and it probably depends on the book itself. But as I have seen, most anti-piracy proponents include the group A) into the lost sales category, while it clearly doesn't belong there.
Personally, I think the world is a better and richer place for more shared culture (see also group C, who likely exists largely because of A), and if that means people who weren't going to pay anyway freeload through piracy, so be it. If the would not convert to a sale, then they should essentially be ignored. The piracy that should be focused on is B, because that's the only one that actually has a real monetary effect.
I'm surprised that so many here, a community where lots of people are engaged in entrepreneurial ventures and where many donate to the unpaid author of widely-pirated shareware [1], would appear to be so laissez-faire on this issue. Whether you call it theft or breach of contract, piracy is wrong and not good.
I suspect you would have a better sense of perspective if people could create and use "paid" accounts on your shiny web services without paying.
Anecdotes of (c) described in the parent are few and far between, and don't justify the instances of (b) or the unintended consequences / moral hazard of (a).
(Disclosure: I sell software for a living, and have discovered [and reconciled] piracy of my products by very large organizations in the past. I imagine there are many other instances I'm not aware of.)
Did anyone here really say that copyright infringement was good? Saying that it's not "theft" doesn't automatically throw one into the pro-piracy camp. Copyright infringement can certainly be wrong and extremely detrimental to our culture - that's why we have copyright laws in the first place.
"Why we have copyright laws in the first place" is because corporations lobbied for them - self-interest. There's no moral component.
> Sounds like the only way we should expect to get paid is
> through generous benefactors and donations.
Or stop producing information and start producing something which people voluntarily pay for. What youre doing now is basically legislating prohibition of copying so you can make a living by selling copies. Trying to make a living by producing and selling copies in an age where everybody and their dog can produce copies themselves effortlessly is a ridiculously bad business decision. It is so outworldlishly ridiculous that it is no suprise, that most of those who for some reason chose that path can not come up with a solution to their little problem than crying for protectionism to ban DIY.
It is no different than the story of the french button wars:
When was the last time you were forced to pay for something you didn't want?
I know that isn't what you meant, but if the producer of a good is not capable of determining the terms under which that good is sold/licensed, then you're still in effect talking about donations.
This has nothing to do with buttons: there's no aristocracy attempting to limit your access to that ebook or that piece of software. The creator set a price, and you're saying it should be perfectly fine for anyone to read that book or use that software for free, whether the creator agrees to that or not. "DIY" isn't pulling torrents, it would be producing the content or software you want to consume or use yourself.
No. Donations would imply that you do not have a business model at all. Just set up a business in a way that you do not care about people copying information bits.
> but if the producer of a good is not capable of
> determining the terms under which that good is sold
He is determining the price of his copies and selling copies. But he knows that if everybody else is _also_ allowed to produce copies, nobody will buy his copies. So instead of solving _his_ problem of a obsolete business model (manufacturing and selling copies), he solves it by downgrading everybody else's rights to freely exchange information with eachother.
> This has nothing to do with buttons
It has absolutely _everything_ to do with buttons. Its the same "prohibit DIY-X so we can keep selling X"-principle.
> there's no aristocracy attempting to limit your access
They are limiting what kind of information I and my neighbour may exchange for the sole purpose of making their copy-selling business thrive. The button guild criminalized ordinary people for making DIY cloth buttons in order to make them buy their originals.
> it should be perfectly fine for anyone to read that book
> whether the creator agrees to that or not.
This is not what I am saying, but a consequence. What I am saying is that neither the author nor anybody else should have absolutely any say whatsoever about who is "allowed" to copy what bit of information. Allowing copies only when somebody "agrees" (usually for money) is protectionism and for-profit censorship, pure and simple, and I am against it.
> "DIY" isn't pulling torrents, it would be producing the
> content or software you want to consume or use yourself.
No, the author created the work once, and is afterwards selling copies. This worked 50 years ago, when ordinary people couldnt produce copies, so his copies had value. Today they dont any more, since everybody can produce them effortlessly themselves. My grandmother can copy Avatar as easily as 20th Century Fox can. 50 years ago she couldnt. So today the business of manufacturing and selling copies is gone like the button business. The only way to sustain it is to scare people into not DIY-copying in order to make authors copies "valuable" again, so the author can continue making a living by "allowing" copies like he did in the 50s by selling real-value copies.
> Allowing copies only when somebody "agrees" (usually for money) is protectionism and for-profit censorship, pure and simple, and I am against it.
Crazy town. I only now noticed your "*-gnu" handle, but things make more sense now.
Just out of curiosity, what do you have in mind for a suitable business model?
For a large number of people in the US, 2014 when health insurance becomes mandatory.
First, I do not think morality would come down entirely on the side of freedom of information (I do think our current system is skewed and it should shift closer to freedom of information, but that is a topic filled with subtlties.) Copyright is a means to ensure authors continue to write.
While it is true publishers did lobby for the original Statute of Anne, it was providing incentives for authors tht motivated Parliment and in the American Constitution Congress' ability to grant copyright for a limited time was expressly to encourage authorship.
Morally, I think there ought to be a balancing between the public and the authors. Our current copyright has some balancing in it with fair use exceptions, though I would think that the balance needs some readjusting.
For a good history of copyright see http://www.thepublicdomain.org/ by James Boyle. The entire book is available as free PDF.
My experience with the issue includes an incident where an organization with revenues in the multiple billions of dollars used the software I built in a widespread way for free for years without a license or payment. They were provided with technical support when they had problems by indicating that they were evaluating the software (when they had actually routed around the license-verification routines in the distributable). It was only when a new manager there learned what was going on and contacted me did I learn the real story; we've since come to a fair arrangement. I probably could have made a lot more by suing them, but I don't need the distraction or the heartache.
As far as I can tell, the countermeasures I could use to prevent the above would make life less pleasant for my paying customers. In the meantime, piracy continues to be viewed as a victimless action, even by those making full use of the copyrighted works in question and with plenty of resources to pay the price set by the creators.
I'm pretty sure noone here thinks that that specific case is ok.
Technically there's no difference between that company pirating your software and someone illegaly downloading a movie off of the internet, the crime is the same, both actions are copyright infringement.
But the main arguments of the pirate movement is that there is a difference between the actions and that the law should reflect that. Arguing that private non-commercial infringement should be allowed is different from arguing that commercial for-profit infringement should be allowed. There's a lot of people in this thread arguing the former, but noone arguing the latter.
Infringement is infringement. Arguing otherwise smacks of opportunism to me; people just like getting shit for free.
Laws can, and should, change if society changes.
> people that produce content, software, whatever for non-commercial/personal/consumer consumption have the same standing as I do as a commercial vendor, and should have the same standing.
I agree, I don't think there should be differentiation based on how or why something copyrighted was produced.
However, I don't agree that all infringement is equal, there's a huge difference between some kid downloading a movie off of the internet, and a corporation using a piece of software without a license. I think it's absurd to use the resources of our justice system and law enforcement to pursue the former, but I think it's a great use to pursue the latter.
I think the law is going to be behind the times for a long time on this topic; in part because of the tech, and in part because we are, broadly speaking, divided on what a better direction would be. In any case, I'd hate to see a day come when it's generally agreed that authors of content and software fundamentally don't have the right – if they so choose – to demand payment in exchange for their creations being used, consumed, and distributed.
I'm not sure that's the case.
Let's start with the base assumption that piracy is something that exists, and will forever exist. Just work your way around it, and use it for your advantage.
For example, build your product so that the more users it has, even if they are illegal users, the overall experience improves.
Don't fight battles you can't win. Use the circumstances to your advantage.
Now it's debatable whether or not we could actually function as a society if every little use was tracked, accounted for, and billed; technologically it's probably possible. But realistically, I don't want to live in a society where casual use of intellectual property (a concept that is harder to define than you might imagine) is minutely tracked and logged.
We have a name for that kind of society, it's called a Police State.
The bad news for Old Media (and commercial software developers) is that digital technology has made "casual use" almost frictionless. I can give my brother a copy of Jon Stewart's latest rant, half a dozen different ways, as easily, or easier, than I can repeat the high points over the phone. It's the _ease_ that defines casual.
I write software for a living too. And I've worked in broadcast TV. My TV job, which paid pretty well, thank you, was screwed by the imploding broadcast industry. Boo hoo. The price of progress. If I have to suck it up and re-invent myself, then Old Media can too.
The recording industry did it to live performers, the TV industry did it to Radio. The VCR ... well you get the idea. The only way to stop it is a nuclear war or a police state.
I'm not trying to minimize this. This is a weather change in the way media works. It is gonna be _hard_. But worrying about old models, and trying to prop up old players, who add little value in the new world, is only going to make it harder.
Wrong or right, good or bad, there are smart ways to get what you want and not so smart ways that don't work.
Taking non-corporate pirates head-on often doesn't work, and is often counter-productive. Taking pirates on indirectly is often a better option. (Use direct conflict as a last resort. It tends to be expensive.)
Not necessarily the same as books, but may be somewhat relevant.
There was a Japanese think tank that recently released a report that found the online piracy actually boosted the sale of anime DVDs.
http://torrentfreak.com/internet-piracy-boosts-anime-sales-s...
Personally, I used to work in the music business for Nettwerk Records (hence the Nettdata username), Sarah McLachlan's label. We were one of the few labels that believed that the freely available online versions of songs actually stimulated sales, especially for back catalogues.
When Sarah's Surfacing album released, we actually ripped high quality MP3 versions of the songs and hosted them for free download. We also created a streaming "radio" site that allowed you to make and play your own playlists from any and all of the songs Nettwerk had the rights to.
We had real live numbers that showed sales were up a LOT after we made things available online.
I think more than anything the content producers are being forced to rethink their models, especially when it comes to the record industry.
If they made their back catalogues available in an individual song format for a reasonable price (whatever that would be), I think they'd do well.
And for what it's worth, I actually bought a non-DRM'd eBook this morning, one that I can read on my laptop in PDF, or on my iPhone and iPad in eBook format. I'm sure it was available in some pirated format, but I'm one of those guys that would rather support the things I want to see more of.
A whole new import market sprung up because of what was technically piracy.
[1]With subtitles, but dubbed episodes started popping up on the Hulu page near the end of the show's run.
Superstars might lose out somewhat; their group B might be larger than group C. But for almost all creators of media, group C is larger, often extremely much larger, than group B, and therefore copyright infringement is a net benefit to them.
Even for superstars, it's not clear that B is larger than C. You want the latest hit song from Lady Gaga? Here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV1FrqwZyKw
Free to air for the world to see and download, no payment required, put up there by the creator. Clearly Gaga believes that the benefits of publicity outweigh any "losses" from people who decided not to buy the album. I'm sure she is correct.
Link?
But things might very well be different if it becomes the default mode for everyone. If you give something away for free now, while your 10 competitors are not doing it, you will draw a lot of people simply because consumption is easier by comparison. If your 10 competitors also started giving away everything for free that advantage would be gone.
Of course, there might still be a net benefit, but the evidence we have should be taken with a grain of salt.
I think it's important to remember that groups B and C aren't static.
In my, completely unsubstantiated, opinion group B would be much larger for blockbuster media.
Think a new video game from Valve or Id Software or movies like Avatar or Titanic. These types of media don't really need piracy to market due to the fact that many/most people already know they exist. I would also guess that they gain much less from word of mouth, but I'll fully grant that's just an opinion:)
On the other hand you'd have "indy" games and movies, and other niches like anime, where piracy may actually help spread the word about this media and help it gain sales through increasing the size of group C.
The fundamental problem I have with (C) being larger than (B) is that if it were true why don't more major companies know about? For example, if (C) were true, wouldn't MS remove all forms of copy protection from its product? No license keys period. You just pay money and get a link, but a link that anyone can use. And they would, accordingly make more money than what they're doing now.
I think what it probably looks like is (A) >> (B) >> (C)
For me, personally, it almost feels like the effort required factors into whether piracy is OK. That isn't really rational, but when you casually download a torrent, that doesn't seem as bad as building your own hardware to pirate a signal. Maybe it speaks to intent? (NB: this paragraph isn't intended as anything other than me exploring my own rationalizations for piracy. Do not use except as instructed by a physician, and all that).
I can't tell you how many versions of AutoCAD I downloaded as a teenager, either because I thought I might learn how to use it or just because I could. I don't think I ever installed a single copy. Likewise, I once had several hard drives filled with pirated TV Shows of things I will never watch, just because it was available.
Pirates converted to legitimate customers (in the face of DRM or other obstruction of the pirated form) at a rough rate of 1 customer per 1000 defrayed pirates. This seems to indicate a rough ratio of 1000 As to 1 B. Are a thousand sales worth a million users?
It seems almost everyone is taking what he has said as justification of piracy, "oh well he's rich now and he doesn't mind piracy so it must be okay for me to pirate!". If we ask him whether or not he thinks people should pirate he'll not say "yes, do it" he'll say "Well I'd rather you bought it, but if you're not going to then you may as well play it for free as I'd rather you play my game than go without, and I'm not going to spend millions trying to stop you... but I'd prefer if you paid for it".
This is kind of where I always stood (I don't pirate personally, though).
If you're selling some intellectual property, you can sell a bazillion copies with almost no production costs. You produce once and then copy for (almost) free.
Now that everyone has the ability to copy, that massive advantage is somewhat tempered. It isn't quite the wild west, which is good. If piracy was easy and convenient it would eviscerate sales. Most people can't figure out or don't bother with piracy and blatant piracy is legally squashed (in the developed world, at least).
There's not much you can do but accept it as a cost of doing business and soldier on.
I agree it's sloppy to think that theft and intellectual property violation are interchangeable but the point has been made on here about a million times so it doesn't really add much to the debate.
A lot of the time the copyright debate is fought between people these world views.
1) Copyright opponents define propert as being like a car - something which one person has by denying it to another person.
2) Copyright advocates think of property as a "bundle of rights" enforced by the state. i.e. property is whatever a judge says it to be.
People who insist on calling it theft are steering the debate towards the second definition - that theft is whatever a judge or politician says it is. It's crucial to knock back attempts to do that. That worldview believes the whim of the state is the root of philosophy, and fundamentally correct in its judgement of right and wrong.
Property predates the state. It exists even in states that try to outlaw it. It's a strong algorithm that is useful for the efficient allocation of resources. Intellectual propert is neither a strong algorithm, nor a mechanism that leads to an efficient allocation of resources. It is not property. Intellectual property violations are not theft.
Anyone who insists that copyright infringement and theft are the same thing isn't someone who has anything useful to add in this debate. Given that why not focus the debate on useful, genuinely contentious areas and solutions, not rehashing an argument that has been had and won over and over again?
(And yes, I know there are people who don't buy into this but by and large they're not reading Hacker News so you're doing nothing to progress the argument on that front repeating it here).
Congratulations to you for being around long enough, and seeing this point enough times, that you find it commonplace. I guarantee however that there are plenty of people here who still need to see it. There are lots of people on this site who are very intelligent in many ways who make comments like "you need to protect your patent or you lose it" or "copyright doesn't count unless registered". As long as they exist, this point can be made without it just being echo chamber fodder.
IMO, the argument is simply being reframed to avoid dealing with the larger and more difficult problem. I'm not interested in avoiding the real issue here -- compensation for creators in the age of easily-copied goods.
If we fix that, the semantics argument won't be an issue. After all, if we have a just system that fairly compensates individuals for creating while providing good incentives for consumers not to infringe, we don't need to nitpick about theft v. infringe.This, to me, serves as a good indication of what is actually important in this issue.
My experience tends to be that if I've not won someone over with one particular argument then my best tack is to try something else they might be more responsive to rather than just keep repeating myself.
But maybe the real issue is that I hope that HN might be a source of intelligent discussion on the subject with an attempt to find interesting and / or practical solutions to the problems raised rather than a more straight forward continual reassertion of views that could frankly be carried out by a series of Python scripts.
Then again, it is quite refreshing to see so many people defend the purity of the English language.
Semantic argument can become tedious and repetitive, but it's necessary for any more substantive argument to proceed. If there's no mutual agreement on what the terminology represents, then the participants of the discussion are effectively speaking separate languages, and they will be unable to 'access' each other's reasoning.
Sometimes, the semantic dispute is caused by an intentional attempt to confound terminology in order to make two things seem more similar than they otherwise are. Calling this out is appropriate and necessary every time it happens.
The US courts, by and large, have been fairly sensible on this so far, thank God.
So I'll say it again: Digital copying is not theft.
Some things warrant rehashing and reaffirming. Note that a new, but substantially similar, discussion about female engineers or gender discrimination pops up here every week or two. That discussion plays out the same way every time not because it adds anything new but because it's important (to someone, clearly).
And every other western country (and pretty much every other developed nation full stop.
Copyright infringement isn't theft but it is criminal. Whether that should be the case or not is a matter for debate, whether it is or not isn't.
In which jurisdiction?
Copyright infringement is against the law but it's not a "crime" (and therefore not criminal). This is true of most civil offenses. Some conditions apply in order to turn copyright infringement into a misdemeanor or a felony in a federal sense - wilfulness and varying levels of financial gain.
If you are merely conflating the words "illegal" and "criminal", they do not mean the same thing. (At least, I've only studied law within the context of England and Wales but believe the US system takes a similar approach on these fundamental issues given its ancestry.)
Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/contents) copyright law in UK allows for criminal prosecution where there is deliberate intent or passing-off in a commercial context. Section 107 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/107) outlines both the detail of the criminal liability (and it is expressly criminal liability) and the punishments that can result, including prison and fines.
The reason it's more commonly treated as a civil matter is that for the injured party to recover damages they'd need to pursue a civil case as well as the criminal case so they don't normally bother.
Someone else has pasted a link supporting that this is the same in the USA and, as it was a condition of the WTOs Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that laws be passed making copyright infringement a criminal offence, this is almost certainly true for any signatory (153 member states including the UK, USA, India, most (if not all) of Western Europe and anyone who is anyone except, for some reason, Russia.
In my estimation "unauthorized copying is not the same as stealing" needs to be said once for every time unauthorized copying is referred to as stealing, plus one or two additional times for good measure.
Piracy is similar. A band, video game maker, software producer, creates something for an audience with the expectation of getting paid for their work. When the work is pirated, that audience member has just done the equivalent of hiring someone and not paying them.
> So if someone hires me to do some work for them,
> and I do the work, but they don't pay me, what
> is that?
> Piracy is similar.
With your creative people, they never had a contract in place. I was never going to buy their music, game, book or whatever. I don't owe them anything. If they want to speculate on me giving them some money for the work they do, they can, but that doesn't guarantee crap. Further, if I copy say, a song: I have the song, they have the song, i paid the same as i would have paid anyway ($0). Somehow you are saying that the band lost money tho? If the pope declares the music satanic, and threatens listeners with excommunication, do you sue the Catholic Church for lost sales?
If I show up at your house and mow your lawn in speculation that you will pay me for that service, but you choose not to do that, do I get to sue you for theft now? Because it sure sounds like that is what you are saying.
As the ability to acquire the software for free increases for average consumers, the more expensive the software will become, with the singularity being that there's one copy, the original, for sale for thousands or millions of dollars. The cost of developing software must always be amortized across all future sales. It's disingenuous to imply that once the software is made, there are no further costs to the developer. The developer's costs are opportunity costs where he/she could be doing something else instead of writing the software. Remove their ability to recoup their initial investment in the software, and you simply won't have anyone writing commercial software anymore. Developers must have some assurance that their ability to capture income from the software is still intact, or they won't bother. Given that many open source projects are actually funded by commercial hardware/software companies, this would also be detrimental to all software development.
So when software I make is copied without my consent, I lose that right. If the infringement is large enough, I utterly lose it. (See also Trumpet Winsock).
Property doesn't need to be physical objects. You can steal an idea just as much as you can steal lunch money. And you can steal my rights.
If I take your pen, you no longer have it; thats theft.
The thing that is being stolen is the right of exploitation. That is what copyright protects.
It is deprivation of exclusivity though, I agree.
If we do, what if someone has exclusive knowledge of some algorithm, and then someone else discovers it too? Is he a thief?
Other than that, you don't lose your right to exploit your work. Someone else is exploiting your work in addition to you. They are infringing on your copyright, not stealing it.
You could sue for everyone for copyright infringement. (This didn't work so well for the RIAA.)
Or you can figure out a way to capitalize off the reason why everyone likes your work.
In any instance you don't lose your copyright.
The two are close, but not synonymous. Take photographs: the exclusive first-use of a photograph is a big thing. If you publish my picture without my permission, my right of control is gone.
I can use copyright laws and the courts to try and get economic redress for that, but nonetheless I no longer have the ability to decide where and when that picture is first published; the ability was stolen from me.
Copyright doesn't prevent copying, it just gives you a way of redress.
Small developers can get badly hurt by piracy.
This story has to do with people "stealing" software for their own private use without paying.
Given the existing level of confusion in all piracy discussions, I believe it is counterproductive to lump these two scenarios together.
So basically exactly the same as torrent sites?
Ten years ago, the idea of questioning the justification of copyright was alien even to geeks and lawyers. People who copied lots themselves considered it to be cheeky, unjustified. The idea of questioning it hadn't thought about it, and wouldn't even raise the energy to consider that it might be worth questioning. The reaction to skepticism would always be that laugh that's reserved for contrarians, followed by a brief "doesn't compute" look and then a search for distraction.
Things are shifting.
The difference is that copyright gives rights to the copyright holder, which may or may not be the author. With creator-right ('Urheberrecht'), these rights are always bound to the author and can not be sold.
I think this is interesting, because I would agree more with Urheberrecht than with copyright.
It's completely irrelevant what you call it unless you are one of those curious people who considers private property to be almost an ontological category. Protection of private property exists to the extent it's judged useful to society. Protection of so-called intellectual property exists to the same extent. Counterfactual what-if reasoning is as valid or as suspect in this debate as in any other.
I agree with that view, but I suspect this issue comes up a lot because many people don't agree with it. A common view is that private property is a natural right of some sort, merely recognized by society, rather than a convention created by society.
If you took that view, then whether intellectual property is legit turns largely on whether it is or isn't part of this natural-law category of "property" (which is what you find debate about in libertarian writings on IP, for example).
You can consider protection of private property the most important right in societies like ours, so important it occupies a lofty stratum of its own, and yet not commit the fallacy of claiming that private property is a natural right. However, it's understandable why people with priorities like that would make such a mistake.
This is why "infringement is theft" arguments are so manipulative and dishonest. They try to tap into this indignation rather than win the debate on the merits.
Rights should be judged by their usefulness, not by how fundamental some person thinks they are, because no right is truly fundamental.
My point is not that the question at stake is straightforward, but that once we stop clinging to flawed analogies, the matter reveals itself as a policy issue like any other, an issue that is complex but ultimately resolvable by the usual means of analysis.
All the rest is rhetoric.
Interesting use of the passive voice - who's doing the judging?
My point is that there are two views of property: it's a right that is somehow inherent/moral/pre-existing; or it's a convention that exists for its benefits to society. How we can know whether it has benefits, and who decides whether the convention should exist, is a whole different discussion.
I'd say that if we're going to view 'society' in a meaningful way - that is, not merely as a conceptual abstraction, but as something exists empirically - then we have to acknowledge that society has a definite nature, emergent from human psychology, emotions, physiology, neurology, etc.
And if we accept that society exists, why should we not recognize that the recognition of things like 'rights' and 'property' emerge from the very same antecedents? These concepts are all descriptions of fundamental relationships between people and other people, and between people and their physical environment.
The idea that social conventions exist for the benefit of society is something of a tautology. Obviously, anything that anyone creates or does is something they're doing because they've judged that it will be of benefit to them. The ideas of 'law' and 'government' follow the same rule - these are also just conventions that people established, in the expectation that they will somehow benefit.
But the real question, the empirical question, is this: what are the actual motivations that have led people to establish these conventions? I suspect that the idea of law emerged after the idea of property, as people sought to maintain the relationships they established with physical objects in the context of their relationships with other human beings, and sought a structured and formal way to do so without violence (or perhaps merely dissension and group harmony, given that cooperation is as essential to our nature as competition).
Fast-forwarding to today, with all of that in mind, I think it's reasonable to make a distinction between the conventions that arose from a 'natural' social context and those conventions which are the product of positive law, the latter being a kind of 'secondary' experimental thing, intentionally designed by the mechanisms of the earlier first-order convention.
In my mind, 'theft' is a violation of the first kind of convention, while 'copyright infringement' is a violation of the latter.
It is important in a debate to not allow people to vilify any participants in "piracy" by declaring them to be criminals from the get go. "Theft" does this. "Copyright infringement" does not. Definitions are important because without sharing a vocabulary, we share nothing with which to debate logically.
Protection of private property is to prevent theft. We both can't have your car. If I copy your software, we both have it.
Protection of intellectual "property" was granted as incentive to create. It was (is?) a time based monopoly on your creation. At some point the protection ended. This was a benefit to society as it allowed ideas to be built upon.
With digital goods, you can share and still own the product, so both are happy.
This works perfect for consumers, but not so good for the companies....
The movie industry is thriving and they've been hit pretty hard by sharing.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...
Software, movies and music are now perceived as free. Which is one reason why many developers are now moving to closed platforms such as Apple's iOs where they are guaranteed payment for installations.
That said, I can see the logic behind "going with the flow" when it comes to piracy, especially when cumbersome anti-piracy measures usually only harm legit, legal owners. (E.g. its more convenient to crack Digidesigns ProTools audio editing software and be able to run it on my laptop without any fuss, than to have to insert my legal USB dongle every time I boot the software).
I think anti-piracy measures will work if they are baked into a product from day one. And I don't mean contrived, un-user-oriented measures, I mean doing it iOs-style or cloud-style. In iOs the users love the App Store - its an advantage, not a hindrance. And its the same with Cloud-based or hosted software. Its a selling point - its part of the offering.
Me and some friends have a SaS app that we changed from free to a minimal monthly subscription. Logically, we saw a decline in sign-ups and follow-through by new users, but this was worth it cos we now make some money from the service. If the software had, instead, been a download, then my guess it that we never would have been able to profit of the small user-base that we have. The free version would be out there, and even though it took off we would never have seen any profits.
And then we might not be motivated to cary on creating cool stuff.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/illegal-downloade...
Just like radio (play for free) increases album sales for record labels.
This suggests that "lost sales" may mean a product that is not worth buying to some.
Is there some place other than that puff piece to get real MineCraft numbers from?
It beat out other indie games, which of course wouldn't get as high a sales boost. So yes, Minecraft is an example of a very rare case.
EDIT: Sorry, 30k/day is registered and 30% purchased, so it's actually 9k/day roughly. That's still 135k/day or 270k/day. Still, two numbers I'd be fine with.
Colin Messitt actually ran an experiment to figure this out. I reposted it about 15 years ago with his permission:
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19990420024127/http://scraw...
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/24446/is-ther...
As for the X is or is not theft discussions, let's see what Richard Feynman has to say about it:
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
I just find it fascinating that a game like Minecraft has such an involved ecosystem around it.
When you purchase the game, you pay for it as it is right now. Future updates are an added bonus.
Sure. So far the game has been updated regularly, but they explicitly stated that they are not guaranteeing any updates.
Convenience is the differentiator (itunes v.s. thepiratebay) and many consumers are willing to pay a premium for it.
Regardless, if you just accept that a good portion of your market won't pay for your product and work around it you can still have a very successful business. Then focusing on techniques like convenience, reward systems, free t-shirts? etc. can increase your paying customers. Maybe suing them can too, but it's definitely not the only way.
During alpha the rules were: "if they release updates, you get them for free. But you agree that when you pay, you pay for the game as-is and you don't have any right to expect updates".
Meaning: "Maybe I lose interest in doing this and just stop updating it. You have no right to be mad about this. If I update it though, you will get that update for free"
Not quite. Only those who bought it before or during Alpha subscribed to a lifetime of updates, since beta the terms are far more "normal".
I like free stuff too. But believe me, I'd rather put in some registration features to "keep people honest" than to let myself be ripped off.