I think there is business "harm" to piracy, but it's (mostly) vastly overstated. If I illegally download a song/movie I wouldn't have otherwise bought, did anybody lose out? There was a reason Napster was popular in colleges, because many of those people were cash poor. Music industry revenue peaked in 2000 at $21B and went down to ~$7B in 2015 before steadily growing again. Also, the entertainment industry are not multi-trillion dollar conglomerates. Not even close. Disney is worth $160B and Netflix is $260B.
That being said, if it were up to the music industry we'd still be paying the inflation adjusted equivalent of $20 for an album we only like one song on and we wouldn't be able to create out own playlists. You can only fight the consumer for so long (and they fought long and hard). That's to say nothing about the morality of repeatedly increasing copyright from 14 years to life plus 70 (which is BS). The Beatles' great great grandchildren (or whoever owns the rights later on) shouldn't still be benefiting from intellectual property.
> Moving heaven and earth to extract a citizen from another country using the power of the state, and drag him before their feet is tyrannical.
This is what rule of law is. KDC knew he was breaking the law and not only didn't do anything about it, but invested in an encouraged it to benefit himself financially. Even after being charged and having megaupload shut down, he then tried again. Do you really feel sorry for him?
> there is business "harm" to piracy, but it's (mostly) vastly overstated
I'm not sure how relevant the harm is. It seems like copyright law doesn't have exceptions for "harmlessness"* -- and even if that were a carve-out, it would be a stupid one for the kind of offenses we're discussing, since it hinges on hundreds of millions of individual 'butterfly effect' decisions and how they hypothetically would have unfolded in a fictional world without piracy vs. the real world. No one can prove or even know what the impact of piracy is on a given work's short-term or long-term revenue. Maybe "Firefly" was boosted massively in its long-term commercial success by piracy, but some $400 physics textbook had materially less sales. I think there's a reason courts never debate this question, though.
*I'm aware there are specific exceptions for things like fair use and timeshifting -- I just don't believe all 'harmless' acts are protected or that that was ever even intended.
Just that is an indication on how little piracy affects revenue, the effect is at best so small that it's effectively invisible.
> I think there's a reason courts never debate this question, though.
Because discussing about the real financial impact of piracy is a sure way to throw a lot of pretty extreme copyright laws out of the window.
They really don't want to start this debate. Piracy is just a boogeyman at this point to pass ever stronger IP laws and the large IP conglomerates are pretty aware of that.
That's because the music industry was incredibly slow to adapt to the internet. They basically took a full decade to react and lost revenue in the process.
More than two decades of studies show there is no harm to these companies and that pirates spend the most on content.
Piracy is flat out a net good for humanity and society. No convincing counter-arguments can be made.
The only example where harm could be said to happen is with very small content-creators who would be relying on income to get started, but even then I don't think that matters.
If you're the source of a creation and people want to see more, they will fund it. It need not be funded by everybody that will or has viewed or enjoyed it.
It actually also hurts the content creators themselves. The music industry spent too much time fighting "internet distributed" music and the only alternatives they pieced together were too restrictive to the way people actually consumed music. "Want to listen on more than one device? Pay multiple times!" was their attempt back in the day.
You might object this evidence by telling me that you bought all seasons of House only because you had been streaming it illegally before, and that you wouldn't have done so without previously streaming it – but in most jurisdictions, this kind of "business procurement" does not cancel out the harm done in the first case.
Anyways, the burden to disprove the harm done through me not buying it is on you.
Is that legally how it works?
This sounds a lot like being guilty until proven innocent...
My "counter evidence" to your example could be something like: I bought House on DVD 10 years ago because my friend who had pirated it told me it was a good show to checkout.
There is no harm done in the first case. You say you would have bought House if you couldn't have streamed it, but I say that's nonsense. If you didn't want to pay for it you would have borrowed it from a library or a friend.
https://www.statista.com/chart/17244/us-music-revenue-by-for...
It is an industry that employs real people from artists to studio engineers to musical instrument and equipment companies to the bartenders at the venues. Those people are sharing a smaller pie than they used to before Internet piracy devalued their music.
In your opinion it's tyrannical. Sure, most certainly a non-violent crime against a wealthy corporation isn't on the same level as murder or assault. At the same time, copyright infringement is conceptually not that different from property crime.
You would want the police to arrest someone who broke into your home and stole your movie collection.
You wouldn't want to spend a year writing code for your micro-SaaS product and then have a hacker breach your infrastructure, steal your work and sell it on their own website.
It's really a grand piece of irony for software engineers that depend on enforceable copyright law to put food on their table to call this arrest tyranny. If nobody can go to jail or be fined for copyright infringement then I hate to say it but you are going to need to quit your job writing software and start driving a city bus or something.
Don't forget that Megaupload was specifically designed to enable piracy and discourage other uses of the technology. It wasn't a file storage service that could be used for legitimate personal use because unpopular downloads would be deleted. The company actually paid people via an incentive program to upload popular files that were copyright infringing. This wasn't just "YouTube is bad at playing whack-a-mole with DMCA claims," this was a company that was responsible for something like 4% of all Internet piracy all by itself and actively encouraged it.
It's not like they were a company that didn't have access to lawyers who could warn them not to do what they did. Kim deserves his fate because his own hubris invited it.
If you do that you'll get a very misleading answer. That low payment he got was for writing credit on a song with 17 writers.
But the main reason streaming gives less revenue than CD sales isn't a "devaluation of music" thing, it's because streaming is closer to radio.
> It's really a grand piece of irony for software engineers that depend on enforceable copyright law to put food on their table to call this arrest tyranny. If nobody can go to jail or be fined for copyright infringement then I hate to say it but you are going to need to quit your job writing software and start driving a city bus or something.
For many (if not most?) software businesses nowadays, the code itself holds little intrinsic value. If someone were to steal my SaaS code, it's unlikely they could deploy it and sell a similar product. The value of my business lies in its domain expertise, not in the code being a trade secret. Many internal projects aren't open-source simply because opening them to the public would require significant maintenance. Otherwise, there would be no issue in sharing the code, as much of what's built today is based on open-source projects.
Similarly, if I'm selling an application and its code is leaked, people would still prefer to install it from the app store. Few would go through the trouble of compiling the code and deploying a "hacked" version.
This contrasts with the 80s and 90s, when illegal copies of floppy disks and CDs posed a significant issue for some software businesses. However, times have changed. Nowadays, people prefer to pay for the support of a SaaS or the convenience of installing an app from a store, complete with updates.
There are exceptions, but I believe most software engineers don't work on projects where the code itself has significant value that needs to be protected by copyright laws.
The situation with music is somewhat similar. People have stopped buying physical media because it's no longer practical. Even those who collect CDs, vinyl, or tapes typically use streaming platforms for most of their music consumption.
You really think if Spotify came along in 1998 that all the major record labels would agree to give them their entire catalog for $10 a month? Back then they were selling a single CD for around $20.
Piracy existed a LONG time before Napster hit the scene.
Not sure if you know this, but there are tens of thousands of people involved in making a movie or TV series. Many making minimum wage and many who own businesses that are employed by the studios like catering companies. Or transportation companies, or even all the companies who tech they use like the camera's they use to film said movies.
ALL of those people? Their employment DEPENDS on movie studio's and the work they do to keep them gainfully employed. When you pirate movies you're not taking money out of the faceless multi-trillion entertainment companies, you're taking money out of the people's pocket who are integral part of creating the movies and shows you watch and who's livelihood depends on their continued employment by those companies.
Take a studio like New Line who put out the Lord of the Rings movies and was wildly successful until a series of flops effectively closed the studio:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/featu...
From 'Nightmare on Elm Street' to 'Lord of the Rings', New Line Cinema created some of Hollywood's most influential blockbusters. But now its 40-year history is in tatters following a string of big-budget box-office flops.
Also, I would consider pirating a perfectly valid protest of what producers have done over the last two years, dragging their feet to break the backs of unions in advance of negotiations. Hollywood, Atlanta, New Orleans, NY, all filming far less over the last two years due to producer’s greed and hope that they can enjoy these pesky trades entirely by automation and AI. This has done more damage to tradespeople than pirating ever did.
Fortunately, it’s pretty clear that it will not be feasible to make a coherent movie or TV show via AI in the near term. Hopefully consumers vote with their wallets too and don’t buy or stream any content that is made without trades.