Ok, so now repeat after me: murder is not good or bad. Murder simply is; a natural outcome given human preferences.
I'm obviously being flippant: being a 'natural outcome given human preferences' does not render piracy immune from judgement as good or bad. As I'm sure you'll agree, murder is one perfectly natural activity (as evidenced by its prominence in regions of the world where the rule of law is weak) which is undeniably bad.
And I think piracy is bad. To those that think it is ok, I meekly and politely suggest that you make an effort to empathize with an indie game programmer whose work is pirated many times in excess of sales, leaving said programmer without the requisite resources for follow-ups or improvements -- to say nothing of personal compensation. The pirate (or filesharer) derives enjoyment out of the programmer's work, and yet the programmer has not been compensated, nor has he consented to the pirate's use. This is unjust. To claim that e.g. filesharing, where the activity is 'non-commercial', is not theft (and therefore not unjust) simply because the file is duplicated rather than moved is just as specious as to claim that an employee at Google should be allowed to take Google's proprietary source code and algorithms, leave the company, and to publish them on github or elsewhere, because 'sharing is caring', and because, hey, the original is still on Google's servers, right? -- without fear that they will be punished by the law.
Or put yourself in the shoes of a musician, like me (shameless plug: www.myspace.com/martindifeo), who after spending considerable time and energy and financial resources into his music, is faced with people telling him, with no apparent irony, on the one hand that they love music and respect musicians, and on the other that he (and other digital content creators) must simply accept that his music will be pirated. (The OP may not explicitly say it, but this statement is actually somewhat timid. For those who hold the view that music piracy is unavoidable, and therefore simply to be incorporated into the 'business model' or 'economic model', typically couple this view with a vehement opposition to the introduction of any legal or technological instrument to actually enforce digital rights, be it DRM, deep-packet inspection, graduated response, etc., thereby encouraging and, in effect, lobbying for the very conditions he claims are unavoidable.)
The OP proposes instead that the musician engage, in effect, in a PR campaign to win over the 'hearts and minds' of fans, in order to induce them to pay some 'token gesture' fee for the music even though, let's be honest, it's totally unnecessary as the OP himself states. I, for one, would like to think that my (ok...I'm being optimistic here) fans aren't idiots, and I certainly wouldn't relish the prospect of having to guilt-trip or otherwise trick them into pitying me enough to send me a few coppers. I'm not destitute, I wasn't e.g. born in the slums of Rio de Janeiro... I can't play the pity card very well. I don't want to take on causes, no matter how noble, simply to curry favour.
Call me crazy, but I think that the normal and correct way for transactions to occur in a modern, civilized, capitalist economy calls for the producer of the good to set the price -- without fear that his product can be appropriated unlawfully. If that price is too high, then consumers are free not to purchase, or, more pertinently, to purchase from a lower-priced competitor. And, no, by competitor, I don't mean to say TPB or the like, I mean another musicians who offers his music for free or at lower cost.
I challenge anyone to name a single instance in history in which widespread and systematic violation of property rights -- real or intellectual -- have led to anything other than net impoverishment. To believe that, simply because it is coupled to the technological marvel that is the internet, piracy and filesharing are ok and to be tolerated, is akin to saying that fusion bombs are 'ok' because, after all, they employ such exquisite quantum physics. Technological advances can be used to encourage good, civil behaviour, and for bad, disrespectful behaviour, like filesharing and piracy, where one minority constituency (the musicians and associated lines of work) are violated and left impoverished for the benefit of the majority (the consumers). AK47s can be purchased for a mere few hundred dollars in many regions, such is the wonder of modern manufacturing. Should we therefore all expect, to use a topical phrase, a bullet in the (mother*$%^ing) head? ;)
Just the thoughts of a concerned musician and onetime hacker...
uh....I didn't claim that piracy was immune. you do know that it is possible to talk about the effects of things without condoning them right? we can talk about how the murder rate of cities affects property values for example.
Call me crazy, but I think that the normal and correct way for transactions to occur in a modern, civilized, capitalist economy calls for the producer of the good to set the price -- without fear that his product can be appropriated unlawfully.
My main problem with this ideal (and I suspect one of the key things that needs to be addressed for the digital economy overall to flourish) is "the price". It's all well and good to set a single price for physical goods, where marginal costs are nonzero, but the fact is, it costs nothing to distribute one more copy of a digital good, so any time a consumer is willing to pay even a single penny for a song/album/movie/etc. but can't do so because the producer's price is too high, the producer loses.
I don't have anything useful to say on the morality of any of this, because piracy is not going away no matter what anyone does - it's clearly "wrong", but the important question is what we should do about it, and I have yet to see any practical solutions other than accepting it as a cost of business and trying to maximize revenues anyways. DRM schemes are fine in theory, and I'd have no problem if a good one came around, but in practice they have all really sucked because they punish legit consumers with all sorts of annoyances, and they still end up getting cracked, so pirates continue to pirate. DRM is by definition an impossible technical problem to solve, so we can't expect it to be a silver bullet.
I've yet to see any mass exodus from any of the artistic fields that are affected by piracy, so can't believe that it's is killing anything, or that it will in the future. If I had to guess, more than anything else it's increasing the number of people that obtain a product, most of whom would never have bothered to buy it in the first place. At worst it's a few percentage point hit to the industries, but IMO those percentage points could be more than reclaimed by adopting a more creative pricing structure (I realize this is not something an individual artist could do, as it would require a lot of data to predict what someone would be willing to pay).
Beyond any of this, I don't think the small guys are hurting at all due to piracy, as they never had any sales to speak of to begin with. Taking music as an example (I've both been a musician and worked at a record company), before the Internet, things looked almost exactly as they did now: big musicians made a lot of money off of albums and selling their fame in other ways, whereas small musicians had trouble making rent and made most of their money from gigs and lessons. The only difference these days is that small musicians can actually sell a little bit of their music on the net to people that aren't physically at their shows - back when I was playing, a band without a major record deal was lucky if it sold any CDs at all, and worse, they had to pay for large numbers of them to get pressed up front. I knew very few, if any, unsigned artists that were able to recoup even the physical production costs of their CDs pre-2000, so I'd say things are slightly better for the small guy now, if anything.
I'm obviously being flippant: being a 'natural outcome given human preferences' does not render piracy immune from judgement as good or bad. As I'm sure you'll agree, murder is one perfectly natural activity (as evidenced by its prominence in regions of the world where the rule of law is weak) which is undeniably bad.
And I think piracy is bad. To those that think it is ok, I meekly and politely suggest that you make an effort to empathize with an indie game programmer whose work is pirated many times in excess of sales, leaving said programmer without the requisite resources for follow-ups or improvements -- to say nothing of personal compensation. The pirate (or filesharer) derives enjoyment out of the programmer's work, and yet the programmer has not been compensated, nor has he consented to the pirate's use. This is unjust. To claim that e.g. filesharing, where the activity is 'non-commercial', is not theft (and therefore not unjust) simply because the file is duplicated rather than moved is just as specious as to claim that an employee at Google should be allowed to take Google's proprietary source code and algorithms, leave the company, and to publish them on github or elsewhere, because 'sharing is caring', and because, hey, the original is still on Google's servers, right? -- without fear that they will be punished by the law.
Or put yourself in the shoes of a musician, like me (shameless plug: www.myspace.com/martindifeo), who after spending considerable time and energy and financial resources into his music, is faced with people telling him, with no apparent irony, on the one hand that they love music and respect musicians, and on the other that he (and other digital content creators) must simply accept that his music will be pirated. (The OP may not explicitly say it, but this statement is actually somewhat timid. For those who hold the view that music piracy is unavoidable, and therefore simply to be incorporated into the 'business model' or 'economic model', typically couple this view with a vehement opposition to the introduction of any legal or technological instrument to actually enforce digital rights, be it DRM, deep-packet inspection, graduated response, etc., thereby encouraging and, in effect, lobbying for the very conditions he claims are unavoidable.)
The OP proposes instead that the musician engage, in effect, in a PR campaign to win over the 'hearts and minds' of fans, in order to induce them to pay some 'token gesture' fee for the music even though, let's be honest, it's totally unnecessary as the OP himself states. I, for one, would like to think that my (ok...I'm being optimistic here) fans aren't idiots, and I certainly wouldn't relish the prospect of having to guilt-trip or otherwise trick them into pitying me enough to send me a few coppers. I'm not destitute, I wasn't e.g. born in the slums of Rio de Janeiro... I can't play the pity card very well. I don't want to take on causes, no matter how noble, simply to curry favour.
Call me crazy, but I think that the normal and correct way for transactions to occur in a modern, civilized, capitalist economy calls for the producer of the good to set the price -- without fear that his product can be appropriated unlawfully. If that price is too high, then consumers are free not to purchase, or, more pertinently, to purchase from a lower-priced competitor. And, no, by competitor, I don't mean to say TPB or the like, I mean another musicians who offers his music for free or at lower cost.
I challenge anyone to name a single instance in history in which widespread and systematic violation of property rights -- real or intellectual -- have led to anything other than net impoverishment. To believe that, simply because it is coupled to the technological marvel that is the internet, piracy and filesharing are ok and to be tolerated, is akin to saying that fusion bombs are 'ok' because, after all, they employ such exquisite quantum physics. Technological advances can be used to encourage good, civil behaviour, and for bad, disrespectful behaviour, like filesharing and piracy, where one minority constituency (the musicians and associated lines of work) are violated and left impoverished for the benefit of the majority (the consumers). AK47s can be purchased for a mere few hundred dollars in many regions, such is the wonder of modern manufacturing. Should we therefore all expect, to use a topical phrase, a bullet in the (mother*$%^ing) head? ;)
Just the thoughts of a concerned musician and onetime hacker...