Q: Piracy is immoral, and illegal. We need to spread awareness, then people will stop doing it.
A: Sure... that's how religion was able to successfully put a halt to masturbation, pre-marital and extra-marital sex. And why the US successfully won the war on drugs.
Illegal doesn't matter. People do what they want to do. Immoral is subjective. And teaching people to behave in a way contrary to human nature DOES NOT WORK.
I've been trying to explain this to some people I know. I hope this helps. :)
I'm tired of the straw man arguments used here. Regardless of if you agree with the gist of his posts, (and I do), no one is saying one download is one lost sale, but to say that no downloads are lost sales is disingenuous. You can say that they are sales you don't care about if you want, but there are definitely lost sales.
Secondly, you don't have to interview every pirate in order to find out. If that were true, it would be impossible to predict elections without... taking everyone's vote. I have a feeling Nate Silver would have a few words for this guy.
Back when I was learning piano under a jazz pianist (who also was part of a electronic duo, signed to a label, that were becoming increasingly popular), he told me that when he released his albums they were not making a lot of money on them. His label told them it was because of "file sharing", yet as a musician, he made most of his money by performing live at venues and doing tours.
I said that "if more people are listening to your music, more people know about you, and more people will come to you gigs, right?", but he fully believed what his label was telling him.
The label were responsible for the bands website, and if you were a fan, you could not even go to this site and see where they were performing next.
I know this doesn't translate directly to ebook story, but I think it points out that perfectly rational people can be hoodwinked by this kind of thinking. A clever marketer would see this as an opportunity.
As a past creator of downloadable software, I don't fear file sharing... because I am no longer producing downloadable software. I'm producing web applications, one of whose many benefits is that they make piracy obsolete.
Enjoy your BitTorrent and whinging about how DRM infringes on your "rights" to enjoy the content you "own", as you gradually realize that content producers are migrating from the forms of content you can conveniently steal to the forms of content that you can't.
Please don't pretend like a lot of people aren't going to make a lot of money selling things that could be pirated. You can migrate wherever you want, but you are only half the equation. If the consumers don't follow, someone will replace you and make all the money you are too proud to make.
But at least piracy will be zero.
ETA: I am pretty amazed by your use of scare quotes around the words "rights" and "own". It's almost like you are mocking people who expect to be able to buy things, and then own them.
'ETA: I am pretty amazed by your use of scare quotes around the words "rights" and "own". It's almost like you are mocking people who expect to be able to buy things, and then own them.'
In the USA at least, copyright is offered as limited privilege meant to achieve specific goals, so the scare quotes might be better used when talking about the "rights" of content creators over the material they "own".
I mean, if you really own something, you can maintain that ownership as long as you like, and then pass it on to others to own, who can do the same, on and on, forever.
But (modulo corporate shenanigans) that's not the case with copyright.
And were it considered a natural right there would be no need to make special mention of it in the U.S. Constitution.
> I am pretty amazed by your use of scare quotes around the words "rights" and "own". It's almost like you are mocking people who expect to be able to buy things, and then own them.
This is the thing that concerns me the most about the current battle between pirates and Big Media.
The pirate side likes to point out that copyright infringement is not theft. A ripped copy does not imply a lost sale, they say, and of course there is some truth in that.
However, these arguments are based on the fact that we are now dealing with pure information products rather than physical products that happen to contain the information. The other side of that distinction is if you no longer buy a physical product, you no longer have something you can keep and use as you see fit. Instead, you are only paying for a service, which provides information with certain controls and under certain conditions.
It is natural that people who put a lot of money into developing this information will react in this way, and clearly for now a lot of people are willing to sign up to on-line music services, games services, etc. But we are drifting into a world where the industry Powers That Be are going to hide everything behind rental models, and it will no longer be possible to buy an open-ended, use-it-as-you-like version of information products. When they switch the servers off, it's gone. If you move account, it's gone, and you have to pay again on your new service, just like when they went from LPs to tapes to CDs.
I'm not sure that is a healthy direction to move in, but as long as significant numbers insist on breaking the law and ripping off others' hard work, that's the direction that market forces will push. If, as some artists believe, there is more upside than downside to allowing open sharing of works, then they will be free to continue releasing things on that basis, and time will tell whether they are right. But for an article that keeps talking about having no evidence for illegal downloads causing a reduction in sales, it is assuming a lot about a culture that shares freely that is also not really supported by evidence yet.
>But we are drifting into a world where the industry Powers That Be are going to hide everything behind rental models, and it will no longer be possible to buy an open-ended, use-it-as-you-like version of information products. When they switch the servers off, it's gone. If you move account, it's gone, and you have to pay again on your new service, just like when they went from LPs to tapes to CDs.
>I'm not sure that is a healthy direction to move in, but as long as significant numbers insist on breaking the law and ripping off others' hard work, that's the direction that market forces will push.
If it comes to that, I can safely predict one thing: piracy will increase enormously.
Just, as they said in the blogs comments, like Harry Potter books in electronic are among the most pirated because there are no official Harry Potter ebooks for sale.
I believe that copyright as security for business models idea is contrary to the survival of entrepreneurs in the free market.
I may not be as successful businessman as you, but my experience, knowledge of other people's experience, a knowledge of economic history concerning copyright as well empirical evidence, has led me to conclude that the notion for and support of copyright is dangerous thinking to an entrepreneur.
Take it as you like, but that's my version of the truth, a truth that has recently been vindicated by a game developer I really admired, though I knew it has proven to me countless time before.
Hopefully, in the near future, I am going to see if my business experiment bare fruits to the truth that I thought I know.
If I am right, I might be the video game industry's most dangerous businessman. While everyone has mired themselves in the sand for their moral reflex against the internet piracy, I have the true map of reality.
So why am I telling you? Well, I am actually torn between the value of telling people the truth and the good news, but I have every interest not to educate my competitors.
Perhaps, telling people doesn't really "educate" people because they stick their head in the sand. So my telling actually serve my both greed and help values.
Yeah, I am probably a snotty 19 years old who don't know better because he doesn't having much of an entrepreneurial experience. Better not take advice from a 19 years old who only want free stuff, right?
This makes sense when your product is interactive (i.e. software and games.) However, when your product is linear: a book, a movie, a song, a performance, a reading, a play—in short, a narrative, there's really no way to "migrate" that content to something that cannot be pirated, because, in the end, if the product doesn't require your input, then experiencing a recording of it is the same as experiencing it.
Do you expect that the future holds no reward for storytellers in any medium?
A recording of a song, performance, or play is totally different from the real live thing.
Recorded media is just over a century old (excluding books). Creativity flourished in the past, it will continue to do so in the future. Perhaps we can revive the days of oral storytelling. The Story adapts.
Unfortunately the tools we have on the web are not powerful enough for all applications yet. Photoshop and Visual Studio have to be client side to be usable...and developing even a rudimentary IDE with web tools is harder than a good IDE with desktop tools.
But this is clearly a faulty analogy. If I download a file then the original owner still has the file. Stealing is where someone literally takes something away from someone else.
Sure we can argue as much as we like about lost sales and that's where this argument should live but to say that it IS stealing is surely fibbery.
A: Sure... that's how religion was able to successfully put a halt to masturbation, pre-marital and extra-marital sex. And why the US successfully won the war on drugs.
Illegal doesn't matter. People do what they want to do. Immoral is subjective. And teaching people to behave in a way contrary to human nature DOES NOT WORK.
I've been trying to explain this to some people I know. I hope this helps. :)