Comment by RupertEisenhart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RupertEisenhart | Hacker News Reader

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RupertEisenhart

This google search[0] will provide a list of interesting papers about piracy.

They seem generally to support what I think is something like the majority consensus here:

- piracy does some harm to sales, especially of new books, but can increase consumer knowledge and therefor increase diversity of sales and sales of older works: "effect of piracy is heterogeneous: piracy decreased the legitimate sales of ongoing comics, whereas increased the legitimate sales of completed comics. The latter result is interpreted as follows: piracy reminds consumers of past comics and stimulates sales in that market." [1]

- piracy does considerable harm to large institutes (but largely seen as a good thing)

- for sales, a lot of the lost revenue seems to be made up for "increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices"

- that DRM creates fake scarcity where none should exist-- distribution costs are now zero, we shouldn't pretend that we still need to pay so much for books and music

- how to make sure artists still have a revenue stream needed to exist is definitely still a problem, but it is not one that is solved by crushing pirate libraries

Also further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 (517 comments, recent)

And, to the person down below who wants to help out, check out the further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=annas-blog.org (>1000 comments over six submissions)

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gwern.net+piracy

[1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2019-tanaka.p...

[2]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2010-oberholz...

EDIT: formatting

This seems to imply that you could get most of the socially-desirable effects of piracy simply by instituting compulsory royalties for previously-published works that have since fallen out of print. As of today, most out of print works will simply never get republished and users who want to access them legally have to resort to substandard solutions such as the used market, or merely borrowing a legitimate copy of the work. (Until the work falls out of copyright protection altogether, and then it's fair game for free reproduction by anyone.) Fix this in a comprehensive way and you would create a lot of value.

Note that this was essentially Google Books' proposal, before they got forced into only showing tiny snippets of works to avoid copyright issues; it's not a new idea at all.

i will try to explain my stand. 2005-12. a small "user" from india HAD 0 means to purchase online content. local content in the stores was the same expensive "imported" stuff and TV was the only main means of consuming content. then with internet, i could suddenly go to piratebay and watch any movie or read any book or download any game. talking about "buying using paypal and stuff", INDIANS STILL CANNOT EASILY BUY FROM INTERNATIONAL SELLERS, you need a "credit card, then you need to call your bank to allow international transaction and then it fails most of the time". this problem exists in 2022, forget about 10 years ago.

to put that into perspective, https://nextbigwhat.com/indias-credit-card-industry-key-stat...

says "A thread While at 925mn debit cards are highly penetrated, credit cards is still a nascent industry ~ 50mn card base (3.5% per capita, unique cards ~60% of this" so only 2.1 mil card holders in india who can potentially buy from foreign markets online.

that said, if i consume content here in india, "HOW AM I CAUSING SALES LOSS TO POOR RIAA and americaan authors and all the content creators?". this is same for 15 years ago and today. a lot of stuff doesnt exist in india in the official market so yeah.

this goes for MOST OF THE WORLD, pricing has helped because for a long time, amazon prime is being sold in india for inr 1500/year or US $17. while in the US the same costs $14.99/month (plus tax). same for netflix and stuff. they made india specific pricing and people are adopting them but it is basically impossible for me at least to pay $14.99/month (plus tax) if amazon prime did not exist in india and i had to pay for american prime.

this is the same problem with scientific journals for example. $35 is normally put as a price but that amount is A LOT in indian rupees and the same for rest of the world who are not on american living standard and cannot pay american prices.

i get it, the moral argument of "you dont pay, you dont get access to our content for which i own the copyright for" but also "doesnt matter if you own the rights or not, i was never going to pay or even if i was, i couldnt pay legally so it doesnt matter because i havent cost you anything financially".

there is a case against DRM, if you pay, you get more restrictions than if you dont so whats the point?

It's basically "You didn't lose money because I pirated your product, I had no money to begin with".

I can relate to this, coming from a poor background. I would've never be where I stand today If I didn't have access to the published material on the internet for free.

Also, the prices of scientific papers are atrocious! And that's not even considering the fact that the researchers who wrote the paper and peer reviewed it for free won't receive a penny!

What do you expect from me when even Harvard says It's expensive?

See also: game piracy. People who install cracked games are mostly kids, or people who can't afford the game. GabeN was right, piracy is a service problem. Any additional piracy after you solved the service problem was never going to be sales anyway, and now you're just spending money to prevent people from playing your game.

Of course, some percentage of pirates become sales conversions, as well. I’ve bought plenty of movies and music after pirating it. I know many people like this. True that this is the exception, not the rule, but then we’re back to the “I am only consuming this because it’s free” issue.

yes. game piracy is huge and STEAM is even bigger. for once, people ACTIVELY use steam because of the multi-player community which is absent in pirated content. sure you can pirate a game and play offline but do you want to? so even pirates pay for that which makes gabeN the one person who ACTUALLY understands the whole thing...

This is broadly correct of course. Modern IPR's have been explicitly pushed since the 1990s or so as a neo-colonialist racket; force dirt-poor people in other parts of the world to pay for the West's tech and content, and rake in the billions. Needless to say it doesn't work like that and can never work like that.

yes, and as i said, the pricing is always made with american rates in mind, sure $100 looks good for a software/ music cd or a movie, whatever but poor people from poor countries cannot afford it in the first place. ebooks are especially stupid in this regard. we are told "this book costs $20 to write, edit, print, sell, transport, wastage and all that" but when it comes to ebooks, prices are equal or more so what happened? i was told back when that a textbook author gets no more than 5% of the sticker price royalty. rest is in transportation and seller margins and stuff. i've always said "here, 5% of $20 is $1. how about the author gets $2 or 3, that is the extent of my "moral obligation" and everyone is happy but no. "

A nit, the argument with be easier to read without the all caps in certain places. That's just personal preference though...

That's interesting. You could make Copyright closer to the way Patents already work: you get protection for your work, but only for as long as you're making it available to the public; once you stop licensing your protected work, you lose the protection.

So if you publish a work and later stop making that work available, it would automatically lose protection and it would become legal to share online or for another company to print.

Yes, that's one possible solution to the issue of out-of-print works. Compulsory licensing or royalty payments for these works could provide a way for them to be republished and made available to the public again. This would create value by ensuring that these works remain accessible, and by providing a financial incentive for publishers to republish them.

> piracy does considerable harm to large institutes

What do you mean by the word "institutes" here? First thing that comes to mind is academic and research institutes, but surely piracy doesn't harm them. So you must mean something else?

Elsevier basically. They are always everyones bogieman. Predatory publishing houses.

But yeah academics love piracy;)

For those who enjoyed this thorough summation of the state of the art, you may find the following forum interesting: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/1597/is-it-im...

It’s a well organized discussion of the philosophical viewpoints surrounding piracy. I felt a compulsion to share based on the parent’s use of “where none should exist” (which borders on opinion).

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