1. The study was restricted to Denmark. It was part of a larger study looking at Danish attitudes towards economic lawbreaking: tax evasion, benefits fraud, copyright infringement, taking home company property, etc.

2. The study asked people to rate how acceptable copyright infringement was on a scale from 1 (completely unacceptable) to 10 (completely ok). The 70% figure is everyone who answered anything except 1. But clearly a 2 out of 10 is still not very positive, especially since in context it could simply have meant that someone found it bad, but less bad than e.g. benefits fraud. Only 20% gave an answer >= 7.

3. The study specifically asked about copyright infringement for personal, home use.

---

From the report (rough translation):

Seven out of ten Danes accept to some extent the copying of music and movies without paying for them. So long, mind you, as it is limited to copying for one's own use.

Thus finds the Rockwool Foundation's study of Danish ethical attitudes in 2010.

In the study, a representative sample of people were asked to respond on a scale of 1 to 10, whether it is ok to pirate music from the internet for personal use. Those who believe that this act is acceptable under no circumstances, corresponding to a 1, total 30%.

The rest, i.e. 70%, accept pirate-copying to some degree. 50% give a rating between 2 and 6. They're probably skeptical in relation to piracy, but they seem not to think that it is totally unacceptable. The rest, around 15-20%, rate 7 or higher. This group mostly or fully accepts piracy.

The views are different however for making money on illegal music downloading. The population has a somewhat stricter view on that. In fact, three out of four respond that it is absolutely unacceptable to retrieve pirated music online and resell it to friends.

The difference between the two forms of lawbreaking is also clear in the average for all responses. Piracy for personal use has an average of 3.8 on the scale, while the score for selling to friends is as low as 1.7.

Looked at the other way around, more than 80% of those surveyed did not mostly or fully accept that pirate copying is ethical (7+ on a scale of 1-10).

When people abuse statistics it makes my head hurt. Would it really have been that hard for them to spell it out, as the original article did, in three distinct categories? It speaks to the fact that the answers to the question rest on a continuum.

I'd be curious to see what the results of this study would be if it were conducted in the US.

However, when you take this incredibly vital and ingrained mechanism for spreading appreciation and knowledge of various works of art and you translate it to the limits (or lack thereof) and character of modern communications and storage technologies you get a phenomena which externally is nearly indistinguishable from piracy (at least without further context of individual behavior).

To put it lightly this is a very serious problem. Imagine if libraries and museums were as much legal pariahs as speakeasies during prohibition, how would the world be different? And yet increasingly the collision of outmoded legal frameworks (already bent beyond reasonable measure by the corrupting influence of large "intellectual property" institutions such as Disney and Sony) with technological advancement is leading to conflict and strife between ordinary people engaging in traditionally ordinary behavior and governing institutions who see that behavior as a dangerous threat.

P.S. Whether sharing in the digital realm is compatible with profit is an equally important question, but the onus is on producers to figure that out (current evidence seems to indicate that it's not such a big problem, given record box office revenue in 2010, for example). It's quite simply infeasible (technologically, legally, socially, and culturally) to demand that people stop sharing because the power of sharing and of stealing are too closely related.

All cases of "sharing" the "older media" you describe are subject to the laws of scarcity. Even xeroxing a book is subject to it, as the cost of that can be even higher than just buying the book; and is mostly done for technical references for which you can't find the original.

"people sharing" is a romantic notion; in a perfect world there would be no problem with it, but writing a book / creating a game / composing a song / creating a movie - takes time, lots of effort and monetary cost that can be quite substantial.

Would people create movies such as Avatar (in the interest of sharing) if the movie industry would go bankrupted? I doubt it. Would people donate money if movies were released for free? Sharing is all fine for people, as long as it doesn't cost them too much. But few people give away their work for free and even fewer do it for altruistic reasons (it's like "spending other people's money" - how can you not be fine with that?)

      the onus is on producers to figure that out

So the onus really is on all of us - if you don't like the current legal frameworks, think of something to reward the original authors; otherwise the situation is only going to get worse.

If the movie industry went bankrupt, people would still create cultural artifacts, and (though I have no evidence for this) I would imagine they would create more meaningful ones. I don't think any of our neolithic ancestors made any money on the paintings at Lasceaux.

But they won't have much "entertainment value" and therefore be disregarded as narcissistic ramblings or self-indulgent drivel. Or, just a hobby.

To have a "value" in a society or to have a cultural impact, one must create compelling works that appeal to a wide swath of the population to which the piece of creative expression is communicating. Perhaps that may take more than one person to accomplish. How do you get a group of people together to perform such a task without a motivational lubricant like money?

"I don't think any of our neolithic ancestors made any money on the paintings at Lasceaux."

There was no money in cave art because, well, there was no money at all. As soon as money was created, so was the minstrel, the portraitist, and the professional writer.

But they won't have much "entertainment value" and therefore be disregarded as narcissistic ramblings or self-indulgent drivel. Or, just a hobby.

I disagree. History is littered with profound cultural artifacts that had plenty of "entertainment value" (weird term if you ask me) that did not have a monetary motivation. One might argue that these are in fact the best ones. You point out yourself that cave art preceeded money. Yet, it existed.

To have a "value" in a society or to have a cultural impact, one must create compelling works that appeal to a wide swath of the population to which the piece of creative expression is communicating.

True enough. But I would argue that in general the breadth of that impact is inversely proportional to it's weight. The Pixies (as the first example that comes to mind) influenced a pretty small number of mostly musicians, but that influence was profound enough to inspire bands that would later go on to have a much wider (and more commercial) impact.

I'm sure neither of us believe that money doesn't change the way art is produced. My point is that if you look at the correlation between production cost and final quality (of say, Avatar), if anything (maybe after a certain point), things get worse, not better.

This debate isn't helped by demagogues on either side pedaling excluded middle fallacies. The future lies somewhere in the middle, not in either extreme.

Are you saying the main motivation to create art is profit and/or recognition?

Human history has many examples of altruistic behaviors for art's sake.

You argue people will stop creating because there will be no profit for them to do so (or "lots of effort and monetary cost that can be quite substantial").

I argue if someone is motivated enough and creative enough, that person will find a way to manifest their vision into physical reality.

James Cameron's life during the creation of the movie "Titanic" was not one motivated by profit for profit's sake...

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,290182,00.html

       Are you saying the main motivation to create 
       art is profit and/or recognition?

BTW, that article about the Titanic is in total favor of what I said. To break even, the Titanic needed ~ $400 million dollars.

I would totally love to see someone sharing that for free, for art's sake ;-)

      You argue people will stop creating because there will 
      be no profit for them to do so

Are you by any chance suggesting that they are paid too much?

You validated my point. The best poet was not motivated by revenue, and althought I do not know, was probably not worried of others disseminating their work.

Creating art for art's sake, not to pay for the offspring's tuition bills.

Even John Keats, the "poster boy" for poetic works of unending beauty and pure inspiration, quit his job as a surgeon-in-training to become a full-time published-and-paid poet. He could've easily worked his day job as a surgeon and moonlighted as a for-free poet by night. His primary goal was to be a poet, and he found the only way to do so was by making it his career.

Even Vincent Van Gogh, the more modern keeper of raw artistic expression, pined for more people to buy his work, not the least of reasons being to fend off abject poverty, but also as a validation of the style he admittedly created. He was resigned in his later years to live off his brother as he painted prodigiously, but by that point he was in the throes of psychosis. Is that what you meant by "art for art's sake"?

It's surely a romantic notion that artists draw forth passionate forms of expression from fending off psychological defect, hungry bellies, and harsh surroundings. But the truth is, every one of those artists to a person wanted to get paid doing what they do. Perhaps the money is a validation, or incidental being a published or culturally accepted artist, or simply a means to an end. Doesn't matter a whit. They want to do what they want to do full-time.

In other words, "Shakespeare got to get paid, son"[1]

[1] http://i.imgur.com/cyIGF.jpg

Ask yourself what level of talent you would have right now if there was zero money in coding or designing software, and you just did it on evenings and weekends, when you were not working your full time job in retail or food services to scrape by?

There is just something disturbing to me about this idea that people should be suffering so that others can read better poetry on their comfy 100k tech salaries.

That's actually part of the reason why I find it so delicious that there are people outside of Computer Science that are hitting it big in Web and mobile apps; it's a validation that anyone can do the work of a CS grad just as anyone can write a novel or paint a picture; it just takes time and effort and acquiring skills.

From Wiki: "Avatar was officially budgeted at $237 million.[3] Other estimates put the cost between $280 million and $310 million for production and at $150 million for promotion."

So, I'd have to agree. At those costs, I don't think any amount of creativity or motivation could get that creator over the hump if all they had to look forward to was a bunch of people torrenting their creation.

I view the choice as simple. If you don't want to pay, in some regard, then don't watch the movie. Everyone has a choice. And nowadays the choice is easy... wait a few months and pay a $1 from Redbox if that's all its worth. Or get it through Netflix. At least the team gets SOMETHING for it.

In your Avator example, had their been a group of motivated people willing to pursue the creative goal of James Cameron's vision in spite of monetary compensation, $237 million would not be required. Some sort of 501c3 action movie production company.

i.e. publish serially and demand advances, like authors used to do.

All cases of "sharing" the "older media" you describe are subject to the laws of scarcity. Even xeroxing a book is subject to it, as the cost of that can be even higher than just buying the book; and is mostly done for technical references for which you can't find the original.

I think you might be missing my point. My point isn't that piracy doesn't exist, it does, my point is that sharing also exists and in the digital realm it is easily confused with piracy. A library allows a great number of people to read a book without any of them paying a dime to the author. In many ways it's fundamentally comparable to piracy, potentially hundreds of people a year can read a book while the author is only compensated for the purchase of a single book. However, we tolerate and indeed celebrate such things because we recognize that there is a tradeoff between the necessity of financial reward for creating art and the necessity of spreading the consumption of art by lowering the financial barriers to access.

However, while scarcity is intrinsic with physical goods it is not so with digital goods. Thus, when you translate an ordinary library into the digital realm without imposing artificial scarcity you get something that is fundamentally indistinguishable from pirate bay.

"people sharing" is a romantic notion; in a perfect world there would be no problem with it, but writing a book / creating a game / composing a song / creating a movie - takes time, lots of effort and monetary cost that can be quite substantial.

Would people create movies such as Avatar (in the interest of sharing) if the movie industry would go bankrupted? I doubt it. Would people donate money if movies were released for free? Sharing is all fine for people, as long as it doesn't cost them too much. But few people give away their work for free and even fewer do it for altruistic reasons (it's like "spending other people's money" - how can you not be fine with that?)

This is a false dichotomy. If all unregulated digital distribution were piracy then you would be correct, people would stop paying for goods that were available digitally and it would become difficult for more such things to be created, as creators would no longer be supported financially in doing so. However, that's not how things have played out. Avatar is a good example. It was almost certainly available online in clean, high-def versions while it was still in theaters and long before it was available on DVD. With just a few clicks and some waiting anyone of hundreds of millions of people could have downloaded and watched it, without paying James Cameron anything. And indeed many did. But none of this forestalled the massive financial success of the movie, both at the box office and in later DVD, blu-ray, and streaming sales.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. The ability to "pirate" digital media has been widely available and widely known for many years. And yet the music, movie, television, and book industries have not collapsed. Indeed, in the case of the movie industry it had a banner year in 2010. How can this be? There is no possible interpretation of the data which is compatible with the notion that huge numbers of people who engage in "piracy" are not also spending lots of money on media. Under the "all unregulated digital distribution is piracy" model this doesn't make sense. However, under the piracy + sharing model it not only makes perfect sense but is a predicted phenomenon of that model.

Despite this evidence that there is more to media "piracy" than just piracy many people refuse to accept it. But in order to proceed to a sane enforcement of laws and a healthy industry where content creators are rewarded for their creations we must see and acknowledge what is actually going on.

_the onus is on producers to figure that out_

And they have, with DRM and all that. Only problem with it is that it's a PITA for honest customers, but technology evolves and people always find ways to build better mouse-traps.

DRM very rarely works. DRM on movies, tv, and music does not work. Every example of DRM trying to impose artificial scarcity on these media has been utterly broken. It takes only a matter of seconds to begin downloading blu-ray rips. And yet despite this, as I've said, the industry still makes tons of money. Indeed, even when digital media is distributed without DRM (as is increasingly the case for music through Amazon MP3, iTunes, and other distributors) the world doesn't end, and artists still make money.

So the onus really is on all of us - if you don't like the current legal frameworks, think of something to reward the original authors; otherwise the situation is only going to get worse.

You seem to think that the situation has been getting worse, but it hasn't. In fact, the situation has been getting better. The lower costs and barriers of digital distribution, with or without DRM, has enabled artists to gain a higher share of the revenues of their work. And has enabled more artists to get into business who would otherwise have been too marginal to have been accepted into the industry. There are many examples now of artists giving away their work in exchange for variable donations (down to none), many of these have been hugely successful in generating revenue.

The problem we face today is not to find some desperate measure to divert us from the inevitable desolate wasteland of rampant piracy and starving artists. Rather, the problem we face is to acknowledge and accept the reality of digital goods and to come up with legal frameworks and business models which embrace the natural strengths of digital goods rather than denying them and pretending we can model this new media landscape by pasting a map of old media on top of it and changing a few of the labels.

      If all unregulated digital distribution were piracy then 
      you would be correct

Selling digital goods is obviously flawed right now; as you said, and you are right - because copying and sharing is so damn easy to do (and human nature too).

Heck, I "share" lots of stuff myself; then I start feeling guilty and purchase some of that stuff.

It's a trend that I worry about; because I'm also in the business of selling digital goods; but I also feel that the legal frameworks have been stretched too far and that DRM is really all about artificial restrictions, not "rights", which is just wrong.

I guess on the Internet the long tail works and some authors are doing quite well because of it. But technology is so disruptive in this case that it will shake a lot of bones :) - and this situation might be comparable to the end of The Renaissance period.

Since you say there is no scarcity, create Photoshop for me without making a copy. How about a Metallica album? Oh? you can't?...that means that not everybody can create it..and there is scarcity. You (and every other person that tries to make the case for piracy) claim that the scarcity is in the copy..when it's actually in the creation.

"Indeed, even when digital media is distributed without DRM (as is increasingly the case for music through Amazon MP3, iTunes, and other distributors) the world doesn't end, and artists still make money."

You need to look at the big picture. Movies (and anything digital) are only about what people are willing to pay. Right now, piracy still has some stigma attached to it and most people will pay rather than pirate. If everyone knew they could get something for free, the value would eventually be $0, which will make it impossible for anyone to make money (or even recoup the initial costs). Since software isn't worth $0, I would say DRM has done a pretty good job.

A good example of this is iPhone apps. For the most part, you can't charge more than a few dollars, because that's what people are willing to pay.

"There are many examples now of artists giving away their work in exchange for variable donations (down to none), many of these have been hugely successful in generating revenue."

This isn't a viable business model. Donations only work so far. There are also many examples of people that asked for donations, had thousands of downloads, and got very little in revenue.

It's funny there aren't more people that have your views on things such as the GNU/GPL licenses. Since there is no scarcity with digital goods, am I really hurting anyone when I use GNU licensed code in my proprietary app (the original code is still 'free')? But, whenever there is a discussion on copyright infringement, people talk it's not theft yet when the guy from thesis used GNU code and didn't release it under the GNU license, it was called 'theft' by many people here on HN. It's because of this that I can't take the movement seriously.

That's what I mean by technology. Book technology is expensive to copy compared to a digital file.

Looking at the big picture of libraries, I can go get a book and read it for free, just the same as downloading a text file. The attitude of libraries is that books should be available to read for free. Libraries are not for profit.

With digital files, that isn't the case. The technology doesn't have just a simple, quantitative effect, such as halving the money going to those who make the books for each copy. The change is qualitative, undermining the entire economic model that physical books allowed.

Public libraries actually have efficient economic properties from a macroeconomic perspective that governments should try to replicate and extend: * Authors are paid by the government on behalf of the public in proportion to the demand for their work (libraries buy more copies of popular books to meet demand from patrons). * The public pay the same amount no matter how much information they consume (via their taxes).

From a macroeconomic perspective, information has different properties to physical goods: * Information has high fixed costs, and low variable costs. * Variable costs of disseminating information can be spread to individuals other than the original creator. * Once the fixed cost of information that improves productivity is met, the most efficient outcome is to distribute the information as widely as possible.

Therefore, there should be a way to compensate information creators in proportion to value to society, without imposing a price disincentive to consume information.

One way to do this would be to have an alternative economic system for digital works where there is no limit on how much digital information an individual or company can consume after they have paid a fixed amount in the main system, with allocation of the individual's total in proportion to some metric - such systems are tricky to get right while not incentivising dividing up one invention / work into small pieces or creating complex entity structures to game the system.

Part of the problem with the piracy debate is that advocates of unrestricted personal use copying tend to pitch it as sticking it to The Man, where the man in question is a big name movie studio that puts annoying unskippable messages on the front of every DVD or a record label that charged absurd prices for CD singles for a few years.

This is a problem because (a) many smaller companies and individuals rely on copyright protection just to make a living, and (b) many copyright-protected works are developed because they are useful rather than because they are inherently fun to work on, artistic, or otherwise worthy of volunteer effort. In their haste to show that Big Media "can afford it", critics of copyright seem amazingly willing to overlook the number of small businesses from inde games developers to niche publishing houses that have been going to the wall in recent years as the Internet has made copying quick, easy, and practically free.

There is a valid argument when assessing damages from copyright infringement that not every copy made necessarily represents a lost sale. You can't know for sure either whether everyone would have bought the product at its legal asking price or whether the free but illegal distribution channels have positive effects on legal sales because of secondary effects like advertising.

However, there is also a valid argument that we don't really know how much work would be created in a world where copyright was fully respected or could be strictly enforced, but never gets made because the current illegal activity makes it too risky to get a project off the ground in the first place.

> It's quite simply infeasible (technologically, legally, socially, and culturally) to demand that people stop sharing because the power of sharing and of stealing are too closely related.

People used to make that sort of argument about driving after a couple of pints at lunch time and about driving while using a phone. They were always better than everyone else, and what harm did it really do?

And yet, today there is no doubt in the mind of anyone who has seen the real evidence, or worse, the result of a driver who overestimated their competence and caused a crash, that we should not condone bad driving just because it means some people will have to suffer some minor inconvenience.

The trouble with the copyright debate is that while we have ample empirical data to support policy on driving law at this point, we simply don't know exactly the effects of different models for promoting content distibution to consumers while still incentivising the original creation and sharing by artists.

The appropriate response is to embrace it as Valve has with Steam. The low incremental costs of distribution allow new business models such as "steam sales". This model has generated literally billions of dollars for Valve and other game makers. And in several instances small game companies have come back from the brink of death.

You can fight against the grain or you can work with it (steam, amazon mp3, humble indie bundle, etc.) The idea that taking advantage of the characteristics of digital goods is akin to surrendering to piracy and thus an end to all revenue for creators is profoundly mistaken. Above all else that's the point I'm trying to make.

Take copyright away so everyone, including those who currently follow the law, is free to copy as much as they want from wherever they want, and channels like BitTorrent rapidly become more viable. For one thing, more people would soon learn to use them, and their effectiveness increases with the networking effect. For another thing, you don't have to hide your identity if you're sharing ripped stuff any more so the "poisoning the well" tactic by copyright holders becomes almost worthless.

I suspect the optimum model in the absence of any copyright at all may be as simple as free distribution and inviting donations, but given that people have tried this and a tiny fraction of users ever donate anything at all, that's a pretty unappealing prospect if you're the guy looking at investing years and millions in building good software for others to enjoy. I have seen a few other funding/incentive models advocated in similar debates in the past, but usually the administrative burden and risks when you think them through in detail make today's copyright mess look the epitome of elegance.

There is nothing fundamentally uncrackable about the DRM of any games available through Steam. Indeed, many games on Steam are available in cracked versions. Nevertheless, this doesn't change the value of Steam or the ability of Steam to do amazing business. Often times it's just plain easier and better to buy a game through Steam than to go to the trouble of pirating it. That's very much a part of Steam's business model. Embracing digital distribution and adding value to digital ownership, in contrast to the typical approach which is to poison digital ownership in the hopes of crippling it enough to make it conform to the characteristics of physical ownership (i.e. constrained scarcity).

As to open donation models, I think you have a misconception about the idea. It is utterly irrelevant if the number of people who donate anything is vastly exceeded by the number of people who play a game (or listen to music, or watch a movie) without paying anything. What matters is the total revenue. If you can make more revenue by having 2,5, or 10 times as many people donate money even though 100x as many people donate nothing. This situation may tickle your "unfairness" sense (but to that I'd ask, do lending libraries do so as well?) but at the end of the day the artist still nevertheless has paid the rent and put food on the table, and that's what's important.

As far as donations, I do understand that the point isn't whether everyone pays. However, you still need whatever total you raise from whoever does donate to be worthwhile. Given that (a) there is nothing in today's law stopping someone from adopting that approach if it truly provides a better incentive to share their work, (b) various people have tried, and (c) I'm still waiting to hear about the market-changing success stories, I think a major cultural shift would be required before a purely donation-based model could provide incentives as effective as even the broken copyright mechanisms we have today.

However another argument: If 99% of the people thought that every 18 year old female must be raped repeatedly until shes 19, will that make it right? A lesser example. If every man believed that a woman must be whipped in public for not wearing the appropriate clothing, is it right? If every man believed that a woman cheating on her husband is grounds for execution, while a husband cheating on his wife is completely acceptable. Is all that moral or right? Consensus does not mean morality.

I feel that InclinedPlane's points raise the correct questions: What part of "piracy" is what people feel is sharing/socially acceptable behaviors taken from the physical to the digital world, and what part is really theft. Intent is important. And how do we separate the theft intent from the sharing intent.

Also another point: Perceived value. If by now people perceive music as worthless commodities, to them downloading it illegally is moral BECAUSE they feel that buying it is a rip off. They are buying something of no value. This could be a side-effect of theft they committed in the past. The content industry must change from "steal and we'll fucking sue" to "steal and you will miss out on big values of the product"

Social norms are not a topic in which we are especially expert. Still, it is a relevant topic: property rights are never enforced only by the law-and-order system, or even by costly private monitoring of other people's behavior. Broadly accepted and well functioning property rights systems rest also, one is tempted to write "primarily," on a commonly shared sense of morality.

Then it quotes another economist, Eric Rasmusen :

Video rental stores and libraries, of course, reduce originator profits and hurt innovation, but that is a utilitarian concern. What is of more ethical concern is that whenever, for example, someone borrows a book from the public library instead of buying a book, he has deprived the author of the fruits of his labor and participated in reducing the author's power to control his self- expression. Thus, if it is immoral to violate a book's copyright, so too it would seem to be immoral to use public libraries. Libraries are not illegal, but the law's injustice would be no reason for a moral person to do unjust things. The existence of children's sections would be particularly heinous, as encouraging children to steal.

To entirely deter copying would require a norm inflicting a considerable amount of guilt on copiers, since legal enforcement of copying by individuals is so difficult. To partially deter it would be undesirable for two reasons. First, it would generate a large amount of disutility while failing to deter the target misbehavior. Second, it would reduce the effectiveness of guilt in other situations, by pushing so many people over the threshold of being moral reprobates. At the same time, the benefit from deterring copying by individuals, the increased incentive for creation of new products, is relatively small. I thus conclude that people _should_not_feel_guilty_about_copying_.

I feel that is true of most general laws -- for example basic law and order is hinged on a collective sense of morality. If 80% of the population decided all of the sudden to riot, break windows, and flip over cars, there are just not enough policemen to keep the peace. But it just so happens that most people do not find that behavior acceptable and would actually step in to help enforce the peace.

When it comes to information products, I think it is very simple (and this just my uneducated feeling) -- individuals see it as copying not stealing. They copy a product, but the owner still has the original. In their minds there is a huge difference between that and walking into an individual's backyard and taking a shovel from the shed.

Now I know it is a copyright issue and each stolen copy is potentially a lost sale, but I am just highlighting how I think the majority thinks about it.

This has been debunken countless times. I think there isn't anyone but the RIAA to still pretend this.

For example, I used to rent seasons of shows on DVD (and on some rare occassion bought boxed sets from Costco). Haven't done that in years. Just wait for Netflix. Now Netflix isn't stealing, BUT if bit torrents just became completely legal right now, I'd probably cancel my Netflix subscription.

I'm not saying that every "stolen" copy is a lost sale, but it does sound like the potential qualifier is pretty accurate.

For example, without piracy, many of my friends (young twenties/teens, so we grew up with piracy) wouldn't have the same taste in music or movies without piracy because we simply would have never found a lot of the stuff we now greatly enjoy. The chances they would have purchased a good deal of their favorite media without piracy existing are utterly minuscule, and to say it's a possible lost sale somewhat glosses over the details, although it is technically correct. That's not to say all piracy would never be purchased, but I think that's the case for a lot of piracy. This is just my personal opinion, but I believe I've seen more statistics that point this way than.

Regardless of your stance on piracy, the "illegal download ≅ lost sale" numbers are not remotely reasonable.

In games, pirates seem to outnumber legitimate customers roughly 9:1, but pirates convert to legitimate customers (in the face of DRM or other obstruction of the pirated form) at a rough rate of 1 customer per 1000 defrayed pirates.

Musically? Looking at Radiohead's In Rainbows, 'most customers' paid nothing, but the album still netted more money in two months than their previous album had in four years. (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/In_Rainbows#S...)

Saul Williams had a relatively contemporary offering of a free/$5 album that in two months (and with producer Trent Reznor's extra exposure) sold as many copies as his previous album had sold in four years while garnering four times as many free downloads. He's had two albums since, but I don't know what the sales are like for either of them.

It's also worth noting that there were a fair number of torrented downloads of both albums, which should shift numbers closer to the observed game piracy numbers.

They take the quite extreme point of view that all intellectual property should be completely abolished. They make IMO a definitive point on the complete uselessness of patents in general; the case against copyright and trademarks is somewhat less clear.

Sure, I skimmed it a bit, but don't have time to read it at the moment.

As for the summary of their points, thanks for posting them - I think there's ample room for debate, and that each thing is probably a bit different - software patents are different from drug patents, for instance.

For copyright, the case is quite clear too, though it may still be possible that a short copyright (14 years, for instance) may still be better than nothing at all.

Trade secrecy are treated page 188. Basically, it is much more used than patents, so suppressing patents won't change things much. Revealing secrets through patents is very inefficient anyway.

Maybe you should redefine your "normal" level of production? There are two, valid, competing concerns here, that of the content producer and that of society. After all, the point of copyright, according to the US constitution is to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Allowing content producers to make money is merely a means to that end, not an end onto itself.

Not really. I don't think it overlaps enough to cause much of a problem. They don't have the ease of use that downloading stuff does.

> Maybe you should redefine your "normal" level of production?

Without any IP laws, you could, in a thought-experiment world, spend millions of dollars to create a movie, release it, and not make one dime back on it. That would be the last such movie produced. That's "underproduction".

> Allowing content producers to make money is merely a means to that end, not an end onto itself.

Oh, I agree completely with that. Historically, it's been a pretty good means to that end as well. Lately, many cracks are appearing in the foundations, but I have yet to read of a convincing replacement for it. I think things like MacOS, Hollywood movies (well, some of them), and books by professional authors are a good thing for the world, and am not sure that amateurs will replace them.

  > Without any IP laws, you could, in a thought-experiment
  > world, spend millions of dollars to create a movie,
  > release it, and not make one dime back on it. That would
  > be the last such movie produced. That's "underproduction".

There's a decent argument to be made that this would happen more often without IP laws, but then you're moving away from the thought-experiment world. Doing that makes it not clear-cut.

Of course copyright does not 'guarantee' profit: you can make a shitty movie and lose money. However it provides some protection for content producers and indicates a fairly clear path to making money: make something and sell it.

A digital example where there is a balance would be iOS, you don't see big antipiracy efforts from developers because there is plenty of market happy to pay for goods.

The real issue is when a content producer can't make anything at all on their time/ money investment, libraries on the whole have never caused this the way digital downloads may.

Point 2, please review http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112207

The real issue is whether we see them as "content producers" or artists, or maybe a bit of the two.

I use the words artists and content producers interchangeably, I guess thinking in terms of the word artist makes their work sound more unique and valuable than content producer.

But how to channel taxes to produce the information goods people want? My proposal is to set up a series of "Content Compensation Funds" and taxpayers get to choose which fund their taxes go to -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...

Woah, that's just one way of ensuring that they are produced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Possible_solutions

I am no free-market fundamentalist, but I think the idea of the government sticking its nose into the production of books, movies, music and software to that degree is not entirely to my liking. It also has a number of practical issues: someone could happily snarf down zillion-dollar blockbuster movies, yet dedicate all their taxes to some indie musician they like. At least it has some semblance of a market to it, rather than simply having the Minister of Information Goods who decides who gets what, but I'm not convinced it's as good as a "real" market.

My best guess is that reconfiguring the current compromise in favor of consumers, rather than some producers (copyright extensions, etc...) might be the best course of action, but I am not convinced 100% of anything.

I copied the "quotes" on real because it applies to both solutions, in both cases you're creating some kind of market with the hope that it functions better than no market at all, or any alternative market.

The problem (or at least part of it) is that people, even those that have thought about it for a while, are too quick to accept the current IP mess as natural, unchangeable, morally correct and real, when it is none of those things.

I'm not saying public subsidies should be off the table, just that this proposal and others I've seen don't seem to be as good as reforming the current system.

Dentist needs billing software. He's going to pay through the nose and face a free rider problem if he just pays some guy straight up to write it and release it under a liberal open source license. The software may not get written at all!

If, OTOH, the developer says he'll take a tenth of what it costs him to write it, and the dentist introduces him to 20 of his friends, the dentists all pay less than the labor costs, and the developer makes more money. And the software gets written.

Sure, simplified a lot, and ignoring various options, but you get the idea.

Granted, it takes a lot more than that to be in business, but the IP laws give you some protection against things like that.

If a person thinks the level of production of zillion-dollar movies is OK, but that there should be more indie musicians, that would be a sensible thing for them to do. If lots of people think like that, then the sorts of information goods they like will become better-funded, and information goods that few people like will become less well funded, which is surely a feature rather than a bug.

The purpose of an economy is to make things people want; I believe my solution achieves that. Of course, I don't think it's the only way information goods will be funded, or necessarily even the largest one. I think the Coasian solution -- where people group together to commission a work -- is attractive, and will become increasingly important as the internet reduces transaction costs.

For example, at some time you feel a desire to watch some hard sci-fi present-to-past accidental time travel causing an alternate war history movie¹, but don't know any, except for those you've already watched. And you fire off a new tab and start lurking around.

Not exactly kids on the steets begging for MP3s, but someone spending considerate amount on time begging^W searching for something they want, but don't know.

___

1) Hopefully, that — while still being somehow generic — would be a quite narrow definition where not too many movies would fit.

* Software

* Pharmaceuticals

* Books

* Music

* Movies

Now, I'm not saying that we'd arrive at that extreme, but you get the idea, no? That's "underproduction" in my mind - it'd be a poorer world with drastically smaller quantities of those things.

You smoke pot, you're a drug-crazed menaced. Except millions already do, they just keep it quiet (from the law at least). The more you push the drug-crazed menace part, the more anyone will any sense will push back as it's demonstrably untrue.

It might work great as a short term strategy and help you get favourable laws passed but I think they might be approaching the end of the line soon.

No need to be too sore though, Mickey Mouse has had a better run than virtually anyone in history.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/03/01/business/01eboo...

So $4 out of the $26 I pay for a hardcover book goes to the person who is actually responsible for the content? I submit paying $22 in rent is ridiculous, and as long as something like this holds true, thepiratebay looks pretty good.

I buy a lot of ebooks in the $10 range, and I would buy even more in the $5 range -- especially if the $5 went to the person who actually wrote the book.

I'll concede there will be cases where the mark up is over the top, but you aren't just paying for the actual words.

Secondly, I imagine most everyone here has seen that picture of what its like watching a non-pirated dvd vs a pirated one.....the non-pirated one takes forever to get through all their copyright warnings, movie previews, etc. If they'd show their paying customers a bit more respect they might get some in return.

in 1999 when Napster came out, everyone said music was too expensive (so they pirated it). Later, it was because there was no "try before you buy" and because the artists were getting screwed by the record companies.

Now that we have services like last.fm, pandora, and grooveshark to preview songs and you can buy songs for less than $1 (which is pretty damn cheap). Hell, you can even get DRM-less music and artists can easily sell their own music without a label.

Has piracy stopped at all? no. It's gotten worse and so have the excuses. Why can't people just admit that they don't give a damn about the artist and just want free music/movies?

Has it? I used Napster to download tons of music. Nowadays I use iTunes (and Amazon). I find it easier than poking around torrent sites or the awful gnutella junk and the music is reasonably priced and DRM free. Things are organized better and it makes my searching and downloading relatively painless.

I don't buy movies online yet because of they are laden with DRM. I don't buy blue-ray for the same reason. I'll buy DVDs only because the DRM has been thoroughly cracked--they go directly to my computer as I haven't even owned a DVD player in 5 years.

Make movies and TV shows downloadable and DRM free for a reasonable price and I'll start buying in a heartbeat.

non-pain = lack of DRM + ease of obtaining + delivery speed + quality + reasonableness of price.

If movie studios want to deal with piracy they have to compete on all those points. And they have to consider the whole pipeline from the internet to my TV. These aren't excuses they're just the economics of the situation.

> Why can't people just admit that they don't give a damn about the artist and just want free music/movies?

Because that's just not the case.

Why should the movie studios negotiate with thieves? The music industry listened (as I stated in my post above) and piracy hasn't decreased. Piracy will stop when everything is $0 (which is really what most pirates want anyway, but refuse to admit).

"I don't buy movies online yet because of they are laden with DRM. I don't buy blue-ray for the same reason. I'll buy DVDs only because the DRM has been thoroughly cracked--they go directly to my computer as I haven't even owned a DVD player in 5 years."

You can blame the pirates for DRM. It was created as a direct result.

"Make movies and TV shows downloadable and DRM free for a reasonable price and I'll start buying in a heartbeat."

"reasonable" is relative to everyone. Since the pirates can download things for free with little effort, even a penny is too much for many people.

"Because that's just not the case."

The problem is that there isn't any way to prove the case either way. Pirates aren't going to admit they just want stuff for free.

That is untrue. DVDs had DRM well before movies were able to be downloaded from the internet. DRM was preemptive paranoia from the movie studios. It has never stopped piracy (only slowed it down temporarily) and it only increases the view that pirated goods are of higher value than the DRM laden legit versions.

> Why should the movie studios negotiate with thieves?

Theft is a strong word. Copyright infringement is a better term. And the movie studios have to compete with it because if they don't they will lose everything, thoroughly.

> Piracy will stop when everything is $0 (which is really what most pirates want anyway, but refuse to admit).

You are casting an awfully wide net there. I've seen this attitude from people before and I don't get it. Why do you think that $0 is the magical reason for piracy? Can you not believe that people are more complicated than "OMG Freeeee!"? Trying to find people's true motivations and ethics and then working within those boundaries is the only way to stem piracy.

If songs were an average of 3MB each, you would need to purchase around 5,300 songs to fill a 16GB iPod. Buying 5,300 of anything isn't going to be cheap.

Then later I read that people who did pay the money were duped. They ended up getting not the broadcast stream, but a bunch of bullshit side-angle camera streams, not one of which was the broadcast. This after a build-up that strongly suggested (pretty much promised, the way I read it) that this was the ticket to watching the Oscars online.

This isn't the first time crap like this has happened. People get burned, and they learn.

I'd say piracy is 'socially acceptable' - in the sense that not many people would bat an eyelid if you said you'd downloaded one of the latest movies illegally. But that doesn't mean I think it's right or that people should do it - it's just an observation on what seems to be "socially acceptable." What is socially acceptable does not typically match up with what I believe to be right.

Imagine a society consisting of 40% Prudes, who disapprove of everything, and 60% Libertines, who disapprove of nothing. And suppose that people in this society are well informed about one another's opinions. Then if you ask "Do you approve of goat-fettling?" you'll get 60% yes, 40% no; but if you ask "Is goat-fettling socially acceptable?" you'll get 100% yes, 0% no, because everyone knows that most people approve.

Now suppose that the media in our hypothetical society aren't perfectly accurate and unbiased; they somehow give everyone the impression that there are more Prudes and fewer Libertines. This doesn't make any difference to the result of the "do you approve?" survey, but it may change the result of the "is it socially acceptable?" survey to 0% yes, 100% no because now everyone "knows" that most people disapprove.

(How relevant all this is to the present survey, I don't know, because my Danish isn't up to working out just what questions they actually asked.)

At least that's not how I interpreted it. I mean that kind of question is only asked in thought experiments :)

I'm pretty sure the original question was meant to ask each individual for his own opinion on whether or not it's ok.

I don't "pirate" copyright material but I don't see why others should be treated as criminals for doing so.

There may be some overlap, but there are also people who support decriminalization, not legalization, and some who support neither.

Just because it's supported by "the public" does not mean it's good, smart or of any interest. Case in point, "the public" seems to like Fox News and Jersey Shore a lot.

I never thought popularity was a good indicator of quality or correctness (though popularity may tell you what you need to be popular, that is a different issue), and that "the public"'s view aligns with mine on this topic is irrelevant, what is needed is still actual arguments.

The only interest here is that it could make discussions on public policy re. piracy easier to have. Not holding my breath though.

That was supported by the majority of the whites. It's a bit different if you count the opinions of the slaves as well.

Name one.

Even more interesting, would be a survey within a bigger geographical spread. Is there differences within Europe? What about the rest of the world? Are the opinions similar world wide? I would also appreciate a more detailed view into the selection of the group that answered.

The most interesting thing about the article is that it is spun very heavily in the direction of piracy... The actual answers about piracy for private use, is that less than 20% accept piracy, slightly over 30% not accepting it. The rest have answered that they are sceptical to piracy for personal use.

Accept is 7-10 on a scale from 1-10, sceptical is 2-6 and don't accept is 1 on the same scale. All from the linked report in Danish.

Still, I realise I'm in the minority here - the 70% figure definitely doesn't surprise me. Just, for some reason, makes me a little sad.

Take apps like Pandora; very easy to use, very nice to use. Doesn't work in the EU. Lame.

If 90% of the cool content you can buy online wouldn't be US only for such a long time after release and if everything was easier to use, I believe copying would be less common. Why would you risk (viruses, the law) it or go to the trouble of acquiring illegal materials if you can easily get it at the same time US citizens get it?

(I'm using the US as an example here mainly because most content I like from other countries I can immediately buy, but that might differ depending on your taste.)

What I could probably do is bittorrent movies and watch them on my TV.

I occasionally rent movies from the store, but I always overpay because it takes me too long to return them. Somehow bittorrent seems like the only sensible option. I wouldn't mind paying, but they don't let me.

The other 30% just doesn't realize that lending a game or buying a game and selling it after you've finished it is exactly the same thing as what an internet pirate is doing.

Yet the same person sends yearly compilation CDs to all his friends. One batch had a few songs that didn't play because of the iTunes protection. So he went out, brought CD's, ripped them and sent a new batch. At no point did he consider himself as having comitting a crime.

If I deleted my digital copy that I sent to someone, would that be okay?

If I download something from someone, am I responsible for verifying the copyright or is it the distributors responsibility?

If someone requests something from my computer, and my computer allows them to have it without my explicit intervention, am I responsible?

Am I responsible for distributing a file if someone downloads it after accessing an FTP server I setup using an anonymous account?

What if it required a password?

Note, I'm not trying to push the agenda that piracy is right. Rather, that piracy isn't as easy as saying someone copied a file.

Edit: I really want to stress I'm not trying ot make a point. Even I can't answer all these questions easily.

Ethically I believe this to be equivalent to lending a book/cd/whatever to a friend (this has been done, actually, as a protest/stunt. A guy attempted to sell an mp3 from iTunes on eBay).

>If I download something from someone, am I responsible for verifying the copyright or is it the distributors responsibility?

Distributor, generally. I feel this is similar to receipt of stolen property. In most places you are only liable if you knew it was stolen.

>If someone requests something from my computer, and my computer allows them to have it without my explicit intervention, am I responsible?

Yes, though how responsible you are is debatable. Intent is important but ignorance is rarely a successful defense.

>Am I responsible for distributing a file if someone downloads it after accessing an FTP server I setup using an anonymous account?

Why wouldn't you be?

>What if it required a password?

How is that any different? Or do you mean someone guessed the password?

Of course, most of these answers are just my opinion/speculation. Sometimes the line between "piracy" and "sharing" is blurry which I think is a huge part of the problem. There is (seemingly) no way have one without the other. If I want the ability to lend an ebook to a friend then I must also have the ability to give a copy to my friend. There are some systems in place to attempt to reconcile this, but they are either limited (you can lend it x number of times) or take away some other right (for example, it might take away the right to have a backup copy).

Their was no intent. Someone was merely able to gain access to the computer without my expressed knowledge and download a file (hypothetical, of course).

> Why wouldn't you be?

I guess your assuming I've given them explicit access to the FTP server.

> How is that any different? Or do you mean someone guessed the password?

Sorry, I tried to state the conditions. In the previous question it was merely that, I setup an FTP server, I don't password protect it, but I don't publish that the site exists.

So, yes, in the last question: someone guessed the password.

> Of course, most of these answers are just my opinion/speculation. Sometimes the line between "piracy" and "sharing" is blurry which I think is a huge part of the problem.

Agreed, which was the point of the exercise. We infer so much from simple actions. Intention is important, as you mentioned.

If you want to stop this, and live in Scotland, you can vote for the Pirate Party this May. I'm one of their candidates.

And it is this childish obsession that tickles my pirate nerves and makes me pirate even stuff i would gladly pay for. Because the industry is dishonest and thinks i sit on the far left of the IQ bell curve. They are lying in my face, and they know it. They don't deserve my money.

Go Minecraft.

'I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital "book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.

Imagine what these people must think of libraries.'

The fact is that, scare-mongering aside, piracy doesn't seem to have nearly as big an impact on profits as the large content creators would have us believe. What worries me more is that they seem to be leveraging this fear campaign to chip away at the basic concept of "ownership," pushing for a world where products are "licensed" rather than "bought." This scares me because, being rather old-fashioned, I enjoy the concept of buying a book, rather than licensing the words in that book for reading.

[1]http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/12/16/

No. It's very hard to not get people to do something and esp to stop doing something they currently are and tripple esp to do either without some replacement. As this "study" demonstrated and should be common sense.

Instead they need to incentivize legal downloads / legal media consumption.

Of course, that's extremely hard cause they literally add no value. They actually have a huge anti-value hill to climb just to reach parity with downloading. Their middle-man business model is broke and requires ever more bizarre/ridiculous laws to keep it shored up.

"70% of the public finds rape socially acceptable"

Would we be having the same conversation?

But more seriously, maybe none of your friends have had the experience of buying an LP, then later paying again for the same music on cassette, (and maybe 8-track and minidisc) and then again on CD.

And then maybe they weren't aware that the industry conducted a huge PR campaign to let people know that when they buy music, they are just paying for a license, not for the physical artifact. Of course they only did this after people had already switched to CDs. If we had known this before, we could have asked for crossgrades of the license from LP/single/tape/8-track/minidisc/whatever to CD.

And maybe your friends didn't hear about things like "Plays For Sure(TM)", Microsoft's DRM scheme that tricked millions of people into paying for music which Microsoft then decided would not play any more.

For those of us who did hear about these things, after paying for the same music three times, we're ready to just download our fucking songs that we already paid for.

Shouldn't Hacker News be a cut above, where people first read and understand an article, and then post it to HN with a succinct, relevant, and most importantly TRUTHFUL title?

(Independently of how much the numbers in this particular poll were manipulated.)

X% of HN finds piracy acceptable

What happens next time you want to play a game? You download it because they made that the less hassle way.

Still, I consume more media than I buy. Like 70% of the public, I'm perfectly ok with that.