"Most of you steal your software"
lettersofnote.com
lettersofnote.com
Let's say you are a freelance developer. Do you think for one second that it would be ok for your clients to let you do all the work, then take your code and not pay you? I mean, knowledge should be free, right? Screw the fact that you built the software with the expectation of getting paid for your hard work.
It's one thing to create something with the intention of sharing it with the world. It's an entirely different thing for anybody to justify stealing what you have done.
It seems that the tech community stands adamantly behind the "copyright infringement isn't theft" mantra but in reality the moral crime is taking something you weren't entitled to. Our actions don't really seem to consider the state of the original product making the difference between "theft" and "copyright infringement" because it is not concerning to us. For the developer/distributor/publisher/artist or whomever is expecting a cut from sales the result is the same: they lost a part of their wage.
Admittedly I've done my share of piracy but now that I spend a good chunk of my free time releasing software or writing code I have stopped; it feels kind of shitty to see something taken without any regard for your hardships. Hell, as a result I even go out of my way to make sure developers are paid their dues by purchasing almost any app I use. If I come to expect others to pay/donate for my effort it is quite hypocritical to not do the same as a consumer.
Secondly, and this is a point that I don't think is discussed much, piracy to me is an effect of market value. For example big music labels will argue that if I distribute a Britney Spears MP3 on a file sharing network, that they lose $0.99 * # of potential buyers. This is false. The market value of this piece of content is much lower. People would not pay for it if the only way to get it was through, say, iTunes. Basically, someone might want it for free, might consider if for cheap ($0.10/song), but not want it for the price set by the market.
Also check out Band Camp for new unsigned artists. Great service and IMHO the future of the "record" industry.
Music CDs are sold for roughly $10-$20 USD. The actual cost of making the physical CD is around $1. People seem much more agreeable to accept a $9-$19 markup on a physical CD than on a digital album, which costs $0 to copy but ostensibly has the same cost to produce otherwise.
I cannot do the same thing with digital goods since the supply is unlimited. I don't see how the market can settle using the old supply/demand paradigm. I can try to get a stable price by offering a "pay what you think it's worth" model, but that' no fun either.
In my experience, the market appears to have established an approximate range of fair prices for CDs in general, that does not appear to be based on how many copies have been pressed.
Obviously there are some major variations if too few copies were made and the publisher refuses to make more to meet demand (putting the CD "out of print"), or if many more were made than people want to buy and retailers need to clear out inventory.
But in general, if an artist produces a new CD, they could press 5 copies or 50,000 copies, and I would expect the selling price to be somewhere in that $10-$20 range or so, not because of the number of copies of that particular CD, but because of what the market expects CDs to cost.
If you take something from me that is meant only for sale to others then it helps me absolutely zero that I still have it.
With copyright infringement, it used to mean selling cheap knock-offs of your work, including your work illegally into someone else's dime novel, etc. With digital copyright infringement people are literally selling or giving away the authentic item (i.e. the data). This is much closer to 'theft' than the old idea of copyright infringement.
You have a good point about market value but those are economic principles, not moral ones. It's like saying I only took a gumdrop instead of a pallet of candy bars, but either way it's still wrong.
Why does copyright infringement not work?
> If you take something from me that is meant only for sale to others then it helps me absolutely zero that I still have it.
That still does not make it equivalent to theft. If I somehow started distributing copies of your digital goods and made it impossible for you to distribute the originals, would you say that's worse than me only doing the former and not the latter?
> This is much closer to 'theft' than the old idea of copyright infringement.
No, it is not. From WikiPedia [1]: In common usage, theft is the taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
In no way is pirating something fitting that definition. The only thing that piracy might deny you is potential profits, which are not property by any definition.
> You have a good point about market value but those are economic principles, not moral ones. It's like saying I only took a gumdrop instead of a pallet of candy bars, but either way it's still wrong.
I agree! Piracy is wrong. Does not matter how little or how much you do it, it ends up hurting someone.
Well, it's more complicated. For example, I currently have a song in my iTunes library that I bought from iTunes when they sold DRM encumbered audio. I bought it with an Apple ID I no longer have access to. iTunes refuses to recognize it in any way and I cannot decrypt it, but I did pay for it fair and square. Would it be amoral for me to download that song on a file sharing network? What if I had an LP that I bought in 1979 instead of an m4p file?
The point is if you pirate software you are committing a moral act that, while economically may not be comparable to theft, reveals the same integrity and character as that of a common thief. Just like you can not "copyright infringe" a widget from to someone who built it, you cannot "steal" software, by definition. The only reason software pirates do not "steal" software is not because they are good-hearted citizens who simply draw the line between theft and copyright infringement in terms of immoral things they permit themselves to do. The reason software pirates do not "steal" software is because it is impossible to do so. I think if there were a way to copy software that deprived others of it, yet still had the same likelihood of getting caught as piracy does today, piracy would still occur as much as it does now. And the reason software pirates do not steal physical goods on top of software is because the risk/reward equation is completely different, not because they somehow have a deep philosophical aversion to affecting the scarcity of goods. People want shit and they do not want to pay for it. Some people who have this feeling decide they are going to take actions they shouldn't. We should hold opinions of these these people equally (though not necessarily treat them the same under the law.)
1. Copying software, changing attribution, and selling it as your own.
2. Acquiring software you would otherwise have to pay for, and being able to afford it (or using it for economic gain).
3. Acquiring software you would otherwise have to pay for, and being unable to afford it.
4. Using a cracked copy of software that you have paid for, in order to circumvent a restriction that impairs your use of it and which the vendor is unwilling to address.
I think few of us would consider #3 a heinous crime if it was done by someone in order to train himself on industry-standard software (e.g. Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc.), which he would then be able to apply at a job where the software was paid for.
That's not to deny there are plenty of people who pirate just because they want free stuff without paying for it. But that doesn't mean we should all take our lessons from Inspector Javert.
First, if you copy one of my books, say from someone who bought it in pdf format from the O'Reilly site, you have not denied the owner access to his paid copy. You have not robbed anyone of a physical artifact with a measurable cost.
Second, such as act doesn't even rise to the status of "theft of service." It isn't like sneaking into another movie theater after watching the show you paid for. You are not taking up a physical seat.
At most you have committed a tort. The problem is these tiny torts have been criminalized. But that doesn't make them any more significant than they really are. How insignificant are they? So insignificant that simply by telling me you will write a review, I would give you a copy for free.
Quantify it: how was I damaged? If you lie to me just to get a free copy, how do I distinguish moral crime comitters from well-intentioned potential reviewers who never got around to it? How many of them should I pursue as thieves? What effect would that have on attracting reviewers?
Stamping "MORAL CRIME DOER" on the forehead of people who have taken something weightless, incrementally cost-less, and that is marketed by giving it away to people is like turning jaywalking into a felony.
The irony is that if copying my works was economically significant - if, say, I made an ERP system and a customer failed to pay maintenance fees - my recourse would be to sue them for the tort of not meeting a contractual obligation. The law already has a measure in place to prevent stupid cases: Is it worth suing over? If not, just move on.
I would agree with that.
But if someone tells me, "I want a copy, but even though you are asking $5 per copy, I don't think it's worth anything at all. Give one to me for free." ... I would not be so quick to hand over a copy in that case, and, based on anecdotal conversations with others, I suspect that is closer to the mentality of a lot of folks who are committing the trivial crime of copyright infringement.
More seriously, there is a lot of evidence that promotional copies sell books. You could buy, or ask for a promotional copy of Guy Kawasaki's book about making books. It's about self-publishing, but his experiences with promoting and marketing books apply to any book where the publisher's marketing budget is very limited.
There are some other effects I can count on: That readers of HN are fairly likely to not bother to take something they won't use, because they value their own time. You are only a hypothetical pirate, and your question is hypothetical, too. In the real world, piracy behaves much like promotion.
But, you may be thinking, what about entertainment products?
It's been shown over and over that "pirates" are also top-ranked among paying customers. Is there a real-world case that piracy reduces revenue? If you get past the hypothetical cases, it's much harder to say so.
I guess my question is, where do you draw the line? You said, there is a lot of evidence that promotional copies sell books. Sure. But if you give them all away, what do you sell? (Assuming that you want to sell any at all.)
The anecdotal evidence Guy Kawasaki bases his advice for self-publishers on is that giving away books is always good. My publishers have signing events at conferences and give away case-loads of my current book at these events. Amazon sales always spike afterward.
In practical terms, that tipping point seems to be very far out there.
Yep, that's exactly what victims of theft feel. When my car was stolen last year, I thought "Well it could be worse, they could have stolen someone else's car". Because the more people steal my stuff, the more money I make, right?
To use a ridiculous example, if you say that taking a picture of a statue is the same as stealing the statue, any accusations you make of theft will not be taken very seriously.
[1] My basis for this claim is that taking $40 that I already have is worse than not giving me $40 for a license to software that I wrote.
Don't get me wrong, I like the notion that it is morally right for people to be rewarded for their hard work if it benefits others. However, if we're going to enforce it, shouldn't we start by trying to stop the exploitation of poor people before we go all nuts over sob stories from software giants, record companies and movie studios?
> For the developer/distributor/publisher/artist or whomever is expecting a cut from sales the result is the same: they lost a part of their wage.
I take issue with this particular argument. By that logic, not consuming is morally equivalent to theft.
I'm sure some people would love that to be a common belief.
OSS has nothing to do with piracy. If I licensed my project MIT, sharing it is not piracy. OSS platforms do not have thriving piracy ecosystems because there is plenty of OSS software for them. In my experience, people who believe in OSS are the most likely to champion using a legal OSS alternative to pirating some widely-used proprietary software.
In a legal sense, this is patently false in every country I know of. Even ignoring the point others have made that theft is not copyright infringement under the law, the assertion is false. Every country I know of has exceptions to copyright law. In the US it's called Fair Use, in many Commonwealth nations it's called Fair Dealing, in Germany it's just called "Limitations on Copyright" (Schranken des Urheberrechts). In every case, the creator's wishes are not absolute.
But more interesting to me is that we have taken a purely legal concept that was completely new just 303 years ago and turned it into a broadly accepted moral imperative. Those with a vested interest have succeeded in tying this new legal concept to an ancient moral wrong, that of theft. And they have been so successful at this, that many people would dismiss the distinction as semantic quibbling. To me, this is a fascinating sociological and philosophical phenomenon.
For anyone else who is interested in this cultural history, I highly recommend "Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars" by William Patry.
Surely you understand that it’s possible for people who aren’t you to look at the same facts, and come to a different conclusion? Not because they’re fooling themselves, but simply because people of good heart are allowed to have differences of opinion.
Try this video, particularly the bit that starts at 10:00 http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html
If you're going to alter the definition of "stealing" to cover things that aren't stealing, then why stop there? Why not call copyright infringement "arson" or "murder" too?
Making an unlicensed replica of another person's non-rival good is not the same thing as depriving another person of a rival good in their possession. You can even hold both to be worthy of legal censure without having to advance this disingenuous prevarication.
If you're in favor of strict IP law, do you not see how playing these semantic games actually undermines your credibility and therefore your argument?
But, that said, when looking at the issue from a purely moral perspective, the difference becomes even more clearly illuminated: again, making a replica of someone else's thing is utterly different from taking their thing away from them. This isn't a hair split in the slightest: the key component of harm that makes theft immoral just isn't present with copying.
And if you say that copying is different from anything else that might diminish your return because you think you already had some inherent right to control whether other people make their own replicas of your stuff, then you're begging the question; your lack of ROI can't itself be the justification for copyright if you make such an argument.
But laws and policy aren't about feelings; they rely on consistent and precise definitions of terms.
If anything here is a strawman, it's your insistence on equivocating two behaviors which are substantively and observably different in their intentions, methods, and effects, in order to apply the moral censure earned by one disingenuously to the other.
If you want to make a meaningful argument against copyright infringement in its own right, please do so; I'd welcome the productive discourse. But arguing against it by calling it calling it by the name of another thing entirely - without bothering to establish a coherent connection between the two - doesn't constitute a valid argument in the slightest.
Further, my previous comment involved nothing resembling a strawman at all; you offered the position that copyright ought to be protected in order to ensure that the time and labor input into the initial design of a creative work would always yield a return for the creator, and I replied by pointing out that these are capital expenditures, to which no one in any field is entitled a guaranteed return at all.
Do you seriously regard as a strawman my classification of the advance investments necessary to open a factory and the advance investments necessary to produce a film both as capital expenditures, but simultaneously claim that your equivocation of copyright infringement with stealing is a robust and substantive assertion?
> I see no such distinction from a layman's moral standpoint
Then why do so many "laymen" actively assert this distinction?
Again, I have to point out that your methods of discourse actively reduce the credibility of your position.
Re: copyright being 303 years old. First, there were developments in copyright prior to the English copyright act. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law#Early_.... Printing in England was done by a royally chartered monopoly from 1557. Printing was regulated by an order of the Star Chamber in 1637 and the Licensing Press Act of 1679 before the Statute of Anne introduced copyrights in 1710. So basically contemporaneously with the widespread adoption of technology in England that enabled copies of written works to be quickly made, regulation has existed to protect works from copying. Copyright itself has existed for 300 of the 500 or so years since printed books became common in England.
I agree that it's not sensible to link copyright to the ancient moral crime of theft. It's more sensible to link it to the very old if not ancient moral crime of trespass: http://www.slesher.com/trespass.html.
A copyright owner's moral right is basically the right to exclude--the right to control with whom one shares his original work.
I don't think anyone would flatly come out and say that a developer doesn't deserve to be paid for his/her work. Yet when you use software without paying for it, you are depriving the developer of his income.
Bill Gates didn't know that his work will spread over the world and he will become one of the richest persons alive.
He didn't know that there will be a huge open source community in the future, where it is normal to develop software for free.
All he knew is that he was working fulltime on something for three years and wasn't payed for it.
For me this letter is just a snapshot of the past with an understandable point of view.
Stallman was hacking in 1976 and many of his ilk were free software advocates.
Gates knew what he was doing. He derived his work from others, but denied others the same leeway.
The hobbyist community back then was based around clubs of people sharing their achievements; the computers they built, software they'd written and any neat tricks they'd invented (like using the electrical interference of the original Altar to play a tune on a radio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgYhVnmeWrk ). The hobbyist community was very much driven by sharing ideas and code.
This is why people got annoyed at that letter. It not only flew against everything the community was built around, but also made some heavy criticisms about their members as well.
When you review that letter in the context of the community is was directed at and the time it was written, it seems even more out of place than it does today.
(oh come one people, downvotes? You can't tell the OP is attempting humor, and I'm trying to acknowledge that?)
> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
The contrast is with ten-comment-long Redditesque variants-on-a-theme threads, which I personally enjoy - on Reddit. Here, I'd rather cut to the chase with insightful commentary.
Could the piracy of his early programming language been what started the exponential growth/adoption of all Micro-soft software?
If he could, would he go back and release BASIC for free as a springboard to sell other software?
> ...in 1998 during a candid moment in front of an audience at the University of Washington acknowledged the problem with enforcing software copyrights in the developing world:
> Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
Shrewd wisdom.
http://www.macgui.com/usenet/?author=gm%40trsvax&group=2...
Internal Security Violation The tree of evil bears bitter fruit Crime does not pay The Shadow knows
Trashing Program Disk.
Point being, despite all the piracy, there is still some money to be made. The complaint is that such folk are not making enough money. See, Bill should be twice or 3 times as rich. Man, he's really losing out.
Of course then we have to deal with the age old assumption that every person with a pirated copy would have paid for it. Which is, er, optimistic, at best. IMHO, the loss is negligible. All they the copyright owner gets in reality is the satisfaction that not so many people use their product, but those who do pay.
I'm not that happy at hitting Bill with this as he is one of the filthy rich people who actually uses his accumulated wealth for good causes. Which is ideal really.
OK, if you aren't poor, give me $10K then. According to me, you have enough!
Still, I think he would resist your offer. What would you do with US$10K?
It is a despotic idea that society must endure the deprivations of these individuals or corporation only to be rewarded with narrow visions of a better future world through the myopic eyes of the DuPont's, Gates', or Carnegie's of the world. These "great" men robbed, captured, or monopolized vast tracts of our communal resources in their acquisition of said wealth (edit: I accidentally an 'r')
I really think that the likes of Gates, Frick, Carnegie, Rockefeller or the more recent Jim Simons. Should have been taxed at a much much steeper rate, just like Buffett proposed [1], instead of waiting for their kindness of heart.
By replacing philanthropy with taxation we get the democratic process to choose what is the best way to spend this money, instead of their however enlightened agenda.
What kind of world do you live in that allows you this kind of democratic idealism?
As our population gets older, the priorities of our democracies will reflect that. More and more government spending will go towards risk-averse projects - mostly medical subsidy. The only truly radical innovation will come from eccentric billionaires.
But hell yeah, more pensions, universal healthcare, maybe more spending on education (talking about public school not 40k$/year colleges) are definitely a better way to spend money than radical innovation of eccentric billionaires.
Moreover what we're talking about here is not turning billionaires into mere millionaires, but taxing people who can afford to donate 95% of their fortune 30% instead of 15%. That still leaves ample room for eccentric innovation. Yours is a false dichotomy.
The unions get much better pensions than the rest of us. And their political machines own the state capitals. How much higher should they go?
The United States spends far more money per person on health care than other countries. How much more do you want to spend?
This year, the top capital gains tax rate in California went up 52%. That's a substantial bite on innovation to ensure public workers get gold-plated defined-benefit pensions.
America's government may be inefficient, but it is not stingy.
Certainly spending less won't fix it.
>The unions get much better pensions than the rest of us. And their political machines own the state capitals. How much higher should they go?
Extend those rights to non unionized workers.
>The United States spends far more money per person on health care than other countries. How much more do you want to spend?
I want to spend less by having universal public healthcare.
>This year, the top capital gains tax rate in California went up 52%. That's a substantial bite on innovation to ensure public workers get gold-plated defined-benefit pensions.
Capital tax gains mostly affect more affluent households. I'm willing to bet that even with this rate, taxation is regressive in the US.
http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/bill-gates
Note that I have not fact-checked this at all, so if anyone has any factual corrections or updates (which could come from one of the published biographical writings about Gates), I would be glad to hear them.
"What most users want, though, is a cheap simple device that lets them collaborate with others... Thus the market for computing may in the end boil down to simple stuff to be used by consumers and reliable stuff to be operated by professional IT staff. Windows is way too complex for most consumers and difficult to justify on the server side when you can run Linux for free."
e.g. "someday we'll just build the cloud on LAMP"
It pissed off seemingly everyone in the community and seemed to be against the spirit of what the hackers were doing at the time (writing and sharing code).
I recall another programmer being irritated by the letter and writing his own basic interpreter and asking $5 for it (which was far less than what Gates was asking).
Book is worth reading for the historical context of computing if you weren't around to see it.
####
Edit [Relevant part of wikipedia page]:
Tiny BASIC: Altair BASIC was an interpreter that translated instructions from the BASIC programming language into assembly instructions that the Altair 8800 could understand. It was developed by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Micro-soft, specifically for the Altair 8800 and it would fit in 4K of memory. Unlike previous hackers and against the Hacker Ethic, Micro-Soft and MITS felt that people should pay for BASIC just like they paid for any add-on card. Many hackers had in fact put in orders for BASIC, but still had to wait for the order to be shipped. During a show put up by MITS, someone got hold of and copied a paper tape containing Altair BASIC.
The tapes were duplicated and passed around freely before the commercial product was even shipped to customers. Gates and Allen did not appreciate this turn of events since they were actually paid commission for each copy of BASIC that MITS sold. Gates responded by writing an open letter titled “Open Letter to Hobbyists” that considered the sharing of software to be theft. Tiny BASIC was a similar interpreter that would fit in only 2K of memory as it supported a subset of the functionality of Micro-Soft BASIC (which itself was a subset of Dartmouth BASIC).
It was developed by Dick Whipple and John Arnold in Tyler, Texas and distributed freely in PCC magazine. Many more people sent in improvements and programs developed in Tiny BASIC to be published. This eventually led to the creation of Dr. Dobb's Journal edited by Jim Warren that distributed free or very inexpensive software in response to Gates' claims of theft. Tom Pittman was someone else who did not take kindly to Gates' words. He wrote a version of Tiny BASIC for the Motorola 6800 microprocessor.
Although he sold it to AMI for $3,500, he retained the rights to sell it to others and decided to charge only $5 for it. He received many orders and even money from people who had already gotten a copy and simply wanted to pay him for his efforts. Pittman also wrote the essay “Deus Ex Machina” on the AI and hardware hackers and what tied them together. Lee Felsenstein and Bob Marsh banded together to create a fully contained computer for an issue of Popular Electronics that they called SOL that sold for under a thousand dollars.
####
I guess old habits die hard.
There was at least one early BASIC extension, for example, where you could pick the commands you wanted "a la carte", with number of bytes required for each one of them listed, to pack the ones that were most important for you to fit into a specific size. You'd pay for the size you chose.
If that would've been at all possible, I think Linux would've had higher than 50% market share in the PC market today. For that kind of poor countries, Windows licenses were and still are prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of their citizens, so if being forced to buy Windows instead of pirating it, I think most would've just gone with Linux, and its adoption would've exploded within a few years, from the moment everyone in poor countries had to make that decision. Therefore software support from the big vendors would've arrived relatively quickly.
Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for Microsoft), there was no way to force people into that decision, so we were left with a Windows monopoly for the past 2 decades.
Anyway, the fact that he says "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share." kind of makes me wonder how he ever ended up with that thought I mentioned at the start.
And I know it sounds crazy that he would ever think that: that's why it stuck with me I guess.
Have you looked at any carrier's web site recently? Tons of $0 full-featured Android smartphones, and tons of apps for sale (subsidized by service fees, of course).
We're already there.
Not to mention the desktop and laptop space where you buy your hardware (and OS if you're not using a free one like Linux) but then there are a lot of free apps.
I mean, if we're to be able to redefine 'actual' costs like that, maybe my house is free... it's just included in the cost of my bank sending me a statement every month.
I do see your point, though: it definitely seems that way, but surely nobody can argue that the production cost of one more piece of hardware is more 'free' than that of a piece of software.
There are two main factors at play:
1) Cost of reproduction (copying) 2) Value to end user
Hardware has historically been harder to reproduce because it's physical. This gap is closing as hardware becomes a commodity. You don't need a server anymore - just spin one up on EC2. Need chips? visit a Chinese bulk electronics markets and buy them by the scoop.
Software provides more value to the end user because it makes the hardware do something. People pay for great software because it cleverly moves information around to meet their needs. You still need hardware to run it, eventually, but it becomes dramatically less important. The servers that power your webmail are entirely abstract to an end user. Angry Birds runs on basically anything. etc
Funny how some things change, yet stay the same. Glad the OP posted this.
It's easy to steal if everything is compatible and connected i.e the DOS/Windows monoculture.
> In early 1976 ads for its Apple I computer, Apple Inc made the claims that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost"[23] and "yes folks, Apple BASIC is Free"[24]
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
Pardon me, but wasn't a fair bit of that Harvard's computing power, ergo not directly paid for by Gates et al.?