As someone who 1) works in the web/software industry and 2) actually paid for Photoshop, how do you (the collective you) see this playing out? Will we have this cat and mouse game ad infinium?
For example, I'm 26 years old (so one of the younger generations), and I think it's absolutely immoral that copyright terms prevent me from using art that was produced more than 50 years ago. I strongly oppose any copyright term longer than 28 years; and I'm only open to one longer than 14 years if a strong economic (statistical) case for it can be made.
In my experience, adults generally don't steal things, even if no one is going to catch them and even if they really want it. And consequently most people grow out of piracy. Not everyone of course, but enough for me to believe there's still a future in selling IP.
If you could pay a fee and get whatever show/movie you wanted, whenever you wanted, without region restrictions, and in the original language, I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy. Some people will download pirated movies just because, of course, but I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy if paid content was just more convenient.
In other word, distributors need to shape up. Of course, it's easier to blame consumers and try to enforce stricter DRM instead of improving the quality of service...
I'm in that camp, now. I'll just pick another show which is available on Hulu/Netflix/Amazon, or I'll play my Xbox, or I'll take a walk. Not a big deal.
My company has a pretty impressive black "market" for US/UK TV Shows, Movies and selected software. We also have a party-disc where everybody can upload their mp3 collections. Especially TV Shows are a run pretty much everywhere. My girlfriend shares Shows with her yoga group. They just switch USB sticks.
We grew out of Game sharing and porn. But who downloads porn illegally these days anyway...
I bet Kickass is back up before the next one goes down, seems a bit more like Road Runner and Wile E Coyote.
HINT: drugs won.
That's why everyone is busy writing SaaS apps instead; they're harder to pirate.
Also pirated products are genuinely better - games can be modded, no activation. Tv shows are simultaneously released and so on ...
Of course we have some attempts at cloudwashing software, but I doubt they will be successful. The benefits of cloud are tiny compared to the freedom of having code run on hardware you control.
The question is: is that a bad thing? Because in that case, a download does not equal a loss of sale.
I know people with 5-6 TB of music on their drives. Or books - that is more that a person could consume, ever. So counting them as lost sales is absurd.
I have pirated a lot, but with steam available I both rebuilt my pirated catalog - their sales helped a lot, and rarely bother with piracy lately - my backlog is so big, that I can literally wait a couple of years for the game to come to 90% off.
So how will this play out? The companies will figure out, sooner or later, that if they provide a reasonable service then people will pay for it. Until then, TPB / bittorrent will remain the only source for a rather large group of people.
Devil's advocate: so? Why should anyone have to provide you with the entertainment that you want? Why shouldn't they be able to exercise their right to sell their product to whoever they want - and leave out whoever they don't want? What possible justification could there be for that level of entitlement? What moral justification could there be for saying: sell me your product, or I will take it? How far does this go with IP? If a web designer refuses to sell me their design, am I free to take it? At least with tools like Photoshop, you can claim you "need" it to do work and make a living. Nobody needs a TV show.
I pirate TV. Some of the shows I could (and do; I also have Netflix) get legally and some I couldn't, but the fact of the matter is nobody "owes" me their TV show and I could just not watch it. And I would just stop watching, if the cost of all the TV shows I wanted to watch ever exceeded $10/month and piracy was too difficult/risky. I'm not kidding myself, the reason I pirate is because it's both cheap and convenient.
Honestly I'd probably be better off not watching TV anyway. :)
A: Pirating is wrong!
B: But I have no alternatives
A: So what?
You are right, of course: so what? But if "so what?" is an option, then the entire discussion becomes:
A: Pirating is wrong!
B: So what?
B doesn't care about this discussion in the first place. A wants to make a point. That means you can't use "so what?".
This is what lultimouomo meant when he said "the excuse is weak, but the fault itself is also considered weak." [para]
Again, not saying I disagree. Of course; so what? But, in that case: people pirate. So what? You're the one making a point. If your point is just "it's illegal": everyone knows that already. So what?
You're right that nobody owes us their TV show. But on the other hand, I don't see why we owe them assistance to enforce their wishes.
I'm probably going to get down voted for this but when your excuse for piracy is you can't watch some TV shows your excuse is weak. Not being able to see those shows is going to have very little impact on your life. Certainly not enough of an impact to justify theft or copying without permission. TV shows are not a 'tool you need'.
I'm fortunately in a country where most stuff is available. There is still a lot that is not though and occasionally I may turn to piracy (until it is available at which stage I buy it). I don't try to justify this though as it is a poor justification for piracy.
If you want to see it in action in a setting where we don't get derailed so easily by its implications, consider vaccination.
I don't know. Maybe the creator didn't want people in a certain country to view the material. Maybe it hurts their feelings that it's being pirated. Maybe they have a release planned 6 months from now in a certain country and their sales will be down for that. There's no way to know for certain you won't be causing harm.
Harm must be proven to receive civil redress. Potential, unrealized harm is not actionable.
If your neighbor digs a bottomless pit in his backyard, and posts trespass warnings, you cannot sue to have him fill it because your kids might fall in. They would, after all, need to trespass in order to do that.
But you could tell your insurance adjuster, they could apply a risk premium to a policy, based on the presence of the hole, and you could sue your neighbor for that.
The argument against piracy is essentially a neighbor saying that 40 of their kids accidentally fell into the hole, except they also somehow lost all the birth certificates and forgot the kids' names. There's just no way that anyone can prove that sort of harm.
But if the content industry ever tried to take out an insurance policy for sales lost to piracy, that would be a reasoned, independent, and measurable assessment of their harm, and they couldn't make up those BS numbers about how many dozens of their non-existent children fell into the pit, lost forever, even to the public records and the memory of their parents.
As long as TV-shows are broadcasted on television you can't expect all shows to be isntantly available in your region. Some will, somw won't, depending on distribution/broadcast agreements.
I believe TPB and kickass proves this statement false.
I don't know what 'region' I'm in, and I don't care.
I'm bracing for the downvotes here, but I really don't see copying for personal use as a negative. To me, it's illegal in the same way that violating traffic laws to keep up with the flow of traffic is illegal (technically, but (sufficiently small values of) nobody actually cares or is actually harmed by it).
Would love to see some arguments to the contrary that aren't straight out of the media cartel fallacies playbook :)
Your point? Slavish adherence to the law makes you obedient, not noble.
That is not very much justification.
There is no such tradeoff - there is only the existence of the law and its enforcement. An unenforced or almost never enforced law need not exist and is treated as same.
I don't have to pretend to respect the copyright lobby to gain the benefits of not being murdered in my sleep.
Copyright infringement is a much more complicated calculus.
Should we ignore those laws that codify the opposite of our beliefs? Many people would say yes. Many of our heroes are lionized for doing this.
In your first response.
>Should we ignore those laws that codify the opposite of our beliefs? Many people would say yes. Many of our heroes are lionized for doing this.
First, this defeats the purpose of law. Everyone has their own beliefs. Imagine what would happen if everyone started selectively obeying the laws that are compatible with their beliefs. Believe me there is quite a diversity of belief systems out there. Secondly, those many people that would say yes, should try to change the law instead of ignoring it. I can also accept a code of ethics that accepts ignoring the law, as long as it waives the rights given by law.
Normal people and police do this every single day with usually little ill effect. Police are not obligated to pursue every instance of a violation they see, a person is in theory obligated to follow every applicable law, but in practice, they do not (and the sheer volume of law ensures that it's impossible anyways), and the world hasn't come crashing down.
The idea that ignoring wrong or inconvenient laws leads to social collapse rings quite hollow, in light of that.
If we treat all laws as equal because they are the law, then a person who drives over the speed limit has logically done just as bad as someone who kills another.
Can we agree that this suggestion is absurd on its face?
If we instead acknowledge that some laws are more important than others, the more difficult question has to be asked "what defines that importance?", which logically means that there are some laws that are not that important at all, who's violation has little to no negative societal impact. Like going a mile over the speed limit.
Or more to the point of this discussion, like downloading a movie from your favorite torrent site.
If morals drive laws and not the other way around, the moral consensus seems to be shifting towards the fact that copyright infringement is morally neutral, or at least not that bad, on the same level as going a mile over the speed limit. It's technically illegal, you could be made an example out of if someone really wants to, but the chances of that happening are all but nonexistent.
No accounts, no logins, higher download speeds, worldwide availability. The fact that is free is just bonus.
We can argue if that perception is right, but I think this is the reasoning that justifies piracy in the eyes of many pirates.
People don't need to speed in cars, or run red lights, or roll through stop signs.
etc
(They generally do so because the cost to them is low 99.9% of the time)
True, I'm not sure why it annoys me so much. I would be much happier if people just said, "Sure, I pirate some stuff I don't need. There is no excuse for it but I do it anyway." The end result is the same.
The same way "I want to get home faster" or "i'm careful" is also a silly and false rationalization for the speeding/rolling through stop signs/etc.
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Well that is sort of true. But that makes it harder to keep up with if you aren't tech savy / into the pirate scene.
The media companies just don't another Napster situation where everyone and their mom knew how to get all the songs they wanted.
If we look at morals...
I always enjoyed the story in the bible where Jesus broke several loaves bread and a few fish and shared it with a massive crowd. No one cared about the poor fishermen or farmers. Why then is it morally objectionable to share software in the same manner?
In other words, unless people fine it morally reprehensible we will always have something like this going on.
There will never be a parable that makes people care about piracy.
Today there really is no excuse. If you are a game dev looking to break into the industry, you do need a lead - something good to show off what you can do - but really all you need is a demo of your capabilities, and with something like Unity you can get something out the door really quick. You just need to demonstrate competency. And you should probably give that one away.
Then if you actually intend to make a legitimate project, of scale, with huge developer costs et al, go kickstart it. If you don't have the finances to gamble on if or if not enough people will voluntarily give you an arbitrary amount of money effectively as a donation for making the game after the fact, find out if they are willing to give you a fraction of it beforehand. If not, your game would not have sold anyway.
And if you say something along the lines of "they have no audience, how can they kickstart?" then I ask you how they can sell their game in the first place, if they have no audience. For better or worse most digital media sales are not about quality or effort but are about publicity and consistency. Fundamentally piracy does not mean you would have or not had a succesful launch - the pirates are just users who mostly would not have paid at all, and you won't get an order of magnitude more sales from somehow making it so you cannot transmit data online freely anymore.
The entire story of my independent career would take much longer to describe than is profitable for either of us.
Evolve or die, as it were, and since I'm not yet gone I am in yet another stage. One where I've whittled own the number of people, and disciplines, I need complete my endeavor.
That's not to say it's easy. Talent of a measurable worth is not always ready to go when you are.
Of course, in actuality, piracy is demonstrably benign. Isn't it strange that in the age of digital piracy, indi-game developers are more successful than at any other time? Movie studios are making more money than ever before, HBO continues to completely destroy the likes of Netflix in profitability despite producing the most pirated TV-show of all time. The fact is: pirates are mostly people who've already paid or would never have paid anyway. I think we can all agree that piracy is ethically wrong, but I think it's also pretty clear that it's not very harmful.
We launched in 2009, and were feature by Apple over 9 times. While we wanted to monetize on episodic content IAP wasn't yet a possibility. The programers, who already had jobs, were dissuaded to continue and for sweat equity my options were 'nil. Kickstarter had literally just launched as a website, I'm not sure it would have mattered much for us back then.
All things aside, I blame no one, but I am finding it incredibly hard to get back into the industry proper, even with my incredibly established group of contacts.
No one deserves to be paid for their work in a creative field. In life we evolve or die. It just smarts when you're dying with over seventeen years experience.
Not that piracy is OK in my eyes, but failing to protect oneself from it is outright ridiculous.
(BTW, Jesus is dead, his father was some schmuck who knocked up some girl that we now call "Mary" for some reason, and there is no God.)