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I think at core his argument is that he doesn't want to pay for the content he consumes. He justifies it on the grounds that the prices are too high.

Well, no. At least, that's not the central theme of his essay. I can sort of see why you might get that impression if you read only the middle and neither the beginning or the end, but the author is very clear about what he is saying and you would have to ignore all of that to label him as "a real creep."

So, here is the overall picture of the essay, since you may have missed it. He is saying, "look, I am a pirate -- I'm not going to try to justify that or discuss it; we'll just take it here as a given: I am going to pirate stuff. Now, it just so happens, like many pirates, I actually buy a lot of entertainment, paying a lot of money for games and television and movies. So let's ask a different question: how can you get access to my money?"

Here's one way, he says, to revoke your access to his money: sell him a crappy product. It's not unlike my behavior at cyclist shops in the Netherlands. An obscure piece of trivia: there are three bike valves in common usage, the American/Schrader/car valve, the French/Presta/unscrew valve, and the English/Woods-Dunlop valve. The Dutch prefer by 90% or so the Woods valve, but I have been sold twice air pumps from various cycling shops which simply do not work on Woods valves, and either time I was told that I could not be reimbursed because I had to take the pump out of the packing material to use it. (In fact, both times I found out that neither bike shop knew the name of the Woods-Dunlop valve despite the fact that it's absurdly popular.) Guess who is never getting my business again? The people who sold me stuff that does not work.

In fact, as you might imagine has occurred with me, he is now so paranoid about being sold content which sucks that he will no longer put down money until he knows that it doesn't suck -- just like I won't buy a bike pump unless I can see that I can manually switch the airflow to the smaller nozzle. If I can't demand a refund then I'm going to demand that I know the quality that I'm buying.

On the other hand, he says, one way to really get his money is by convenience. When he sees albums from bands he liked, he buys those. If he pirates a good game he usually buys the sequel, and will even opt to pay a little extra to bundle it with the original game.

IP law is just as important to open source software.

It actually tends to get in the way. There are all sorts of different licenses, many of which are not compatible -- GNU code can use but can't be used by BSD code, Eclipse can neither use nor be used by GNU -- and the biggest problem is that software freedom is not given automatically.

Would any of the coders here be cool with others appropriating their work without compensation or choice in the matter?

I assure you, all of the people here who work on websites would be happy if you visited their website, even though that requires your computer to copy all of their images and client-side code.

We might get mad if you try to reappropriate our content, especially for profit. This is also conceded by the original poster, who says, "The main reason I don't feel bad is because, like I detailed above, I know I'm buying content. Another important reason I don't feel bad is because I'm not profiting. I'm not taking your content and trying to resell it as though I'm a legitimate vendor."

The problem is that digital goods without articily created scarcity and property like "properties"'will suffer a major free rider problem.

No, they won't. The fact that people will download you for free will be perfectly balanced by the fact that downloads are absurdly cheap operations. It's like complaining that, "if we don't make it really hard to get a glass of water at our restaurant, then everybody will just order water and nobody will ever buy drinks." If you start to think that way, when getting someone a glass of water is of absolutely negligible cost, then you will alienate your customers for no good reason. That's what the MAFIAA has been doing: it's dirt-cheap for them to produce digital copies, but they think like you are describing, and insist on trying to create an artificial economy of scarcity. All it creates is resentment. A good restaurant starts you off with a glass of water and refills it whenever your waiter/waitress notices that your cup seems to be a bit empty -- then you go, "wow, this is great service, I'll come back here again."

Same thing with digital content. Because I can get The Daily Show in the Netherlands via TheDailyShow.com, I am really interested in any work that Comedy Central does, and I even own a copy of their book, America (The Book). I have no idea how else they're going to get a revenue stream out of my viewership there, but I imagine they'll find something worthwhile.

In a restaurant, the cost of providing you with a warm comfortable place to sit, and someone to bring you glasses of water (the cost of the water itself being deminimus), is covered by the expensive meal you pay for.

Since all unprotected digital goods are approximately as cheap to copy as one another regardless of production cost, all digital goods count as 'glasses of water' in your analogy.

This implies that the cost of producing unprotected digital goods in general can only be covered by selling some non-digital good or service in conjunction with it.

I'm not sure where you get the "this implies" aspect of your conclusion from. There might be some sort of "common sense" logic here, but the only ways I can really read it are either boring or wrong.

So you might be saying, "content authors will find it more profitable to sell T-shirts and posters and hardcopy books than trying to sell a required subscription for viewing their content archives." That is true for some cases, like webcomics, but it is not true in other cases, like the machinima series Red vs Blue where you can "sponsor" Rooster Teeth for a set of services which are primarily digital -- or for people who download the MS Paint Adventures music off of BandCamp. You might object that at some level there is a "non-digital good" called "authenticity" which is being sold in the latter two cases, which might be true, but it makes the claim much less interesting, because people sending their money to someone they like is precisely the original author's point, and it opens up all sorts of business models, like aggregation (SomethingAwful requires a small payment for forum memberships and it has worked very well for them; GitHub sells private repositories and that works very well for them too). In fact it's very hard for me to see what business models you'd be excluding, if you took that approach.

I don't see why you need to open with an insult.

By your analogy, all copyable digital goods are like water, regardless of what they cost to produce initially, because the cost of copying is close to zero. If I'm wrong, please explain.

In your second paragraph are you suggesting that digital goods will be supported by donations?

Github doesn't sell digital goods. They operate a service.

(1) I didn't need to and I'm not sure that it was in fact an insult.

(2) Well, the first thing is that I don't know what "all copyable digital goods are like water" means. Perhaps in context you mean "all copyable digital goods should be offered for very cheap prices." I'm not sure I agree with that. Either way I'm not sure that it implies, by itself, that "the cost of producing unprotected digital goods in general can only be covered by selling some non-digital good or service in conjunction with it."

(3) No. In my second paragraph I am explicating the two ways that I see to understand your original statement: the narrow way ("people will not pay for bits period") which is wrong, and the broad way ("people can always be viewed as paying for something other than the bits, like the service to access the bits or the authenticity of getting the bits from some official retailer") which I think doesn't really rule out any particular payments for any particular practices. I have no idea what exactly you're trying to "rule out".

This is all complicated by the fact that as far as I can tell, these are apparently beliefs which you are trying to ascribe to me. That misunderstands the point of my analogy, which is that there is no "free rider" problem generated particular to digital goods sans artificial scarcity. A "free rider" problem occurs when nobody wants to pay to maintain a service. The point of the water analogy is twofold: first, it is to show the absurdity of worrying about free-riders when there is little to no maintenance cost. Second, it is to show how trying to punish those so-called "free riders" is just going to alienate people who might otherwise like you.

(4) That's why I didn't say that they sold digital goods. o_O.

The cost of digital goods isn't in the copying or "maintenance" as you say, it's in the initial production.

Copyable digital goods are special because unlike the majority of physical goods, they are templates that can be used to make virtually free copies of themselves.

The first copy still needs to be paid for somehow, as do improvements.

A free rider problem exists if the unwillingness of people to buy copies because they can easily avoid paying, results in these first copies not being produced.

Your analogy doesn't counter this at all. You are simply suggesting that some digital goods can be financed and given away for free because they enhance the value of a service or non-digital good that provides revenue to the creator. I don't dispute that this is a valid option for certain kinds of good.

I do agree with you that trying to 'punish' customers or potential customers is a mistake, even if they are free riding on your business model, but I think that's a separate issue.

Let me get this structure right, so that I can be sure that I understand you, before you go on. (I'm a little perplexed because if the first copies weren't produced, that would obviate the willingness of people to buy copies in the first place.) You're saying, I think, that some art may never be: and this is because the artist is not convinced that they can make it profitable, and this is because they see their audience as too far predisposed to pirating their content to actually pay for it.

If that's right, then it's true that I'm not really handling that problem with my original analogy -- I wouldn't even really classify this as a "free rider" problem per se.

One question which I'd like to ask up-front is whether this is really a problem. I'm not so sure. If you think about it, it requires a really peculiar set of circumstances. One particular problem is that if you didn't have piracy, that doesn't mean that the pirates would be your customers. So you are very restricted in price range: you have to be unable to amortize the costs of the project normally, but you have to be so addictive that pirates would be your customers and you could amortize the costs of the project if piracy weren't a factor. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that the more I think about it, the harder it is to come up with a clear example that I can use to think through to find a solution. (Maybe I'm peculiar, but that's the way I think about problems: I call particular instances to mind and throw lots of ideas against them hoping one of them sticks as a solution. I'm having trouble seeing a particular instance which wouldn't already be solved by, say, Kickstarter or the BBC.)

Well, thanks. It's interesting to think about in any case. I guess I'd just end on a hopeful note: hopefully the production costs for art steadily drop down as well, as more and more technology becomes cheaper. There will be human-professional costs that cannot go down because people have got to eat, but they just don't seem like the most significant costs in producing art -- at the very least, bands haven't stopped living off of live shows yet, and theaters can still cover their actors and set staff with simple ticketing. I will also make the hopeful comment that people really do care about authenticity enough to support artists. That's why fashion design can still be lucrative even though there's a huge industry dedicated to knock-offs.

Let me get this structure right, so that I can be sure that I understand you, before you go on. (I'm a little perplexed because if the first copies weren't produced, that would obviate the willingness of people to buy copies in the first place.)

I assume you're pretending to be perplexed for effect here as it's standard economics to recognize that people will not produce goods if they don't anticipate making a profit.

Kickstarter is an interesting counterexample - basically get sufficient people to pay up front before production begins. Of course that may not work for everything, but then nor does any system.

The BBC? You mean impose a mandatory annual license fee on computer users and then give it to a state owned software company to produce digital goods for us?

(1) I don't have "effects" really; I don't have some delusion that someone other than you is reading this. I am perplexed because you defined a problem as, "if the unwillingness of people to buy copies because they can easily avoid paying, results in these first copies not being produced". That phrasing perplexes me quite legitimately because you have literally said that the problem is "if you won't buy something which does not exist because you can easily avoid paying for it." So I was very cautious to reread the problem in words much closer to what you're now saying -- "that people will not produce goods if they don't anticipate making a profit" -- in an effort to parse the sentence.

(3) No, I mean the British Broadcasting Corporation. You know, those guys who make Doctor Who. They are not funded by a mandatory annual license fee on computer users, and I would not describe them as a state owned software company. Nonetheless, when they produce a new episode of Doctor Who, it rapidly appears on BitTorrent networks.

What point were you trying to make by mentioning the BBC? I though you were suggesting it as a model for overcoming the free rider problem.

MMO's are digital goods without this problem as is Facebook. Also, many restaurants barely break even on their food and make most of their money selling dramatically overpriced drinks. If you order a ten 99c cheeseburger's from McDonald's they make less money than if you order one 1.50$ soda, yet when you focus on the average customer you sell enough soda for McDonald's to become a multi billion dollar company.

http://adage.com/article/news/double-cheeseburgers-working-t...

No they aren't - they both keep important parts of their software protected and sell an adjunct service.

The MMO server software is heavily protected, and you pay for access to the data center where they run it. MMOs are therefore both protected and funded by the selling of an adjunt service.

Facebook's client software is free but the server software is also heavily protected, and the operation is paid for by selling advertising, also an adjunct service.

The server side software on most MMO's is a tiny fraction of the overall code. People have reversed engendered World of Warcraft and some people play on private servers. However, in both WOW's and Facebook's case it's the hosting of all that data that's valuable not just the code.

Which comes back to my main point, there are DRM free ways to make piracy irrelevant. If someone was trying to sell a nuclear submarine by walking door to door in a trailer-park people would have no problem suggesting they were an idiot. Yet, for some reason people get all up in arms when someone suggests selling prepackaged media is a poor decision.

How is your point any different to the point I made in the comment you first replied to? Am I missing something?

When you said:

This implies that the cost of producing unprotected digital goods in general can only be covered by selling some non-digital good or service in conjunction with it.

My impression was you did not agree with this point and where simply bringing it up as a topic of conversation.

Clearly many individuals and companies do make a lot of money selling content. I simply feel that what's needed to keep that model working in the long term is more costly than the value of content it protects.

I don't like it, but I don't disagree with it.

I was bringing it up as a topic of conversation, mostly in the hope that someone would argue against it convincingly, because if such an argument can be made, I'd like to hear it.

> When he sees albums from bands he liked, he buys those.

There's a wrinkle here, though. He talks about downloading three albums from an artist he never heard of before, and finding that he liked them. Then when he sees a fourth album on Amazon, he buys it. But he never went back and bought the three albums he had downloaded.

To me, that's where he crosses the line. I'm willing to accept the general idea that he ought to be able to preview content for free. But if he likes it, and it's for sale, he's on his honor to go back and buy what he likes.

And not just because it's the right thing to do; failing to do this is also stupid, by the author's own criteria. Look at it from the point of view of the artist: there's a customer out there who likes four of his albums but who has only paid for one. So the artist is only getting one-fourth of the economic feedback he should be getting to create more content. In other words, in his haste to make sure he doesn't reward content distributors who do things he doesn't like, this author is missing opportunities to reward content creators who do things he likes.

If one could guarantee that the money paid were a "reward to content creators" I suppose I could agree with you. I find that description quite problematic because there is very little transparency in these sorts of processes.

I find another aspect of your approach somewhat problematic, too, because you seem to view "economic feedback" as somehow distinct from "creating an interested customer who will buy from you." I might agree that you might be able to support people more by buying things at no advantage to yourself, but if the author really wanted to do something of that nature, I suppose he would just send the band money directly. Most bands don't ask for that sort of financial support, though, and don't provide any way to send it to them. Trying to hack an existing system to do such things would be so much less productive than doing it yourself manually.

Don't get me wrong, there are still usage cases to buy the old albums. People who liked Firefly bought many DVDs to donate to libraries and give as Christmas presents. But your objection sounds pretty contorted to me because they now have a customer who they didn't have before. Having a customer is all that there really is to economic stimulus; you don't make your next album based on how many buyers you used to have, but on how many buyers you think you will have today. Vanilla Ice can tell you all about this. ^_^

> If one could guarantee that the money paid were a "reward to content creators" I suppose I could agree with you. I find that description quite problematic because there is very little transparency in these sorts of processes.

I agree, and I should have made that point clearer. There is a critical distinction between content creators and content distributors. See my response to saber3004.

What you say makes sense, but I think it misses the point. This whole post reminds me of another article that was posted on HN a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633985.

The question is not whether what the OP is doing is right or wrong. Like he said, it's a fact. You can call him whatever you want, this is not going to solve the problem. What you want to do is to be pragmatic: "ok, so that's how some of the pirates think. How can I make sure to sell them my stuff".

As for your last point, that's one way to look at it. Another way is: maybe we'll come to a point where artists will get a higher percentage of each album sale, since there won't be as much overhead in distribution, packaging, etc.. So one out of four will be more than enough for them to keep producing.

> The question is not whether what the OP is doing is right or wrong.

I agree; I did mention the word "right", but I then went on to say that that wasn't the real point.

> maybe we'll come to a point where artists will get a higher percentage of each album sale

First of all, if artists are selling direct over the Internet, why do they need to sell "albums"? Why not just sell songs? Or better yet, why not sell "content" in whatever form the customers actually want to buy it?

But if anything like this happens, then the effect will be to reduce the prices of content to the point where the economic "signal" sent to the author or artist by a single purchase is about the same as it is now.

Anyway, my point is that the OP went to all this trouble to write a long blog post trying to explain how "content creators" could get him to spend more money; but he never seems to realize that a better way of communicating that information is already available to him: actually spending the money on things that are worth it to him.

In general I think that I agree with what you're saying. The only point I'd like to make is that he does repeatedly say that he does spend the money on the things that are worth it. He wrote this with the objective of telling content creators directly instead of assuming that they'll just figure it out. If the money backs what he's saying, all the better.

> The only point I'd like to make is that he does repeatedly say that he does spend the money on the things that are worth it.

Yes, he does, and I agree with his general point. I'm only pointing out that his definition of "worth it" appears to me to be somewhat inconsistent. If the fourth album by that artist he mentions was "worth it" because he liked the other three, why weren't the other three "worth it" as well, once he knew he liked them? The fact that he already had them for free is irrelevant; by his own admission, he could have gotten the fourth album for free as well, but he chose not to. I don't see why the same logic that drove that choice wouldn't also drive him to go back and pay for the other three after seeing their quality.

> He wrote this with the objective of telling content creators directly instead of assuming that they'll just figure it out.

This brings up another key point: the distinction between "content creators" and "content distributors". Much of what he says really applies to distributors--the media companies--rather than creators--the actual artists. The main conclusion an actual creator might draw from his post is that he should look for a better distribution channel than the big media companies. I would agree with that; in fact I've written about it myself:

http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/internet-blackout-day.ht...

> This a nonsensical assertion supported by the flimsy justification that the marginal cost of a digital good is so low. Well the total costs of production remain quite high,especially considering the cost of marketing.

That could be true but doesn't seem to be. (Though it is possible that due to piracy some capital-intensive virtual/intellectual good are not being made at all.) Note the sort of post scriptum he added at the end:

> Year after year I'm told online file-sharing is decimating sales, everyone is losing money, we have to do something to stop it. I'm not going to try and convince you you're wrong, but I do have a question: [...] If online file-sharing is killing these industries, why would they keep producing more content?

> I've seen people get quite huffy in these parts for lifting a stupid graphic graphic from a website.

I think that's also a consequence of copyright enforcement: "I can't copy anything but when I made something people just copy it?!" sort of thinking. And many people are fine with their work being appropriated without compensation (with credit which is also strictly enforced in the illicit copying world), look at all that GPLv2-, or MIT-, or BSD-licensed software.

I, for one, don't want movies, music or any other content creation to die. I would like to see the obsolete middle men die off though. They have no reason to be there and seem to be really awful people (going by what they do to stars and real content makers).