Piracy

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My point was, with presumably AMaster, that software piracy is not stealing, in much the same way as defalcation is not theft. I repeat, the companies don't lose money. They don't make more money. So what the companies are losing through piracy is sales prospects, probables or putatives. That is something other than stealing, where you take a material thing away and deny it the owner. When I take away your five dollar bill, your damage is losing possession of that five dollar bill.

Now, no matter what software piracy is exactly, there is more or less general agreement that it is more or less harmful, and so it has been criminalised as a crime sui generis. The interesting question is how great the actual damage of the crime is. The point is not academic; it has direct bearing to the severity of the crime. While it amounts to something, it is immaterial, and the what it amounts to is the result of the internal calculations of the company. A company that calculates conservatively or pessimistically will probably take less damage through piracy than a very optimistic one expecting a sales boom.

The industry's view, encouraged by shareholder interests, is probably simply: It's mine, and I want the ****ing money. After all that's what an absolute right like a property right is about. Fierce advocates of industry privacy (as opposed to customer privacy), they certainly won't allow you to easily find out how harmful software piracy actually is and whether based on that harsher or milder punishment is warranted. I think the industry is prone to exaggerate the damage, because for them it pays off to do. They will go for the harshest line. Among other things, it justifies them increasing the prices. If they can make some more money that way, the shareholders will be happy, and if they don't make more money they can still can blame the pirates - win-win. Software piracy is a convenient scapegoat on the shelf for the industry captains to gloss over less convenient aspects of their balance sheets. That is not to say that it isn't harmful. I just do not think that one ought to take industry proclamations with a grain of salt. I just think I am being realistic there.

The immense damages named by the industry, and their intensive lobbying, make politicians err on the side of the industry, conservative administrations more so than more liberal ones. That is just a reality. Probably Chev's strategy to address the issue is the most sensible, pragmatic and effective way to go. That said, the industry will fight Chev's 'sensible approach' tooth and nail, even though it would make it attractive to go legal and even has a chance to work.
IMO Chev's suggestion is clearly preferable to waiting for the elusive deterrent effect of harsh punishment. The traditional conservative response to the absence of notable effect of harsher punishment would then be more of the same: Call for harsher punishment, because if it doesn't work it's obviously because the people are just worse than they were thought to be and need an even heavier hand and certainly not because the policy chosen is a failure.

More generally, it will remain a very hard thing to persuade the general public that by downloading a song from the internet, illegally, that they can hear and record on the radio, legally, they did something very evil. Same for piracy: You end up with kids, committing the crime of piracy at the effortless click of a button and enter their adulthood with ... a criminal record of 'software piracy'?

We already have it here in Germany that the prosecutor's offices are only prosecuting more serious cases because they (a) would be swamped going after the small guys and (b) because indeed there is doubt about the severity of the crime and whether it warrants prosecution. Also, there is (c) the question of justice of prosecution: So they'd go after the folks stupid enough to download the movies or games from the web but not after those renting them in the public library and copying them quietly at home because they can't identify them? What to do against that? Use undercover cops hunting them down, too? Ridiculous. And apparently the prosecutor's offices see it that way, too.

 

If this were a true statement the USA would still be a colony of Britain. Slavery would still exist here. Women would have little or no rights here. I could list a lot of things. Yes we still have problems but when we give up fighting what we believe to be wrong we are nothing. Tal already said it is the fact that we have standards and most of us try to live up to them that differentiates us from animals. Animals simply react to their environment and instincts.

I am not interested in stats, I don't even like stats. If you proved to me that 75% of the computer using people pirated on a regular basis I would still insist that it is morally wrong.

We have all of us done things that were wrong, sometimes we realized it at the time and sometimes we didn't. Hopefully with maturity comes the realization that certain behavior is wrong and we at least try to do better.

You think we are not 'hearing' you but neither are you 'hearing' us. It is true that you will never convince that just because piracy goes on I should accept it and quite possibly take up piracy myself. If that were the case I could give examples of things I rather do that are either illegal or morally wrong but I don't do them because they are wrong.

Excellent post, Tal.

Ps to Ragusa, it will take me a little while to read and digest your post. IMO your arguement is quite different from Joacqin's.

 

The only way to fight piracy is to find other ways to collect your payment, that is my main point. I do not personally think that piracy is such a big problem for hte industry but rather a convenient scapegoat but that is irrelevent. My point is still the solution is not to fight piracy but to make it obsolete.

 

I know it is a different business but i offer up this from Author Eric Flint about the baen free library
http://www.baen.com/library/
It's kind of long so i want post the whole thing. He makes a very good argument against tighter regulations.

"There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!

Alles in ordnung!


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I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:

1. Online piracy — while it is definitely illegal and immoral — is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market — especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people — is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. He more or less virtually snorted and expressed the opinion that if one of his authors — how about you, Eric? — were willing to put up a book for free online that the resulting publicity would more than offset any losses the author might suffer.

The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. After all, Dave Weber's On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a "loss leader" for Baen's for-pay experiment "Webscriptions" for months now. And — hey, whaddaya know? — over that time it's become Baen's most popular backlist title in paper!

And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.

Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a "gesture of solidarity. "But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren't worried about the small cost — once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug. )"

This is about the first 20% of it so please look at the rest at the link.

 

To put this in a different perspective though... Game companies, quite often, release bug-free demos of their games, but when you buy the whole game, some months later, you find that the game itself is a bug-fest. So thats is kind of imoral as well, in my book at least. Same goes for movies I suppose. Trailers looks amazing, but the movies often suck.

Personally though, I download games on occation, and try them out. If I really like them, I buy them. If not, I don`t play them anymore. I just got sick of buying games that looked great, but sucked bigtime.

 

Just heard about this on the news: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7568642.stm

So it seems that for all our talk of various things the games industry could try, they are going with this. Well, I guess you can't really fault the courts for awarding damages - as we all keep saying, file sharing is illegal. We'll have to wait and see how effective this will be though.

This bit however, I find a bit worrying:

Wait, what? They can just ask for money from people, without any evidence presented? And if you don't pay up, you get taken to court? Chev, and the rest of the SP resident lawyers - what are your thoughts on this? It seems to me, as a legal layman, to be completely open to abuse.

 

I guess it depends on your definition of "abuse". I'm hoping that companies aren't just going to select people at random and send them these kinds of letters - if they're sending them out, presumably they have pretty good evidence, and believe they will win if it goes to court. In that case, they're actually doing these people a favour (assuming they really are guilty) because it would end up costing those people a lot more if they went to court. Of course, if the evidence is weak, and the letters are just a scare tactic, that's a different story (and would IMO fall under the category of "abuse").

 

That's the kind of thing I was thinking, yes.

 

Nakia sums up some of my feelings perfectly. I'd be lying if I said I have never pirated intellectual material (not games, I'm not smart enough for that) but the fact ius that I was wrong to do it. I don't care if the laws in a particular jurisdiction is grey or not, right is right and wrong is wrong. This does not mean that people who pirate are "horrible, evil people" to paraphrase an earlier poster, because all of us are guilty of doing wrong things in our lives and those things do not make us Dahmer clones. But to try and take an action that is at its core wrong and try to call it OK by means of all sort of semantic wriggling is not honest. I call a rose a rose -- and I call stealing stealing. The fact that millions of people do it does not make the action right. It DOES mean that the methods we use should be realistic, as I believe Joaqin tried to establish.

 

I don't have a lot of time today (or tomorrow, for that matter) to do much in-depth replying, but here's some studies to chew on:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2347/125/
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070212-8813.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060320-6418.html

Now, of course, there are plenty of other studies out there that show that the sky is falling due to piracy. However, in my brief googling, I didn't see a single one that wasn't from an organisation with a strong bias towards showing that (and there would often be other results about the same study debunking its methods). These, however, are studies from independent bodies (or - heh - one from the music industry that largely fails to show what they want it to show).

 

I'm not saying that the sky is falling because of piracy any more than I'm saying that Wal-Mart is about to go under because of shoplifting. To me, that is not the point. Taking something that does not belong to you is wrong. End of story.

However, there's a lot of things that I have done that are wrong. Likely in the future I will do more things that are wrong. I strive now to be as compassionate and non-judgemental vis-a-vis people's characters as I would hope that others, privy to my shortcomings, would be to me. I'm not always successful but I'm trying. But when it comes to behaviours, am am more than willing to lay it on the line and say "it is wrong to do that."

 

I could play semantics by pointing out that not everything that doesn't belong to you belongs to someone else, but your point is taken. I have to agree with Amaster and Ragusa, here, that piracy isn't necessarily stealing. If the issue were as clear-cut as regular theft, we never would have felt the need to pass copyright laws. Piracy is pretty damn close to theft, but it isn't quite the same thing. It still damages the producer (and laying all the blame for it at the feet of industry is absurd), and should be illegal, but to call it theft is a little inaccurate.

 

Ragusa, having read your post several times very carefully I certainly have no quarrel with it. It is a well written, intellectual analysis of what piracy is, what laws have been passed and the problem. No argument there.

However in reading some of the other posts I get an impression that varies from there is nothing wrong with piracy because everyone does it to it is such an overwhelming problem that we shouldn't be bothered to combat it.

I disagree with this type of thinking. Piracy is morally wrong because it is the taking without permission of something which does not belong to you and does belong to someone else. Does anyone read the software EULA's? I own a lot of software disks and also software legally downloaded. I do not own the software. I have a license to use the software. I do not have the right to make copies of this software and distribute it to others for free or profit.

Whether industry reports as to the damages they incur are correct or not is a legal question. What a company does to prevent piracy is their decision and I agree or disagree with it by purchasing or not purchasing their game.

Silence is a form of agreement. I can't just shrug my shoulders and say too bad when the subject arises. Looking back I think the wrongs I most regret are the wrongs of omission. The times I failed to speak out against or in favor of something. If I believe that something is wrong I not only have the right to speak out against I have the responsibility to do so. That does not mean that with proper well thought out arguments I can't have my mind changed or at least modified. Threads on this board have certainly influenced my thinking, stimulated it, modified it and reinforced it.

So far I have seen no argument that in even a small way affects my stance on piracy. I do not believe that pirates are evil, demonic beings. They aren't. Neither do I believe that piracy is in the same category as murder, child abuse, rape etc. It isn't but it is still wrong and downloading software in order to sell it and make a profit should be a criminal offense and those doing it should be prosecuted and software companies should receive compensation.

Downloading software illegally is morally wrong but the degree varies according to each situation. That is a legal problem and has IMO nothing to do with morality.

 

He is, but the jobs he finds are either only part time or temporary positions. I know how tough his situation is, that's why I don't moralize as quickly. If the guy had resources to get the game legally, it would make a difference...

Here's a situation: I got Age of Mythology: the Titans for Chirctmas one year. I installed it, enjoyed it and so on. Recently I decided to go another round with it. This is at least computer later, and the original jewel case has apparently met with an unfortunate accident in that time. What option do I legally and morally have?

So it is more like counterfeiting?

In the grand scheme, they are greater evils, and by the time we've fought the good fight against these, and the issue of piracy comes up, where's the energy? Also, as many here, myself included, have brought up, our hands aren't clean and pure.

That may be true, but it's not right. There is a difference...

But when 10,000 packs of gum go missing over a month, it adds up...

I look back at all the EA stuff I pirated in the 1980's, and look at how much I've bought since reaching adulthood, that doesn't come close to balancing.

Well, we'll see how much of an excuse DRM and Price really are if they try it. If they came out with Age of Empires IV and Civ V at the same time, I would probably choose Civ V based on reputation and no DRM, but I'd pick up AoE IV when the price came down...

 

I still have the disk, but the activation code on the case is what I've lost...

 

Yeah, I don't think it can be considered morally wrong if you downloaded a keygen or otherwise acquired a new code in this situation. Well, other than stealing somebody else's. Since you've already bought it, you're not going against the reasons keygens and such are prohibited in the first place. That is, to prevent people from illegally obtaining the game.