No, Silly, Piracy is Theft
devtopics.com
devtopics.com
Causing someone not to get income they might otherwise have gotten is not theft. If it were, giving someone bad financial advice would also be theft.
Because taking something someone already has is so much more serious than causing them not to get something they hoped to get in the future, we have a specially bad word just for this situation: theft. And the RIAA and MPAA deliberately misuse this word in order to make file sharing seem worse than it actually is.
If it were, Blizzard would lose the biggest class-action lawsuit in the world! I mean, if all the time I spent playing Starcraft were spent doing something productive...
Another mistake in this analogy is that between criminal and civil law. Theft, in most if not all countries, is a criminal offense.
Piracy, formally known as copyright infringement (or copyright violation), is a criminal offense when done for financial gain, civil offense otherwise in countries which recognize software copyright. The vast majority of occurrences of copyright violation we see in the media are for personal use, not financial gain, thereby a largely civil legal matter, than a criminal one. Hence theft as a comparison is inaccurate.
- Yes, it's illegal. I don't think anyone actually argues it's not, but somehow it still keeps popping up as an argument to support that it's theft.
- Legally, as far as I know, theft and copyright infringement have very different meanings. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm willing to bet that neither are any of the people arguing piracy=theft. Anyway, I don't really see how arguing and personal opinions can come into this. The law is what it is.
- Morally, it's hard to argue that it's right, but at least this is the only part where you CAN actually have any kind of debate.
People arguing about different things without realizing it = recipe for endless, unproductive argument.
Arguing about this is good because it fosters thinking and may prompt people to actually DO something to improve our current situation.
One person arguing the legality. Another, the morality. A third steps in with semantics. Since they all use the same words they think hey are talking about the same thing. But they are not. If you replaced the words they used with the words they mean they'd sound like a pack of hyenas.
That's why internet music taxes & whatnot are ridiculous. That doesn't restore ownership. Just money.
It depends on where you are. In Spain it's not illegal to make private copies of music and movies, and share it with friends. P2P is slightly different, and a legal void here because, although maybe not completely legal, its prohibition would be unenforceable due to privacy laws.
In fact, the right to make these copies justifies the "canon", a compensation that goes to "spanish RIAA" charging recording media, formerly CD/DVD and recently expanded to hard disks, memory sticks and even phones.
>- Morally, it's hard to argue that it's right
Not so hard, I've seen very convincent reasons. Excuse me if I don't share them, but, as you say, this is often an endless and unproductive argument.
No, it's not stealing. Yes it is wrong - if you don't pay for creative content, content creators won't create, which is a bad outcome for society (and no, don't give me any crap about people creating for free - sure, some might, but I certainly wouldn't be spending my weekends and nights writing an application if I didn't think I'd get some money for it, and I doubt that I'm rare!).
This is where governments are supposed to do their jobs - create laws to encourage desirable behaviour. For example, they could start passing laws to make it illegal to publicly share copyright-protected works. They could also make it illegal to facilitate the sharing of copyright-protected works, putting operations such as TPB under pressure.
Better than just making it a law, make it one of the conditions of membership in the WTO - it's a logical activity for the WTO anyhow, seeing as an increasing percentage of world trade is IP. That way, there is a powerful tool available to force compliance at an international level.
And Python, Perl and PHP...
I think enough people who spend their lives working for free to make it worthwhile!
Though I think most of free software is written for the 'finally this thing does what I want it to do' reward.
Obviously I, and everyone else here, is aware of them, which should have clued you in that you had misread me. I didn't say that no-one will develop software for free, I said that I don't do it, and that I suspect that I'm far from unique.
Besides, if you look, you'll discover that many of the developers on those projects are getting paid for it, one way or another.
Piracy does not take money away from sellers. It reduces how much they get. This is not the same thing.
The best example I heard was this: say you're a baker and you sell bread. One day it starts raining bread, and people pick up their bread from the street rather than pay for yours. It sucks for you that you aren't getting money from your bread, but how can you blame people for what they're doing?
Price is dictated by supply and demand, and there's now a supply which is infinite and therefore, by traditional economics, surely it should be free?
I don't agree that you should be able to get stuff from artists etc for free. I make a point of paying for the albums I download if I like them, and I pay for movies and TV I like. But it's not a question of ethics, it's a question of what exactly it is you're paying or not paying for.
Why exactly do so many newspapers publish content for free? Surely it's the same idea - they're publishers after all…?
EXACTLY what someone with an ethical dilemma says.
Situational logic if there ever was any.
Inaccurate analogy. The baker played no part in making it rain bread. Software developers and other producers of content invest their time, money, and life into creating the product that gets disseminated. If they see that the product of their labor will get pirated, they will be less inclined to innovate and produce more in the future.
"Price is dictated by supply and demand, and there's now a supply which is infinite and therefore, by traditional economics, surely it should be free?"
No. You are committing the fallacy of confusing descriptive economics with normative economics. Saying what will be is not the same as saying what should be. As an example: if I hack into your server, steal your startup's source code, and release it on BitTorrent, your startup's product will become free. That doesn't mean it should be free.
A better example would be a company that invested a huge amount of money into creating the perfect strain of corn that allowed farmers to get 10 times as much corn per acre, solving the shortage caused by ethanol production. They sold this corn to a few farmers, who then grew a lot of it and gave it away for free to others. The original company never recouped their investment, ran out of money since no one would invest, and shut its doors in the middle of inventing a new kind of wheat that would also solve world hunger.
The other farmers never would pay for the better corn, they already had corn, why pay for the better kind if they could get it for free? Right?
Wrong, the better corn would have eventually forced the other farmers into buying it to be competitive, and the company could have recouped its investment and created better wheat, better apples, etc. Just because something doesn't have a variable cost, doesn't mean it didn't have a fixed cost to start with.
the rebuttal makes the assumption that pirates will actually pay for the item if they can't get it for free. 90% (i made this number up) of pirates would not pay for the item that they're pirating. hypothetically, if i were unable to pirate photoshop, i'd use gimp instead. i wouldn't go buy photoshop.
so, piracy does not steal income.
and i'm also, apparently, making up statistics.
what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?
I want to remind readers that this 10% (or <=10%, as you just phrased it) is a made-up figure.
what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?
If you backed up that assertion with hard evidence, and demonstrated that this effect outweighs the loss companies sustain from piracy, I'd take you more seriously.
Are you claiming that these companies overall make more money because of piracy? Software and media companies are diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of their budgets into anti-piracy measures. If piracy didn't drain their profits by at least the aforementioned hundreds of millions of dollars, why on earth would they throw away so much money into something that reduces their bottom line (and annoys me and other consumers, therefore making us less likely to buy their products)? These companies might be capitalistic, greedy and [insert adjective here], but they're not dumb. Follow the money.
canadian governmental study on music piracy:
http://www.pch.gc.ca/pc-ch/pubs/music_industry/tdm_e.cfm
When assessing the P2P downloading population, there was a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file sharing increases CD purchases. The study estimates that one additional P2P download per month increases music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.
When viewed in the aggreggate (ie. the entire Canadian population), there is no direct relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchases in Canada. According to the study authors, the analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.
Piracy steals income infrequently at best.
You seem to be making an argument about how rates of piracy are distributed across different products. How does this make the effects of piracy any less harmful?
It doesn't matter (to the status of piracy) whether or not piracy is harmful or any other consequences. If 90% of shoplifters get hit with a sudden case of Dostoevsky & slip envelopes under doors resulting in 120% ... It would still be theft. Just like assault is still assault if they sober up & buy you an icecream.
I'm not saying piracy is theft. It is different enough to warrant its own word (& its own treatment). 'Preventing revenue' is not a reasonable explanation. Standing outside a store and yelling like a madman scaring away customers is also preventing (stealing?) revenue.
In some cases, I think that piracy is helpful to companies (photoshop might be an example) in others it's harmful. But that's besides the point. You can invoke that in a wider discussion of how laws should be made or you may be making a moral assertion that rights & such aren't important, only consequences. But that's not really our system (or most people's understanding).
Anyway this discussion is 90% semantics. It's only important to propaganda campaigns (saying stealing is more effective then saying violating copyright).
I think open source also has a more attractive price tag too, but maybe I might consider selling support somewhere down the line...
it's like piracy is the main subject and theft or non-theft piracy would be the stubs.
PIRACY
/ \
LOST REVENUE NO LOST REVENUE
| |
THEFT NOT THEFT
Would you accept that in end cases?
Say you steal a toy from a child that has piles of em? They don't even notice. Not theft?
IP is actually quite similar. Suppose I wrote a book (.pdf) that contains important business information about the future of the oil market. I obtained this information at great personal cost. Your accessing that information doesn't remove that information from me, but it's still stealing access to information you otherwise wouldn't have had.
Saying, "But I wasn't going to buy your crappy business book anyway!" doesn't change the fact that you've still taken information that doesn't belong to you.
Because in Canada here we allow downloading music as part of fair use like listening to the radio. The artist gains exposure from music downloads which could increase your sales.
So what if this 'stealing' was causes 10% of the users to not buy the music, but 20% of the user to buy the music they would have been otherwise unaware of.
It's also illegal in Canada to upload or share music if you don't have the rights to do so , so at least theoretically you're downloading that music because the artist/label wants you to.
(( http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39118537,0... ))
If we didn't have pirated MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite folks would improve openoffice.org and the GIMP/Scribus/Inkscape instead and these monopolies would die and lose everything.
Piracy actually helps software monopolies to be de facto standards and kills all alternatives (or keeps alternatives unusable).
Thus software piracy "steals" only our own freedom.
Piracy is people in boats killing other people and stealing their stuff. What about software piracy? As far as I know, pirates use guns and boats, not software.
What people are talking about when they say "software piracy" is "sharing".
The important thing is whether a certain number maps to a mechanism. The mapping is the thing people are really copyrighting when they copyright IP, and that is not a number.
So far, the BD+ scheme on Blu-Ray disks has had to be bypassed title by title, with Slysoft's breaks being corrected by Macrovision and Slysoft averaging 2.5 weeks on each of the refreshes. Nobody has come up with a scheme that completely defeats BD+. And BD+ is the first system of its kind; subsequent systems will be even more of a bitch to deal with. Add to that the fact that Slysoft has a really smart team that does almost nothing but this.
Take another example: DirecTV. The current DTV smartcards are unbroken, despite a ~7 year track record of breaks leading up to them.
Take another example: iTMS FairPlay. Last time I checked, there still isn't an equivalent break to JHymn, which does a direct decryption of audio files.
Take still another example, of protected media pathways on Windows kernels; currently shipping Intel hardware has chipset-enforceable RSA/SHA/AES locks on kernel integrity, which is something you want anyways, because without it you can't trust your kernel against malware.
And of course, all of this assumes that the goal is to keep people from copying at all. The industry could also solve the revocation problem, so that when copies are detected, players are shut off, accounts are closed, or people are sued. Ed Felten beat early watermarking attempts, but come on, do we really think watermarking is an intractable problem? It's the covert channel problem turned around to favor the defender; the media companies will win it.
I'm not making a moral stand here (although I really think that if you don't want to pay for DRM'd Miley Cyrus tracks, or pay for Miley Cyrus at all, you simply shouldn't give your money to Warner Music Group). But I object to the knee-jerk dogma that copy protection can't work. I think it can.
"Starting in 2006, many new laptop computers have been sold with a Trusted Platform Module chip built-in... Intel is planning to integrate the TPM capabilities into the southbridge chipset in 2008..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module
Or simply unaware, and with little chance of ever finding out:
http://isis.poly.edu/csaw/embedded (and assorted talks at HOPE, Defcon, Shmoocon, etc. on hardware and firmware covert channels)
The analog gap isn't an unsolveable CS problem. Yes, you can't encrypt photons. But you can watermark and trace them. Preventing copies is CS-hard. Preventing covert channels is also CS-hard. Watermarks are a defensive application of covert channels.
Watermarks -> revocation -> economic disincentive to copying transactions.
Watermarks -> evidence -> lawsuit -> economic disincentive to copying at all.
Also, none of these things has to work perfectly. The industry's goal isn't to stop copying. It's to capture the maximum amount of revenue per title.
As long as we've got private communications, it will become ever easier to share media over the internet. It only takes one "Pirate_0" to break the copy protection (even if it requires digitizing LCD signals). And if breaking the protection requires substantial capital, the market will oblige.
Two simple examples:
If a license or physical player is needed to create a high-fidelity copy (for instance, by capturing raw video streams from a player), and the output video is watermarked, content providers can revoke the player. Now "free" copies cost players.
If the same technology creates a trail of evidence leading back to "pirate 0", people will start getting sued. Not everyone the RIAA sued was innocent, and there's nothing to say that the DVD legal teams will create the same PR firestorm the RIAA did by abusing the system. Just as importantly, if it takes a huge amount of effort to create a supply chain of unlawful copies, the court case is much more damaging.
Content protection is not really a practice focus for us (though anticheating and kernel protection are), so my thoughts on this are not an exhaustive summary of the space of solutions content providers have. I'm just saying, the content providers aren't always on the wrong side of computer science.
Even if it costs $1k to get each movie release out of protected form, it's cheap for a (dubious) advertiser wishing to get a message out to a huge audience.
And further down the road, I suspect there will be an anonymous market for such content. $1k is only a penny from 100k people.
My point is, "useless" is too strong a word. It isn't silver-bullet simple, but it is a tool that can be made to work. Content providers are already costing Slysoft money; now they just have to figure out how to increase that cost fast enough to push them out of business.
But for getting one-time copies out, there will always be an analog output at the end of the chain. Watermarking allows the distributor to pinpoint the device used, but the only thing they can do with this information is shut down the device. I don't see how this can be an economic threat when player prices must be kept low for consumers, but there are millions of people wanting pirated content (which is easily distributed after extraction).
How hard is it to forge the required identification or bribe a store clerk to not check identification?
If someone's house is broken into, are they going to be liable for piracy through their stolen media player? (Assuming there's a several hours before it can be disabled)
And, with regards to "are they going to be liable", I direct your attention to the track record of the RIAA.
Of course it's hard to speculate the difficulty of such forging in the future. But I would think that $10k would be enough to break some human link in the chain.
"Arggg, what seas you be sailing, matey?"
How did the word "piracy" ever get attributed to this? Just to make it more sensational, more evil?
Last I heard, you don't get sued/fined thousands of dollars for sneaking into a movie theater....
If I download a song - it does not directly negatively impact the artist. They aren't out anything.
The indirect impact on the artist is another matter. They are potentially out of a sale that could have otherwise happened without the piracy. However, they are also potentially gaining a sale from a user who would have not normally purchased their music, but downloaded and decided to buy. Just like listening to a song on the radio isn't theft - yet if you are only listening to the radio and not buying music are you stealing?
It most certainly should not carry harsher penalties than physical theft. Downloading a song should not result in a 1000$ penalty while a physical theft of a CD results in a lesser penalty.
The analogy breaks down because music and other forms of media are just pure information, so there is no reason to buy it if you already downloaded it, especially as the friction of obtaining an illegal copy is reduced to zero.
1. Many downloaders ended up buying physical copies because paper books are easier to use.
2. It drove up sales of older catalog items, which had been crowded out of the shelves at physical bookstores.
3. It created new fans of the authors, driving up future book sales.
You can read about it at http://www.baen.com/library/
Why? Because I found it was a useful book and wanted to support the author and own a physical copy. I also would have never purchased the book if I hadn't been able to go through it first online.
I realize that I wasn't pirating - but the analogy doesn't break down in the manner you suggest.
That's a donation, not a purchase.
So I'll assume he's consistent in his moral principles once the check clears.
Piracy is a robbery committed at sea, or sometimes on the shore, without a commission from a sovereign nation.
That said, whatever you want to call it, it's hard to deny it's illegal in many places. If you're ok with breaking the law, and you think it's moral to "pirate", then by all means go ahead.
It may be illegal, but that does not mean a pirate is breaking the law. The basis of piracy is to sovereignly act, without blessing from the land oligopoly. A pirate may be attacked by a nation, but the concept of law is absent from such interaction.
The movie theater has costs associated with the playing of said movie. It pays employees, cashiers, ushers, cleaners, licensing fees, operators... etc etc... These costs are covered by the revenue from said ticket purchase. On the other hand, when a pirated copy is made, there is absolutely no ADDITIONAL cost to the content's creator(s). Actually, people typically use their own resources (time especially) to reproduce these works.
As previously stated, this new medium needs new rules and new ways to participate.
Besides, last time I checked the people complaining the loudest about piracy benefit the most from it.
Historically, copyright law is type (2) -- specifically, it's a response to the threat that creators will not create without financial incentive. The copying isn't itself undesirable; we're more interested in encouraging a specific outcome.
Where most of the purportedly analogous arguments go wrong is that they describe actions that are type (1).
As an example, lots of people here are suggesting that a better analogy to file sharing is the act of sneaking into a movie theater. But this seems pretty clearly to be a case of an act that is restricted due to (1); that is, it's illegal because it's trespassing, which is undesirable in its own right.
Some cinemas are set up to facilitate sneaking in: having passed the usher to get into one film, you can then stay and watch any number you like.
This is semi-deliberate: it turns out that they gain more money from people who wouldn't otherwise bother, than they lose from people who would otherwise buy two.
Maybe these people are committing "theft", but it's still a mutually beneficial relationship. This doesn't obviously apply to most internet piracy, as in that case nothing is bought at all, but it's worth considering.
Turns out that the rental on the reels was so high that the ticket sales themselves were basically a break even proposition. $7 popcorn and $4 sodas are a completely different story.
[Edit: but, reading down the page, I see that pg already made a similar point more concisely. Oh, well. :) ]
I make over 100usd/hr and I pay for my software. My colleges in developing countries make it in a week and I don't blame them for copying software. Otherwise they would stay forever poor instead of learning stuff.