If you want my money you'll have to provide at least the same amount of service. And stop being assholes trying to pass massive surveillance laws every three months.
I think the pro-piracy position is just totally irrational. If I'm gay and I don't like Chick Fil-A's anti-gay message, should I: a) refuse to do business with them; or b) steal chicken sandwiches instead?[1] The big media companies don't have a monopoly on content. The costs to both produce and consume indie content are lower than they ever have been.
[1] At this point someone will bring out the "copying isn't stealing" hypothetical. Technically true, but consider this: any product has a delta between its market price and its marginal cost of production. The marginal cost of producing a copy of a piece of digital content isn't zero, but it's very close to it. But lots of products sell for far more than their marginal cost of reproduction. Is it okay to steal sandwiches from Chick fil-A if you leave an amount of money that covers the cost of producing the next sandwich? Apply that reasoning to products like Apple computers or Prada handbags that sell for far more than their marginal cost of production. Is it okay to take those items and leave an amount of money that compensates for the cost of replacing it? Or do we have a general understanding that companies that produce things have a right to the profit they can earn on each item?
Don't they?
The problem is not with what they create, it's how they want to limit your options of using what you legally bought.
It is perfectly possible to believe that the way copyright terms have been extended and the way usage restrictions have hollowed out public access means the balance has been distorted to a point where the bargain is no longer justifiable.
The widespread acceptance of piracy indicates that the support for the current copyright regime is likely to crumble, and my guess is that it is largely down to the way copyright holders have massively abused their position to shift the balance ever further towards them.
In other words, despite pretty much never pirating anything these days - I have a collection of about 500 or so legally bought DVDs: I have very little sympathy. They've largely brought this on themselves. They do need to realise that their copyright protections are artificial restrictions that comes with a price, and that can be rolled back or revoked.
The much more telling thing is that there is no public moral outrage from large numbers of "intellectual property crusaders" who decry the lack of enforcement - the limited outrage there is almost entirely corporate and/or paid.
This shows how disconnected copyright law has become from prevailing culture.
The copyright holders have already for the most part lost - the question is not if the legal framework will change, but how long they can hold it in place.
That's true of every property right. In the state of nature, I have the "right" to trample all over your yard, to kill you and eat you. When the government comes along and creates the "right" to land and the "right" to life, that is a trade off between society and property owners.
> It is perfectly possible to believe that the way copyright terms have been extended and the way usage restrictions have hollowed out public access means the balance has been distorted to a point where the bargain is no longer justifiable.
And the way to handle this is to lobby to get the right redefined to have the sort of scope you want. And nothing would help this effort more than supporting indie content creators, undercutting the wealth and power of the traditional media companies.
> and my guess is that it is largely down to the way copyright holders have massively abused their position to shift the balance ever further towards them.
The "abused their position" canard is becoming toothless in the face of how much money is on the opposition side now, in companies that specialize in distributing content (Youtube, Apple, etc). The lobbying dollars are there to weaken copyright protections to give these distributors a better negotiating position. It's a hard political sell because in the U.S. we just believe in really strong protections for property rights. My parents have this huge back yard that they never use. But if a homeless squatter sought refuge on a tiny portion of their land, an infringement that would cost my parents basically nothing, they can still have the police come and kick that person out. We like our property rights absolute, and that's why the media industry has found it so easy to drive copyright protection in that direction.
So the appropriate response to a rigged game is to just buckle down and try harder?
(Youtube, Apple, etc)
Did you even read the article? Google and Apple are part of the problem; they created the walled gardens!
Historically this difference is highly noticeable: Property rights to physical items and land have existed pretty much as long as humanity to various extents, even in societies with no formal concepts of jurisprudence and no centralised enforcement. It has been codified in laws pretty much as far back as we have records - the first codified property laws are more than 4000 years old.
While copyright came into being as an Act of Parliament with the Statute of Anne in 1710, which was an explicit restriction of rights, and it took a further 150 years or so to solidify the modern copyright system, because it was essentially all invented from scratch with no basis in previous human history. Most of these efforts explicitly recognised copyright as a bargain where the public gave up rights, while property law has systematically been justified with the idea of a natural right to control that which you can physically possess and protect.
Incidentally I believe property rights are too extensive too, and e.g. in Norway where I'm from there are substantial ancient exceptions from private property rights (on the basis that too extensive property rights also involves the public surrendering freedoms) - the "freedom to roam" ("allemannsretten"), but historically they are still of a fundamentally different character in that at least the underlying concept of property law basically devolves to the idea that someone does not have the right - though the may have the power - to deprive you of access to that which you physically possess.
> And the way to handle this is to lobby to get the right redefined to have the sort of scope you want.
Meanwhile most people are not interested in a crusade - they just want to go on with their lives, and carry out actions they largely don't see as morally wrong. History is full of laws that have fallen because enforcement became impossible due to total public disregard for the law.
> The "abused their position" canard is becoming toothless in the face of how much money is on the opposition side now
As long as the copyright terms are as long as they are, the DMCA is still on the books in the US, and sites like Youtube enforce far stricter standards than they are legally obliged to, it is by no means toothless.
> The lobbying dollars are there to weaken copyright protections to give these distributors a better negotiating position.
Of your two examples, one (Apple) has a strong self-serving interest in protecting copyright, and the other is a site run by a company with a strong self-serving interest in protecting copyright, thanks to iTunes and the Play store respectively. I don't see why you believe that either Apple, Google or similar companies have much to win by lobbying for weaker copyright protections. Nor have I seen any kind of evidence that they do.
> It's a hard political sell because in the U.S. we just believe in really strong protections for property rights.
Copyright is not a property right, no matter how many times they repeat the term "intellectual property". Copyright law exists in the first place exactly because property law fundamentally is based on the concept of possession. Copying does not remove possession of anything, and so it could not be a violation of property rights.
And the extent of piracy in the US too demonstrates quite well that whether or not people think it is "right" in abstract terms, a substantial proportion of the population does not consider it wrong enough to stop participating in it. Copying and sharing has been an ingrained part of human culture since before written history. In fact, large parts of human culture throughout history has depended on widespread copying and sharing.
So on hand, the historical state has been one of freely copying and sharing, while on the other hand the historical state has been one of rapid and continuous strengthening of enforcement of physical property rights. The two are about as opposite as they can get.
> We like our property rights absolute
Not even the US has property rights that are anywhere near absolute. Try erecting a ten story building on the plot of your suburban house without applying for planning permissions and fighting all your neighbours. Try buying a house right in the path of a long planned road and fight the application of eminent domain. Try starting a brothel most places. Or dumping hazardous chemicals. Or refusing black people access to your store.
Many US states further have exceptions that limit your ability to even prevent access to your property in certain situations - e.g. you may not be able to prevent access to the shore-line.
Your freedoms and rights to do things with your property are continuously weighed against and limited by the concerns for the freedoms and rights of others. Your property ownership does not exempt you from business regulations, or anti-discrimination laws or environmental regulations or a whole host of other laws and regulations that limits what you can do to or on your property.
And that is the one thing that brings property rights closest to copyright laws: They both reflect tradeoffs between the freedom and rights of the public and freedom and rights of the owner.
Copyright infringement is more like trespass than theft, but trespass is a property concept as well. You've mis-characterized property law here. A property right isn't just about possession, it's the right to exclude. It doesn't just keep you from dispossessing me of my land, but allows me to arbitrarily exclude you from it, even in situations where your use of my property doesn't cause me any loss or deprivation.
> While copyright came into being as an Act of Parliament with the Statute of Anne in 1710
Before the Statute of Anne, operating a printing press require a royal license, so large-scale copying wasn't possible. In other words, copying has been restricted almost since the technology has existed to allow it.
> while property law has systematically been justified with the idea of a natural right to control that which you can physically possess and protect.
Yet we consider it a crime to engage in activities like embezzlement, which specifically involve money or property you do not physically possess. This is quite an unnatural concept if you think about it: you give someone else possession and control of property, then expect the government to intervene if they use it in a way different than you intended? That has no natural analogue and is indeed relatively novel in the history of criminal law.
> I don't see why you believe that either Apple, Google or similar companies have much to win by lobbying for weaker copyright protections. Nor have I seen any kind of evidence that they do.
Google, and Apple, as content distributors, have a great incentive for copyright to be weak, which gives them more leverage in negotiating with content companies. Google and Apple would love not to have to pay for the content that appears in the iTunes or Play stores.
> Copyright is not a property right, no matter how many times they repeat the term "intellectual property". Copyright law exists in the first place exactly because property law fundamentally is based on the concept of possession. Copying does not remove possession of anything, and so it could not be a violation of property rights.
Property does not require possession of anything, nor can they only be violated by dispossessing someone of something. Someone walking onto my property without permission does not dispossess me of it, but is a violation of my property right. Abstract concepts like transferable contractual obligations are also property rights.
> Not even the US has property rights that are anywhere near absolute.
I mean "absolute" in the sense that property law rejects the idea of sharing. Say I have a big plot of land that I don't live on or use for anything. Some people come along and camp in it. The value they gain from camping is greater than the loss to me of the use of land I never use anyway. Property law does not consider that. It gives me the right to exclude people from the property. The government is of course empowered to regulate my usage of my property, but other individuals can't raise "the public good" as a defense to infringement of my property rights. They can't say "this benefits the public a lot more than it hurts the owner."
> weighed against and limited by the concerns for the freedoms and rights of others.
If you think about it, the fact that you can't cut across someone's land is a much bigger infringement to "natural freedom" than the fact you can't copy someone's song. At least the song is something that is the product of its creator. It wouldn't have existed without an act of creation. But the land is natural. It's the earth. It existed long before any property owner ever laid claim to it. Yet, we very strongly defend the right of people to exclude other people from patches of earth they didn't even create. So is it surprising that we have strong protections to allow people to exclude others from works they did create?
Theft denies the owner their rightful property. Trespass denies or restricts the owner the use of their rightful property.
Copyright Infringement does not, on its own[1], does not stop the rights-holder[2] from using their copy.
The important distinction here - that is often conspicuously avoided by people that attempt to conflate copyright infringement and theft - is scarcity. Physical goods are scarce, so we invented laws to discourage theft. Land is scarce, so we invented laws to discourage trespass. Copyright, on the other hand, was enacted not out of fear of losing a scarce resource; we hoped it would give society faster/better access to "science and the useful arts".
As an investment, it is something society may decide it to stop paying for (i.e. no longer providing the temporary monopoly). People hoping to exploit such monopolies should really keep that in mind, because society may choose to invest in something else if their investment isn't providing adequate returns (access).
[1] If I have to invade your property to do the copying, I could probably be charged with both copyright infringement and trespass. The two activities are still distinct; they just happen to occur at roughly the same time.
[2] "owner" isn't really appropriate when speaking of copyright infringement, for the same reasons. You don't "own" the abstract concept behind a work, you only own a particular instance.
But... I can't really do all of this, I don't have the money. If and when I have the means to do this comfortably, I'll do it! Until then, this is the way I'm gonna go. And the thing is, if I was not pirating all of these things and simply abstaining from enjoying these costly goods, it still would all be the same to the entity I'd buy it from -- because from their view it's a) simply not consume, or b) consume -- and for the time being at least contribute to fulfilling a network effects popularity of the thing, or at least get interested enough to be a willing buyer sometime in the future, (see Adobe and Microsoft leaked documents expressing their being okay people pirating their products. I'm sure you understand that Adobe and MS would indeed that you rather use a pirated copy of Windows/Photoshop than to go with Linux (or GIMP)... because this way you at least get hooked/familiarized with it, and might buy it legally when you're a business owner or something).
I'm poor and I like chicken sandwiches because all my friends like chicken sandwiches. I can't afford chicken sandwiches so I steal them instead so that I can fit in with my friends (sometimes I leave a couple quarters on the counter because that is all it costs them to make one and I'd like them to break even). The company I steal them from shouldn't be upset with me because I've been able to find out who has the best chicken sandwiches and when I have money I'll pay for my chicken sandwiches.
Yes, the company can say "consume and pay or don't consume" because they paid all the money to make the content in the first place. Any other option is stealing.
Have you checked out the selection at your local library?
My parents go down there and take out multiple movies a day, for FREE. I also hear they have books there.
Free from the library, free from The PirateBay, who cares, right? Either way you're not eating into anyone's profits.
That doesn't necessarily apply to you specifically, since it's dependent on your financial situation and how much you consume various media. Imagine yourself in a hypothetical world where it wasn't physically possible to pirate any music, TV shows, movies, software, etc. Would you really completely abstain from enjoying those goods, or would you simply reduce your consumption while actually paying for it? I think for many people, it's the latter.
No one is going to buy a TV for Amazon Instant Video support. They will buy the TV, see that it does not support the service, and promptly pirate the content they want.
We will adapt to this situation, or lose to those who will. And if no one adapts? Then many will pirate. And all our diatribes against freeloaders will do nothing to stop them.
I'm not saying it's good that it's this way. I pay.
Actually, a client bought a "smart" TV to watch BlazeTV. When he realized it wasn't smart enough to offer the channel he wanted(licensing, crap proprietary software) he called me to "make it work". I bought a Roku, delivered & set it up. He watched < 4 hours of the target channel, called me up and told me to pack the whole thing up. Gone are the Roku, the TV and all subscriptions cancelled. Here's a target consumer who wants to pay but is not willing to pay, pay more & then jump through a myriad of hoops.
edit, forgot your 2nd paragraph: he doesn't pirate the content, it's not that important to him. He does listen to the live audio offered free of charge on his phone now that I set that up for him.
However, producers don't get to complain about piracy by people who aren't in their market. Unless they eventually put the product on sale at some point, a pirate has no impact on the bottom line. In the simple (one-price-forever) case, the producer lost nothing - not even potential profit, because the consumer was already priced out.
My ire is directed at the people who treat piracy as some sort of moral high ground that they're taking.
No.
By his reasoning it would be okay to go into the store, copy the bag and leave with the copy.
The other reason is that the store's supplier has a finite number of handbags - and selling one for $1,000 is clearly worse than selling one for $10,000. With data, there's an infinite supplier willing to sell you more at the same marginal cost. In that case, I'm back to not seeing why the store owner would care.
Copying data is frictionless - in fact, it's invisible. The store owner would never even know it happened.
My point is that it's ridiculous to make a categorical distinction between digital and physical goods based on the premise that digital goods have a zero replacement cost while physical goods have a non-zero replacement cost. It makes it seem like as long as a producer is not out the replacement cost, then stealing a product is okay.
Think of it this way. If, during a peak holiday shopping weekend, a thousand people not in the target market descended upon a store and replaced all of the bags with their strict cost-to-eventually-replace amount, this would be a major blow to the company's expected revenue. The same scenario does not hold for digital products. A thousand people could pirate the digital product, and as long as the pirates are not in the target market (an assumption made in these analogies so far), there is no analogous loss of potential revenue.
I think the 'magic' analogy is still a bit more apt because of the difficulty of quantifying that temporary lost opportunity. Maybe it could be about using your own 3D printer to duplicate a product exactly.
A better example would be a Honda car (or Ford, or whoever makes boring cars these days). Say you go to the factory, provide the raw materials and pay the workers to do one extra car which you then drive off in. And suppose otherwise you wouldn't have bothered buying a car at all.
Does Honda have something to complain about?
Putting that aside though, once you're out of positional good territory some providers of goods and services are indeed willing to accept different prices from different customers depending on their capacity to pay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_segmentation
If I can make 10% profit out of you by charging a lower price whilst still being able to make %200 profit from the next client through the door because they can pay more, then it is rational for me to do so. The trick is that it is difficult to convince rich client A to pay twice as much as poor client B if A knows that B is getting the same good for half the price, but if you can pull that trick off, then it is totally rational to modify the selling price based on the customer's capacity to pay.
You now have lowered the impression of price of the good to everyone who knows what you did. Now when your friend wants to buy a car, why would they buy one from Ford when they know they can just go down to the factory with the raw materials and a little cash and get the same car for less. Ford should be PISSED!
You can get a loan, buy the handbag for $10000, and disassemble it to create a copy pattern. Then you make and sell 10 copies at $2000 to pay off your loan, and sell an 11th copy to pay for the 12th, that you keep for yourself. At that point, you can continue making copies to serve all the customers that Hermes is excluding by setting its price so high, and profit from their narrow market focus. But you can't put a Hermes logo on your copies. Trademark.
This happens all the time, because fashion has no copyrights.
Copying isn't stealing. Stealing is stealing. You can't be a fashion monopolist, because there are trivial barriers to entry and no legal protections. Therefore, in order to price higher than the marginal cost of production, you have to sell the protected monopoly good--your trademark.
Hermes can charge $10000 for a $1000 item because it has created $9000 worth of brand value in its trademark. So, theoretically, it should be value-neutral for you to take the Hermes bag and leave $1000 on the counter, provided that you also remove and leave behind every trademarked element on the item. That's the only way Hermes breaks even. And the only way you can do this non-hypothetically without it being considered theft is by purchasing a knock-off bag for $1000 instead.
The difference is that they don't have a frictionless way of "pirating" electronics, so they are actually forced to choose between paying for the good and abstaining from it. With media, it's easy to rationalize that you wouldn't be giving the producer money anyway, but I'm skeptical of your ability to honestly evaluate that when you have the option to trivially enjoy the good for free.
However, there is an incredible amount of content out there available via free and legal means. That is to say - technology has made the barrier to entry very, very low and so content creation is a really competitive market. The relevant question is not whether, strictly speaking, the pirate can afford the product - I can afford an Hermes bag if I save up for a while - but whether their willingness to pay exceeds the price. I'm priced out of the market based on my willingness to pay, not my ability to pay.
If we were to take a typical pirate and transport them to a hypothetical world where piracy was physically impossible, I think you'd generally find that they're not actually priced out of the market for many of the goods that they currently pirate. They'd likely cut down their consumption in a major way, but I strongly suspect that they'd still be willing to pay for a significant portion of the goods they currently pirate.
If you paid for it, you were willing to pay at least the asked amount. In a "pay what you want" scheme, your willingness to pay is something between infinity and what you wind up paying. If you don't buy a thing, your willingness to pay is something below the price being asked.
There's no magic. It's an immediately available revealed-preference system - you either pay or you don't. I won't disagree that the availability of a free, well-functioning, DRM-free, easily available alternative reduces people's willingness to pay for locked-in, degraded, or even available-but-overpriced alternatives. That said, we live in a world where the piracy alternative exists, whether people like it or not.
Adjust your business model accordingly. Valve is making a killing selling software via Steam.
When I talk about being able to honestly assess willingness to pay, I'm talking about the pirate who claims that they wouldn't buy a good anyway so they might as well pirate it. It might be true, but all we can really say from the outside is that they value the good at least $0 worth, so their willingness to pay is somewhere between 0 and infinity. You can't put an upper bound on their willingness to pay just because they didn't buy the good when they got the good for free.
I don't particularly care if people pirate, but I find that pirates tend to do a fair bit of mental gymnastics trying to justify why piracy is ethical; I think the "I wouldn't pay for it anyway" argument falls under that umbrella.
I really doubt that.
First your last sentence. Which one is it? Either you cut down on consumption in a major way, or you still pay for a significant portion of your current consumption.
Then, questions about this hypothetical world. Does free music (net.labels, ektoplazm.com etc) still exist in this world? If not then I'd expect music culture to become a rather elitist hobby, if it even still exists in any meaningful form at all.
If free music still exists then I expect it to flourish much more than it does in the real world. I'd probably mostly listen to that, because that's where the innovation will happen. I'd probably buy a tiny number of some classic genre-definers that happened to end up on the "paid" side of the fence.
The latter situation is where we're moving with piracy as well.
I'm not GP, but I think the real problem is lack of competition. There's no real competition in this marked, they all collude.
One example: If Big-Movie-Studio-A sold their movies online as downloadable, DRM-free content, I would be much more inclined to buy their movies instead of the competitions. There's hundreds of ways the movie studios could differentiate themselves, but they don't. They obviously do not want to compete on most fronts.
A lot of people are seeing their internet use throttled for certain services lately, so even the supposedly "simple and fast" alternatives are taking a beating in the race these days.
(Bittorrent) P2P technology is a marvel to me. It's such a simple concept and the recent advances at distributed links, encrypting and/or obfuscating the traffic etc. have done a good job keeping up with attempts at limiting it. It's fast, takes little effort to use and makes incredible use of the resources that the internet offers while being more true to its core values (fault tolerance, distributed data, "route around censorship" etc.).
If you want to (and have a modern connection), you can find TV Shows in high definition shortly after their original broadcast, with zero advertisement interruptions and at download speeds that vastly exceed realtime streaming. Even in the rare cases where you cannot stream what you have downloaded so far (because of early missing chunks), simply waiting a minute or two will usually do the trick. What I would call the "inconvenience level" is down to where the time you need to wait for your content to be ready is about what you need for getting a round of snacks. Ergo: Virtually Zero.
A content consumer like myself, in particular using a GNU+Linux system, is receiving vastly superior service at pretty much zero cost (save for effort and internet fees). Not to mention that for a content publisher, bittorrent is a mindblowingly simple and cost effective tool.
For a while, I was actually considering moving away from my usual routine of "watch first, buy properly (in disc form) later". With all the BS they are still attempting to shovel into those, however (in particular the recent net-neutrality and surveillance crap), I find it harder and harder to ease up on my stance.
In my opinion they should burn it all down, put it on bittorrent and charge in crypto money. Pretty sure we will be moving to some form of that eventually, might as well get it over with before we have to endure even more collateral damage from outdated monopolies trying a little too hard having it their way.
Aye, there's the rub.
Then I tried teaching someone who's not tech savvy to do it. She didn't have adblock, so she was confused by the Russian wives for sale and by the multiple Download buttons. She was deeply suspicious of having to download uTorrent and completely lost as to how to choose which of several available torrents she should pick.
I don't know. I try to use Netflix on someone's Xbox and have the exact same problem. How the hell am I supposed to navigate with a joystick? Is it A or B to select? How do I go back?
Maybe we're all just getting old.
The media industry is no longer designed for more than a handful of massive vertically integrated companies to operate, because there's only a handful of massive vertically integrated companies that operate the media under a thousand different names.
It may sound quaint, but production costs used to be the big hurdle to creating and distributing an independent work. As production costs approach zero, collusion and M&A have risen in a complementary manner to compensate.