It's difficult to say regarding the lost sales. In relation with every pirated book, there are several groups of people:
A) Got the pirated version, but wouldn't buy it if they couldn't get it free
B) Got the pirated version, and therefore didn't pay for it
C) Learned about the book because it was pirated, and then bought it.
I don't have the statistics, but my guess is that most of the people are in the group A). Now the question is, which group is bigger, B or C. I don't know myself, and it probably depends on the book itself. But as I have seen, most anti-piracy proponents include the group A) into the lost sales category, while it clearly doesn't belong there.
Personally, I used to work in the music business for Nettwerk Records (hence the Nettdata username), Sarah McLachlan's label. We were one of the few labels that believed that the freely available online versions of songs actually stimulated sales, especially for back catalogues.
When Sarah's Surfacing album released, we actually ripped high quality MP3 versions of the songs and hosted them for free download. We also created a streaming "radio" site that allowed you to make and play your own playlists from any and all of the songs Nettwerk had the rights to.
We had real live numbers that showed sales were up a LOT after we made things available online.
I think more than anything the content producers are being forced to rethink their models, especially when it comes to the record industry.
If they made their back catalogues available in an individual song format for a reasonable price (whatever that would be), I think they'd do well.
And for what it's worth, I actually bought a non-DRM'd eBook this morning, one that I can read on my laptop in PDF, or on my iPhone and iPad in eBook format. I'm sure it was available in some pirated format, but I'm one of those guys that would rather support the things I want to see more of.
Funny thing about anime: fan subs/dubs are why most anime publishers line up a translation during production now. They realized they were missing a big market. It's why the original Fullmetal Alchemist ('03-'04) was a fansub for a long time before an official NA release, while the recent remake came out in English[1] on Hulu days after airing in Japan.
A whole new import market sprung up because of what was technically piracy.
[1]With subtitles, but dubbed episodes started popping up on the Hulu page near the end of the show's run.
FWIW, I saw both the original fan sub and the newer official release (japanese with subs) and I definitely preferred the fan subs. They explain some nitty gritties and colloquialisms rather nicely, things that are certainly ignored by official releases.
Just about the only lick of sense in this discussion.
I'm surprised that so many here, a community where lots of people are engaged in entrepreneurial ventures and where many donate to the unpaid author of widely-pirated shareware [1], would appear to be so laissez-faire on this issue. Whether you call it theft or breach of contract, piracy is wrong and not good.
I suspect you would have a better sense of perspective if people could create and use "paid" accounts on your shiny web services without paying.
Anecdotes of (c) described in the parent are few and far between, and don't justify the instances of (b) or the unintended consequences / moral hazard of (a).
(Disclosure: I sell software for a living, and have discovered [and reconciled] piracy of my products by very large organizations in the past. I imagine there are many other instances I'm not aware of.)
If I hear a joke on TV one night, and I repeat it in a meeting at work the next day, I might even attribute it, but technically, I've committed (gasp) some type of infringement. Now we might "hrrumptffff" and try and call that "fair use" but what this really is, is a casual use.
Now it's debatable whether or not we could actually function as a society if every little use was tracked, accounted for, and billed; technologically it's probably possible. But realistically, I don't want to live in a society where casual use of intellectual property (a concept that is harder to define than you might imagine) is minutely tracked and logged.
We have a name for that kind of society, it's called a Police State.
The bad news for Old Media (and commercial software developers) is that digital technology has made "casual use" almost frictionless. I can give my brother a copy of Jon Stewart's latest rant, half a dozen different ways, as easily, or easier, than I can repeat the high points over the phone. It's the _ease_ that defines casual.
I write software for a living too. And I've worked in broadcast TV. My TV job, which paid pretty well, thank you, was screwed by the imploding broadcast industry. Boo hoo. The price of progress. If I have to suck it up and re-invent myself, then Old Media can too.
The recording industry did it to live performers, the TV industry did it to Radio. The VCR ... well you get the idea. The only way to stop it is a nuclear war or a police state.
I'm not trying to minimize this. This is a weather change in the way media works. It is gonna be _hard_. But worrying about old models, and trying to prop up old players, who add little value in the new world, is only going to make it harder.
I'm surprised that so many here, a community where lots of people are engaged in entrepreneurial ventures and where many donate to the unpaid author of widely-pirated shareware [1], would appear to be so laissez-faire on this issue. Whether you call it theft or breach of contract, piracy is wrong and not good.
Did anyone here really say that copyright infringement was good? Saying that it's not "theft" doesn't automatically throw one into the pro-piracy camp. Copyright infringement can certainly be wrong and extremely detrimental to our culture - that's why we have copyright laws in the first place.
Well, no. There's no morality to copyright infringement laws, and if we were to apply a moral component, it would clearly come down on the side of freedom of information. Copyright laws are at best amoral, and at worst immoral.
"Why we have copyright laws in the first place" is because corporations lobbied for them - self-interest. There's no moral component.
First, I do not think morality would come down entirely on the side of freedom of information (I do think our current system is skewed and it should shift closer to freedom of information, but that is a topic filled with subtlties.) Copyright is a means to ensure authors continue to write.
While it is true publishers did lobby for the original Statute of Anne, it was providing incentives for authors tht motivated Parliment and in the American Constitution Congress' ability to grant copyright for a limited time was expressly to encourage authorship.
Morally, I think there ought to be a balancing between the public and the authors. Our current copyright has some balancing in it with fair use exceptions, though I would think that the balance needs some readjusting.
For a good history of copyright see http://www.thepublicdomain.org/ by James Boyle. The entire book is available as free PDF.
That view would seem to have some pretty far-reaching consequences, insofar as many of us produce information of one sort or another and nothing else. Sounds like the only way we should expect to get paid is through generous benefactors and donations.
> many of us produce information of one sort or another
> Sounds like the only way we should expect to get paid is
> through generous benefactors and donations.
Or stop producing information and start producing something which people voluntarily pay for. What youre doing now is basically legislating prohibition of copying so you can make a living by selling copies. Trying to make a living by producing and selling copies in an age where everybody and their dog can produce copies themselves effortlessly is a ridiculously bad business decision. It is so outworldlishly ridiculous that it is no suprise, that most of those who for some reason chose that path can not come up with a solution to their little problem than crying for protectionism to ban DIY.
It is no different than the story of the french button wars:
When was the last time you were forced to pay for something you didn't want?
I know that isn't what you meant, but if the producer of a good is not capable of determining the terms under which that good is sold/licensed, then you're still in effect talking about donations.
This has nothing to do with buttons: there's no aristocracy attempting to limit your access to that ebook or that piece of software. The creator set a price, and you're saying it should be perfectly fine for anyone to read that book or use that software for free, whether the creator agrees to that or not. "DIY" isn't pulling torrents, it would be producing the content or software you want to consume or use yourself.
> then you're still in effect talking about donations.
No. Donations would imply that you do not have a business model at all. Just set up a business in a way that you do not care about people copying information bits.
> but if the producer of a good is not capable of
> determining the terms under which that good is sold
He is determining the price of his copies and selling copies. But he knows that if everybody else is _also_ allowed to produce copies, nobody will buy his copies. So instead of solving _his_ problem of a obsolete business model (manufacturing and selling copies), he solves it by downgrading everybody else's rights to freely exchange information with eachother.
> This has nothing to do with buttons
It has absolutely _everything_ to do with buttons. Its the same "prohibit DIY-X so we can keep selling X"-principle.
> there's no aristocracy attempting to limit your access
They are limiting what kind of information I and my neighbour may exchange for the sole purpose of making their copy-selling business thrive. The button guild criminalized ordinary people for making DIY cloth buttons in order to make them buy their originals.
> it should be perfectly fine for anyone to read that book
> whether the creator agrees to that or not.
This is not what I am saying, but a consequence. What I am saying is that neither the author nor anybody else should have absolutely any say whatsoever about who is "allowed" to copy what bit of information. Allowing copies only when somebody "agrees" (usually for money) is protectionism and for-profit censorship, pure and simple, and I am against it.
> "DIY" isn't pulling torrents, it would be producing the
> content or software you want to consume or use yourself.
No, the author created the work once, and is afterwards selling copies. This worked 50 years ago, when ordinary people couldnt produce copies, so his copies had value. Today they dont any more, since everybody can produce them effortlessly themselves. My grandmother can copy Avatar as easily as 20th Century Fox can. 50 years ago she couldnt. So today the business of manufacturing and selling copies is gone like the button business. The only way to sustain it is to scare people into not DIY-copying in order to make authors copies "valuable" again, so the author can continue making a living by "allowing" copies like he did in the 50s by selling real-value copies.
It sounds like we're down to services and live performances. I think you just eliminated most of the classes of content that you likely consume in a recorded form. And in the software world, some would say hosted services should be freely available as well (viz. AGPL), thereby driving absolutely everyone to commodity pricing.
> Allowing copies only when somebody "agrees" (usually for money) is protectionism and for-profit censorship, pure and simple, and I am against it.
Crazy town. I only now noticed your "*-gnu" handle, but things make more sense now.
Just out of curiosity, what do you have in mind for a suitable business model?
No, I said people here "appear to be laissez-faire on this issue". I'd say that's accurate, given that the primary interest appears to be the semantics of "theft" vs. "copyright infringement" while the practical effect in many cases is the same.
My experience with the issue includes an incident where an organization with revenues in the multiple billions of dollars used the software I built in a widespread way for free for years without a license or payment. They were provided with technical support when they had problems by indicating that they were evaluating the software (when they had actually routed around the license-verification routines in the distributable). It was only when a new manager there learned what was going on and contacted me did I learn the real story; we've since come to a fair arrangement. I probably could have made a lot more by suing them, but I don't need the distraction or the heartache.
As far as I can tell, the countermeasures I could use to prevent the above would make life less pleasant for my paying customers. In the meantime, piracy continues to be viewed as a victimless action, even by those making full use of the copyrighted works in question and with plenty of resources to pay the price set by the creators.
> My experience with the issue includes an incident where an organization with revenues in the multiple billions of dollars used the software I built
I'm pretty sure noone here thinks that that specific case is ok.
Technically there's no difference between that company pirating your software and someone illegaly downloading a movie off of the internet, the crime is the same, both actions are copyright infringement.
But the main arguments of the pirate movement is that there is a difference between the actions and that the law should reflect that. Arguing that private non-commercial infringement should be allowed is different from arguing that commercial for-profit infringement should be allowed. There's a lot of people in this thread arguing the former, but noone arguing the latter.
Doesn't that thinking discourage the creation of consumer software? Just because someone isn't making money off of my software doesn't make it ok for them to have it for free.
That's absurd. The law is the law, and people that produce content, software, whatever for non-commercial/personal/consumer consumption have the same standing as I do as a commercial vendor, and should have the same standing.
Infringement is infringement. Arguing otherwise smacks of opportunism to me; people just like getting shit for free.
> people that produce content, software, whatever for non-commercial/personal/consumer consumption have the same standing as I do as a commercial vendor, and should have the same standing.
I agree, I don't think there should be differentiation based on how or why something copyrighted was produced.
However, I don't agree that all infringement is equal, there's a huge difference between some kid downloading a movie off of the internet, and a corporation using a piece of software without a license. I think it's absurd to use the resources of our justice system and law enforcement to pursue the former, but I think it's a great use to pursue the latter.
We're largely in agreement, then. Repercussions should vary with the magnitude of the infringement. Various industry groups managing to get individuals fined for out-sized sums, jail time for parents of downloaders, etc., are out of bounds. I see no problem with things being ratcheted up for big seeders and such though.
I think the law is going to be behind the times for a long time on this topic; in part because of the tech, and in part because we are, broadly speaking, divided on what a better direction would be. In any case, I'd hate to see a day come when it's generally agreed that authors of content and software fundamentally don't have the right – if they so choose – to demand payment in exchange for their creations being used, consumed, and distributed.
You do have a point that web services cannot be pirated, and if they could be, the HN community would have a different view on things.
I'm not sure that's the case.
Let's start with the base assumption that piracy is something that exists, and will forever exist. Just work your way around it, and use it for your advantage.
For example, build your product so that the more users it has, even if they are illegal users, the overall experience improves.
Don't fight battles you can't win. Use the circumstances to your advantage.
This also puts developers in a position where they're told to expect high piracy rates if they have the gall to write desktop applications and charge for them. This is more apparent the more you target the, ahem, 'power' user crowd, who is steeped in piracy.
Yes, piracy will always exist, and there are lots of things that can be done to de-incentivize it. I do what I can. That's aside from the question of whether it should be considered normative, legal behaviour.
Whether you call it theft or breach of contract, piracy is wrong and not good.
Wrong or right, good or bad, there are smart ways to get what you want and not so smart ways that don't work.
Taking non-corporate pirates head-on often doesn't work, and is often counter-productive. Taking pirates on indirectly is often a better option. (Use direct conflict as a last resort. It tends to be expensive.)
From the evidence we have, group C is much larger than B for most media.
Superstars might lose out somewhat; their group B might be larger than group C. But for almost all creators of media, group C is larger, often extremely much larger, than group B, and therefore copyright infringement is a net benefit to them.
Even for superstars, it's not clear that B is larger than C. You want the latest hit song from Lady Gaga? Here you go:
Free to air for the world to see and download, no payment required, put up there by the creator. Clearly Gaga believes that the benefits of publicity outweigh any "losses" from people who decided not to buy the album. I'm sure she is correct.
Believe what you like, but at some point the product becomes a "commodity" - its well-known and further piracy doesn't contribute to publicity. Then it'd be nice to switch models (which is of course impossible).
This might very well be true in the current environment where there are only some isolated cases where people give stuff away for free.
But things might very well be different if it becomes the default mode for everyone. If you give something away for free now, while your 10 competitors are not doing it, you will draw a lot of people simply because consumption is easier by comparison. If your 10 competitors also started giving away everything for free that advantage would be gone.
Of course, there might still be a net benefit, but the evidence we have should be taken with a grain of salt.
People also ignore a subset of A. Got the pirated version, but never consumed or used it.
I can't tell you how many versions of AutoCAD I downloaded as a teenager, either because I thought I might learn how to use it or just because I could. I don't think I ever installed a single copy. Likewise, I once had several hard drives filled with pirated TV Shows of things I will never watch, just because it was available.
I think it's important to remember that groups B and C aren't static.
In my, completely unsubstantiated, opinion group B would be much larger for blockbuster media.
Think a new video game from Valve or Id Software or movies like Avatar or Titanic. These types of media don't really need piracy to market due to the fact that many/most people already know they exist. I would also guess that they gain much less from word of mouth, but I'll fully grant that's just an opinion:)
On the other hand you'd have "indy" games and movies, and other niches like anime, where piracy may actually help spread the word about this media and help it gain sales through increasing the size of group C.
In some sense the difference between A & B don't matter. Probably the real question is if the consumer is using the product. Lets imagine I'm Garmin and someone comes and copies my GPS code, puts it on a device and then copies all of my map data. And then goes on to use that for their fleet car service. Now its possible that the consumer never would have bought the actual Garmin product, but there's really no good way of knowing. But if they're using it regularly I almost feel like it doesn't matter. It seems like (IANAL) that quasi-contracts should come into play here.
The fundamental problem I have with (C) being larger than (B) is that if it were true why don't more major companies know about? For example, if (C) were true, wouldn't MS remove all forms of copy protection from its product? No license keys period. You just pay money and get a link, but a link that anyone can use. And they would, accordingly make more money than what they're doing now.
I think what it probably looks like is (A) >> (B) >> (C)
I suspect there's a difference when the end user is not the entity doing the piracy (Mike copies Garmin's code and puts it in many cars for his customers to use). Involving a 3rd party, and probably involving commerce, feels different to me than personal use.
I was thinking since its Mike's company it would be similar in effect, just amplified (and somewhat like torrents). But to make it simpler, what if it's just Mike's personal car? It just seems like if you're getting "reasonable" use from a commercial product, you probably should pay. I get that you may want to evaluate it or maybe used it once or twice, but when you use it regularly as the product intended, that starts to be a little shady.
Yep, I'm in agreement with you there. Personal use like that seems to be right in the middle when I query my ethics.
For me, personally, it almost feels like the effort required factors into whether piracy is OK. That isn't really rational, but when you casually download a torrent, that doesn't seem as bad as building your own hardware to pirate a signal. Maybe it speaks to intent? (NB: this paragraph isn't intended as anything other than me exploring my own rationalizations for piracy. Do not use except as instructed by a physician, and all that).
It's not just that some people include A into lost sales though, although that is the major problem. Some people are strongly against group A because they feel that they should not get whatever they pirated for free. You'll see this a lot in conjunction with the word "entitled". I can understand their point, too.
Personally, I think the world is a better and richer place for more shared culture (see also group C, who likely exists largely because of A), and if that means people who weren't going to pay anyway freeload through piracy, so be it. If the would not convert to a sale, then they should essentially be ignored. The piracy that should be focused on is B, because that's the only one that actually has a real monetary effect.
Pirates converted 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. This seems to indicate a rough ratio of 1000 As to 1 B. Are a thousand sales worth a million users?
The thing almost everyone seems to be ignoring is Markus isn't saying "I think piracy is great and you should all do it" he's saying it exists and you just have to deal with it.
It seems almost everyone is taking what he has said as justification of piracy, "oh well he's rich now and he doesn't mind piracy so it must be okay for me to pirate!". If we ask him whether or not he thinks people should pirate he'll not say "yes, do it" he'll say "Well I'd rather you bought it, but if you're not going to then you may as well play it for free as I'd rather you play my game than go without, and I'm not going to spend millions trying to stop you... but I'd prefer if you paid for it".
Markus isn't saying "I think piracy is great and you should all do it" he's saying it exists and you just have to deal with it.
This is kind of where I always stood (I don't pirate personally, though).
If you're selling some intellectual property, you can sell a bazillion copies with almost no production costs. You produce once and then copy for (almost) free.
Now that everyone has the ability to copy, that massive advantage is somewhat tempered. It isn't quite the wild west, which is good. If piracy was easy and convenient it would eviscerate sales. Most people can't figure out or don't bother with piracy and blatant piracy is legally squashed (in the developed world, at least).
There's not much you can do but accept it as a cost of doing business and soldier on.
Quite right. The English definition of theft: "A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it". To thieve something, there must surely be some thing to thieve.
At some point can this develop beyond a semantic discussion of the term "theft"?
I agree it's sloppy to think that theft and intellectual property violation are interchangeable but the point has been made on here about a million times so it doesn't really add much to the debate.
I share the frustation, but I'll explain why I think it's important not to let an issue like that slide.
A lot of the time the copyright debate is fought between people these world views.
1) Copyright opponents define propert as being like a car - something which one person has by denying it to another person.
2) Copyright advocates think of property as a "bundle of rights" enforced by the state. i.e. property is whatever a judge says it to be.
People who insist on calling it theft are steering the debate towards the second definition - that theft is whatever a judge or politician says it is. It's crucial to knock back attempts to do that. That worldview believes the whim of the state is the root of philosophy, and fundamentally correct in its judgement of right and wrong.
Property predates the state. It exists even in states that try to outlaw it. It's a strong algorithm that is useful for the efficient allocation of resources. Intellectual propert is neither a strong algorithm, nor a mechanism that leads to an efficient allocation of resources. It is not property. Intellectual property violations are not theft.
No-one is saying that you're not right, we're just saying that this has been said so many times that it doesn't need saying again.
Anyone who insists that copyright infringement and theft are the same thing isn't someone who has anything useful to add in this debate. Given that why not focus the debate on useful, genuinely contentious areas and solutions, not rehashing an argument that has been had and won over and over again?
(And yes, I know there are people who don't buy into this but by and large they're not reading Hacker News so you're doing nothing to progress the argument on that front repeating it here).
Human interaction is not code. Human discussion is not code. People are not code. Repetition is how people learn and understand things. Seeing a point once makes a person think "oh good point". Seeing many times forces them to think of it in different contexts and different ways. This allows them to understand it better.
Congratulations to you for being around long enough, and seeing this point enough times, that you find it commonplace. I guarantee however that there are plenty of people here who still need to see it. There are lots of people on this site who are very intelligent in many ways who make comments like "you need to protect your patent or you lose it" or "copyright doesn't count unless registered". As long as they exist, this point can be made without it just being echo chamber fodder.
And what determines what is important vs. what is not? Certainly something like spam is pure noise, but what justifies the repetition? I'm trying very hard not to see it as consensual groupthink, but coming up short. I see this in every community: a set of near-sacrosanct 'truths' emerges that inevitably must be defended, and part of that process involves repeating them, often under the guise of 'educating' others.
IMO, the argument is simply being reframed to avoid dealing with the larger and more difficult problem. I'm not interested in avoiding the real issue here -- compensation for creators in the age of easily-copied goods.
If we fix that, the semantics argument won't be an issue. After all, if we have a just system that fairly compensates individuals for creating while providing good incentives for consumers not to infringe, we don't need to nitpick about theft v. infringe.This, to me, serves as a good indication of what is actually important in this issue.
Perhaps the argument is being reframed back and forth, not to avoid an issue, but as proxy to this issue: creators are over-valuing their work and/or copiers undervaluing. The semantics chosen are done so because they reflect the point of view of the speaker. Put a different way: there are 2 ideas of fair out there, each set of semantics represents one idea of fair accurately.
Simple repetition can be a powerful way to get people to change their minds but I suspect in this sort of environment it doesn't work so well as those who disagree simply don't read it once they establish the basic gist and just skip the post. As a result it's not really being repeated to them in any way that matters.
My experience tends to be that if I've not won someone over with one particular argument then my best tack is to try something else they might be more responsive to rather than just keep repeating myself.
But maybe the real issue is that I hope that HN might be a source of intelligent discussion on the subject with an attempt to find interesting and / or practical solutions to the problems raised rather than a more straight forward continual reassertion of views that could frankly be carried out by a series of Python scripts.
I think it needs to be said as often as people continue prevaricating by using the word 'theft'.
Semantic argument can become tedious and repetitive, but it's necessary for any more substantive argument to proceed. If there's no mutual agreement on what the terminology represents, then the participants of the discussion are effectively speaking separate languages, and they will be unable to 'access' each other's reasoning.
Sometimes, the semantic dispute is caused by an intentional attempt to confound terminology in order to make two things seem more similar than they otherwise are. Calling this out is appropriate and necessary every time it happens.
Possibly because the system as it exists now might be perceived as near-optimal for the average user: some people fund creative works that others enjoy for free. Thus, the discussion is consistently trainwrecked into one of semantics (sometimes, with a bit of a victim mentality thrown in) because some people would like the system to continue as is. Real solutions to this problem are very hard, and I can't think of one in which someone doesn't get screwed.
Then again, it is quite refreshing to see so many people defend the purity of the English language.
Also, those who want people to want everyone to adopt (2) are those who have the eyes and ears of both a large amount of the populace--how many videos have you rented or bought that have an unskippable intro telling you in big flashing grungy type that "you wouldn't steal a car...so you shouldn't make illegal downloads"--and of the politicians who make laws and sign treaties.
The US courts, by and large, have been fairly sensible on this so far, thank God.
So I'll say it again: Digital copying is not theft.
If it's a debate about legal issues, it's crucial to not be ambiguous about definitions. We've seen what damage and abuses can occur when people get sloppy with legal terminology - the redefinition of "enemy combatants" in 2008, for example. "Theft" is a criminal offense. Copyright infringement isn't necessarily (though there are conditions that make it so in the US).
Some things warrant rehashing and reaffirming. Note that a new, but substantially similar, discussion about female engineers or gender discrimination pops up here every week or two. That discussion plays out the same way every time not because it adds anything new but because it's important (to someone, clearly).
Copyright infringement isn't theft but it is criminal.
In which jurisdiction?
Copyright infringement is against the law but it's not a "crime" (and therefore not criminal). This is true of most civil offenses. Some conditions apply in order to turn copyright infringement into a misdemeanor or a felony in a federal sense - wilfulness and varying levels of financial gain.
If you are merely conflating the words "illegal" and "criminal", they do not mean the same thing. (At least, I've only studied law within the context of England and Wales but believe the US system takes a similar approach on these fundamental issues given its ancestry.)
I'm aware that criminal and illegal aren't the same thing but in both the US and the UK copyright infringement can be a criminal matter (these things aren't mutually exclusive - things aren't either or, many are both).
Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/contents) copyright law in UK allows for criminal prosecution where there is deliberate intent or passing-off in a commercial context. Section 107 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/107) outlines both the detail of the criminal liability (and it is expressly criminal liability) and the punishments that can result, including prison and fines.
The reason it's more commonly treated as a civil matter is that for the injured party to recover damages they'd need to pursue a civil case as well as the criminal case so they don't normally bother.
Someone else has pasted a link supporting that this is the same in the USA and, as it was a condition of the WTOs Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that laws be passed making copyright infringement a criminal offence, this is almost certainly true for any signatory (153 member states including the UK, USA, India, most (if not all) of Western Europe and anyone who is anyone except, for some reason, Russia.
Copyright infringement is not theft and it is not criminal in Germany. It is illegal for sure, but not criminal. It is probably criminal to sell pirated stuff in a large scale, though. (Again, sell, not distribute)
If people are still referring to unauthorized copying as theft the point hasn't been made enough, regardless of how many times you've been forced to read it.
In my estimation "unauthorized copying is not the same as stealing" needs to be said once for every time unauthorized copying is referred to as stealing, plus one or two additional times for good measure.
So if someone hires me to do some work for them, and I do the work, but they don't pay me, what is that? There is no 'thing' in that case.
Piracy is similar. A band, video game maker, software producer, creates something for an audience with the expectation of getting paid for their work. When the work is pirated, that audience member has just done the equivalent of hiring someone and not paying them.
Someone hiring you and not paying you is a breach of contract but that's not the same as piracy. If I download the latest Hollywood blockbuster for free, I've not breached a contract because I didn't enter into one (though I may have breached a contract with my ISP). The offense committed is copyright infringement and in many jurisdictions this is a civil offense rather than a criminal one (or, as in the US, there are conditions to turn it into a criminal one that very few downloaders would satisfy).
Not if the contract is itself illegal and/or immoral. A contract is not necessarily enforceable by virtue of it being a contract. But this is a straw man; the point is that the terms "piracy" and "theft" have been misappropriated to protect intellectual property, bringing along a lot of basic assumptions that can be justifiably challenged. Even the term "intellectual property" is vulnerable for the same reasons. The whole debate takes place in a virtual world where not everyone agrees to the same conditions. But the same could be said about the ownership of physical things, which probably originally meant whatever you possessed at the moment (a piece of food, a scrap of clothing, a hand weapon) and was eventually extended to mean whatever you could protect over longer periods of time (livestock, shelter, huge tracts of land). The concept of ownership is continuously evolving.
What? So if I hire you and don't pay you, you can go back in time, thus not losing the hours of effort you will never get back? I strongly doubt this, but assuming it is true: why haven't you just invested in the stock market and made trillions of dollars yet?
With your creative people, they never had a contract in place. I was never going to buy their music, game, book or whatever. I don't owe them anything. If they want to speculate on me giving them some money for the work they do, they can, but that doesn't guarantee crap. Further, if I copy say, a song: I have the song, they have the song, i paid the same as i would have paid anyway ($0). Somehow you are saying that the band lost money tho? If the pope declares the music satanic, and threatens listeners with excommunication, do you sue the Catholic Church for lost sales?
If I show up at your house and mow your lawn in speculation that you will pay me for that service, but you choose not to do that, do I get to sue you for theft now? Because it sure sounds like that is what you are saying.
It's a free rider issue. Your ability to acquire software for free raises the price of that software for those that do pay. It's the same reason why taxes are not voluntary, because eventually the system would devolve into nobody paying, with the last few payers being considered "suckers".
As the ability to acquire the software for free increases for average consumers, the more expensive the software will become, with the singularity being that there's one copy, the original, for sale for thousands or millions of dollars. The cost of developing software must always be amortized across all future sales. It's disingenuous to imply that once the software is made, there are no further costs to the developer. The developer's costs are opportunity costs where he/she could be doing something else instead of writing the software. Remove their ability to recoup their initial investment in the software, and you simply won't have anyone writing commercial software anymore. Developers must have some assurance that their ability to capture income from the software is still intact, or they won't bother. Given that many open source projects are actually funded by commercial hardware/software companies, this would also be detrimental to all software development.
The thing that is being stolen is the right of exploitation of your creative work (it's one of the UN Human Rights, that). When I make something, I have the right to control how it is exploited commercially -- even if I simply don't want it to be commercially exploited!
So when software I make is copied without my consent, I lose that right. If the infringement is large enough, I utterly lose it. (See also Trumpet Winsock).
Property doesn't need to be physical objects. You can steal an idea just as much as you can steal lunch money. And you can steal my rights.
I can buy this if somehow someone illegally obtained your copyright.
Other than that, you don't lose your right to exploit your work. Someone else is exploiting your work in addition to you. They are infringing on your copyright, not stealing it.
Depends on the type and scale of infringement and gets slightly pedantic: if I can no longer workably exercise my right -- if the infringement is too widespread, say -- do I still have it?
You're conflating the right of control of exploitation with copyright, which is a legal creation to protect that right.
The two are close, but not synonymous. Take photographs: the exclusive first-use of a photograph is a big thing. If you publish my picture without my permission, my right of control is gone.
I can use copyright laws and the courts to try and get economic redress for that, but nonetheless I no longer have the ability to decide where and when that picture is first published; the ability was stolen from me.
Yes, I assumed you were speaking of copyright. Copyright gives you a monopoly on your work. Is this what you mean by the "right of control of exploitation?" Is there another law that gives that right or are you speaking from a moral standpoint?
Copyright doesn't prevent copying, it just gives you a way of redress.
UN Declaration of Human Rights (ratification varies by country; your mileage may vary) enshrines a right to control of the exploitation of your works, yes.
The exclusive right to control the exploitation of your creations is something that can be stolen though, technically speaking. Because if someone else appropriates control over what can be done with your work, the exclusive control over it is taken away from you. By the definition earlier, that's theft.
The definition given earlier was: "A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it"
That definition is age old and unprepared for the future. It does not determine what the word theft was intended to mean. In other languages, the definition of 'theft' is not that strictly restricted to physical property.
I defended copyright charges in a civil suit in the late nineties. I was already skeptical about it, and the combination of my skepticism and the case caused me to start to argue against it openly. It has been and is thrilling to see the debate continue to turn against the idea.
Ten years ago, the idea of questioning the justification of copyright was alien even to geeks and lawyers. People who copied lots themselves considered it to be cheeky, unjustified. The idea of questioning it hadn't thought about it, and wouldn't even raise the energy to consider that it might be worth questioning. The reaction to skepticism would always be that laugh that's reserved for contrarians, followed by a brief "doesn't compute" look and then a search for distraction.
Funny thing, Germany does not have copyright. Instead, it has creator-right, which is very similar and usually compatible with copyright, but not exactly the same.
The difference is that copyright gives rights to the copyright holder, which may or may not be the author. With creator-right ('Urheberrecht'), these rights are always bound to the author and can not be sold.
I think this is interesting, because I would agree more with Urheberrecht than with copyright.
I think in the 80s and 90s the idea of questioning wasn't thought of much because it (copyright) wasn't thought of much. No one thought to much about copying cassette tapes or floppy disks (at least where I grew up).
Whenever a discussion on this subject devolves into bickering over the meaning of words, I feel an urge to smack the participants.
It's completely irrelevant what you call it unless you are one of those curious people who considers private property to be almost an ontological category. Protection of private property exists to the extent it's judged useful to society. Protection of so-called intellectual property exists to the same extent. Counterfactual what-if reasoning is as valid or as suspect in this debate as in any other.
> Protection of private property exists to the extent it's judged useful to society.
I agree with that view, but I suspect this issue comes up a lot because many people don't agree with it. A common view is that private property is a natural right of some sort, merely recognized by society, rather than a convention created by society.
If you took that view, then whether intellectual property is legit turns largely on whether it is or isn't part of this natural-law category of "property" (which is what you find debate about in libertarian writings on IP, for example).
My argument doesn't hinge on the negation of natural rights theory. It's based on a simple observation of the way large-scale societies have always worked in practice: they have never treated protection of private property even in its purest forms as an absolute.
My point is not that the question at stake is straightforward, but that once we stop clinging to flawed analogies, the matter reveals itself as a policy issue like any other, an issue that is complex but ultimately resolvable by the usual means of analysis.
The statements:
an issue that is complex but ultimately resolvable by the usual means of analysis.
and
All the rest is rhetoric.
seem contradictory. What is the usual means of analysis if not rhetoric?
I was employing the colloquial sense of 'rhetoric' in that final sentence. Had I instead used 'sophistry', someone would no doubt have rebutted my choice of words by justly remarking that the Sophists and that Protagoras guy were jolly good fellows. :)
Explain how any right is a natural right. This is a spectrum, some rights require more effort to protect than others. Private property rights require a great deal of effort to protect, as do intellectual property rights.
It's not really the effort to protect, but whether you see it as a choice society can legitimately make, or something inherent pre-existing society. Is private property something that a society should recognize or not recognize based on pragmatic reasons, like how well society functions as a result? Or is private property some sort of inherent/moral right (as e.g. John Locke and most libertarians argue)? A similar debate comes up with copyright: is it a privilege that we as a society choose to recognize as a means of encouraging the production of creative works? Or is it some sort of inherent/moral right of a creator to control the reuse of their works?
In a given context, rights can be more or less fundamental. Imagine a hypothetical post-scarcity society. Protection of private property in our sense ceases to have meaning there and cannot be considered a right. How can anyone of sound mind mistake private property as a natural right in light of such thought experiments? It's a contingent and therefore non-absolute right.
You can consider protection of private property the most important right in societies like ours, so important it occupies a lofty stratum of its own, and yet not commit the fallacy of claiming that private property is a natural right. However, it's understandable why people with priorities like that would make such a mistake.
It seems to me that, somewhat like adultery, most people treat infringement against their property as threat to some stone age survival instinct. We can hear it when a small child shouts "MINE!" and see it in the cumbersome hoards of garbage some homeless people drag around. I doubt a post-scarcity society will be able to coolly regard all stuff as ephemeral and fungible; we'll still defend our stuff vigorously only there will be more of it.
This is why "infringement is theft" arguments are so manipulative and dishonest. They try to tap into this indignation rather than win the debate on the merits.
What makes some rights more inherent than others? Some people seem to think that a right can be inherent in an absolute almost mathematical sense. This is a lack of imagination. Many rights that seem inherent now were not in the past and are not going to be in the future.
Rights should be judged by their usefulness, not by how fundamental some person thinks they are, because no right is truly fundamental.
You're right in that nature gives us no rights. Maybe it would be better to say God-given rights. Thus the command "Thou shalt not steal" becomes the basis of property rights. These rights can be understood as universal as I know of no culture in which it is considered a virtue to steal.
Since this isn't really the place for extensive political theory, that doesn't seem very relevant to the point, so I deliberately didn't go into a digression.
My point is that there are two views of property: it's a right that is somehow inherent/moral/pre-existing; or it's a convention that exists for its benefits to society. How we can know whether it has benefits, and who decides whether the convention should exist, is a whole different discussion.
I don't mind diverging into a bit of political theory here, since it seems important to the topic.
I'd say that if we're going to view 'society' in a meaningful way - that is, not merely as a conceptual abstraction, but as something exists empirically - then we have to acknowledge that society has a definite nature, emergent from human psychology, emotions, physiology, neurology, etc.
And if we accept that society exists, why should we not recognize that the recognition of things like 'rights' and 'property' emerge from the very same antecedents? These concepts are all descriptions of fundamental relationships between people and other people, and between people and their physical environment.
The idea that social conventions exist for the benefit of society is something of a tautology. Obviously, anything that anyone creates or does is something they're doing because they've judged that it will be of benefit to them. The ideas of 'law' and 'government' follow the same rule - these are also just conventions that people established, in the expectation that they will somehow benefit.
But the real question, the empirical question, is this: what are the actual motivations that have led people to establish these conventions? I suspect that the idea of law emerged after the idea of property, as people sought to maintain the relationships they established with physical objects in the context of their relationships with other human beings, and sought a structured and formal way to do so without violence (or perhaps merely dissension and group harmony, given that cooperation is as essential to our nature as competition).
Fast-forwarding to today, with all of that in mind, I think it's reasonable to make a distinction between the conventions that arose from a 'natural' social context and those conventions which are the product of positive law, the latter being a kind of 'secondary' experimental thing, intentionally designed by the mechanisms of the earlier first-order convention.
In my mind, 'theft' is a violation of the first kind of convention, while 'copyright infringement' is a violation of the latter.
It is important in a debate to not allow people to vilify any participants in "piracy" by declaring them to be criminals from the get go. "Theft" does this. "Copyright infringement" does not. Definitions are important because without sharing a vocabulary, we share nothing with which to debate logically.
Well and truly said. But my frustration is that the public debate has not moved far beyond the stage of settling on a common vocabulary. No party will cede to the other's framing of the issues because that would admit defeat. Thus we have a stalemate. Skipping this stage and cutting to the chase may not be the best strategy for "winning", but it stands a chance of actually generating some insight.
Of course what you call it is relevant! To claim otherwise is to pretend that language has no influence on thought, which simply isn't true and I believe you know it. Human brains will have different thoughts in a discussion of "stealing" than in a discussion of "unauthorized copying", and that will influence how we ultimately decide to deal with this issue.
The problem arises not over some strawman of usefulness to society. The problem people have is that equating material property and intellectual property has some pretty serious flaws. It overlooks various attributes an (please excuse the overloading of the term) properties of each that are not shared. These attributes allow for some very different use cases between the two - and using the same words for very different actions is confusing. So while the arguments coming down to definitions may look like semantic wrangling, it is really an attempt to get people to see the different attributes as actually different.
"Protection of private property exists to the extent it's judged useful to society. Protection of so-called intellectual property exists to the same extent."
Protection of private property is to prevent theft. We both can't have your car. If I copy your software, we both have it.
Protection of intellectual "property" was granted as incentive to create. It was (is?) a time based monopoly on your creation. At some point the protection ended. This was a benefit to society as it allowed ideas to be built upon.
Surely lost sales must exist... Markus is obvioously doing ok, and pirated copies of his game are aiding virality, but still...
Software, movies and music are now perceived as free. Which is one reason why many developers are now moving to closed platforms such as Apple's iOs where they are guaranteed payment for installations.
That said, I can see the logic behind "going with the flow" when it comes to piracy, especially when cumbersome anti-piracy measures usually only harm legit, legal owners. (E.g. its more convenient to crack Digidesigns ProTools audio editing software and be able to run it on my laptop without any fuss, than to have to insert my legal USB dongle every time I boot the software).
I think anti-piracy measures will work if they are baked into a product from day one. And I don't mean contrived, un-user-oriented measures, I mean doing it iOs-style or cloud-style. In iOs the users love the App Store - its an advantage, not a hindrance. And its the same with Cloud-based or hosted software. Its a selling point - its part of the offering.
Me and some friends have a SaS app that we changed from free to a minimal monthly subscription. Logically, we saw a decline in sign-ups and follow-through by new users, but this was worth it cos we now make some money from the service. If the software had, instead, been a download, then my guess it that we never would have been able to profit of the small user-base that we have. The free version would be out there, and even though it took off we would never have seen any profits.
And then we might not be motivated to cary on creating cool stuff.
I don't know whether it is or isn't piracy, but it's hard to take his opinion on this as representative or forward thinking because of how "special" Minecraft is (i.e. it's massively popular). Maybe his goal is to maximize revenue, but it doesn't seem like that. In that case, I'd be more interested in the perspective of someone who's pulling in 30k/year in sales and has the same 70% "lost sales" rate. When you're making millions, there's a threshold above which more money is just more money and doesn't really matter (depending on the person). But the difference between 30k/year and what might be 60-80k/year if there was a lower piracy rate would probably drive me nuts because that's the difference between making a living doing something and not.
I'm glad you got something from the numbers in that article because I didn't. Something about 1% of the registered users coming in the last 24 hours? And a million out of 600,000 being such-and-such.
Is there some place other than that puff piece to get real MineCraft numbers from?
My rough calculation is that Minecraft goes for 15 Euros, so if he's registering 30k people/day, that's 450k/day in revenue. That's a lot. Maybe it could be double that if people who are pirating the game didn't have that option. But my point is, 450k/day or 900k/day? I'd be happy with either.
EDIT: Sorry, 30k/day is registered and 30% purchased, so it's actually 9k/day roughly. That's still 135k/day or 270k/day. Still, two numbers I'd be fine with.
Minecraft won an award (multiple awards?) at the Indie Games Festival Awards at the Game Developers Conference yesterday. That would explain the sales.
It beat out other indie games, which of course wouldn't get as high a sales boost. So yes, Minecraft is an example of a very rare case.
It's a number that may be impossible to account for. Heres a study concerning illegal music file sharers, it turns out that they spent more money on music than people who don't share music illegally.
Piracy first increases product visibility and increases overall sales until a saturation point is reached. Once market visibility is achieved then piracy represents a loss of sales.
As for the X is or is not theft discussions, let's see what Richard Feynman has to say about it:
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
What gripes me most about pirates is that a lot still feel they have some form of entitlement for support. For example, I get emails all the time saying "I'll pay for the app, but only if you provide feature X and fix bug Y, until then, it's just not worth 99 cents.".
Minecraft is mind boggling from a business perspective AND a gaming perspective. Are there any other communities that are similar to Minecraft that anyone can think of?
I just find it fascinating that a game like Minecraft has such an involved ecosystem around it.
Buying Minecraft is not just buying a program, it's a kind of license agreement; the buyer is expecting future updates and feature improvements. Whereas, software bought in a box comes as-is, at most with the occasional bugfix patch.
That was a recent addition to the Terms. What that is referring to is additional DLC once the game is complete. Right now it is in beta. If you own a alpha license, you are guaranteed to receive additional updates free. The idea was that they were afraid of a "Everything in the future is free" clause, so just in case; they added that. There is currently no planned 'bonus updates'
The clause I quoted was there even during alpha (unfortunately web.archive.org doesn't have older versions so I can't link it).
During alpha the rules were: "if they release updates, you get them for free. But you agree that when you pay, you pay for the game as-is and you don't have any right to expect updates".
Meaning: "Maybe I lose interest in doing this and just stop updating it. You have no right to be mad about this. If I update it though, you will get that update for free"
Unless someone creates an independent installer / upgrader package that will grab updates from unofficial sites, I.e. torrents. In which case the pirated versions are again almost the same as the registered versions. Then the only difference is the lag between the official and pirated versions, which is generally very low for popular products.
Convenience is the differentiator (itunes v.s. thepiratebay) and many consumers are willing to pay a premium for it.
Regardless, if you just accept that a good portion of your market won't pay for your product and work around it you can still have a very successful business. Then focusing on techniques like convenience, reward systems, free t-shirts? etc. can increase your paying customers. Maybe suing them can too, but it's definitely not the only way.
I generally support examples like this, but it's important to note that Minecraft development budget is hardly anything compared to the investment of a major game studio, hence the lower price point.
Actually, piracy is theft. Specifically, it's a form of robbery that takes place at sea. The attempt to equate the crime of copyright infringement with piracy is a gross misuse of the English language. When a ship of Somali bandits with AK47s boards your yacht, murders everyone on board (or leaves them stranded somewhere), and takes everything of value -- that's piracy. When a college student downloads warez, bittorrents "Pirates of the Carribean", or downloads the new Lady Gaga album through a P2P app -- that's copyright infringement. When the MPAA, RIAA, or BSA use the word "piracy" to describe the latter activity -- that's propaganda.
"No big studio picked up the film [Ink] for theatrical and home distribution. Double Edge Films pitched the movie directly to independent cinemas and to the DVD, Blu-ray and online distribution by themselves. After the release it became the most downloaded movies in file sharing torrent sites more accurately 400,000 times in a single week and exposed the film to a large audience, leading to higher DVD and Blu-ray sales in return. The independent filmmakers wrote in their newsletter that they had "embraced the piracy" and are "happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure." : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071804/trivia
Oh please, can't we keep those piracy apologist posts away from HN? It's bad enough that gamasutra.com's comments are flooded with those "I pirate games because piracy = freedom"-kids. I don't think this kind of discussion would enrich HN in any positive way.
This isn't a piracy apologist post. This is an article about the creator of a wildly successful game saying piracy isn't as big a deal as people make out of it.
A) Got the pirated version, but wouldn't buy it if they couldn't get it free
B) Got the pirated version, and therefore didn't pay for it
C) Learned about the book because it was pirated, and then bought it.
I don't have the statistics, but my guess is that most of the people are in the group A). Now the question is, which group is bigger, B or C. I don't know myself, and it probably depends on the book itself. But as I have seen, most anti-piracy proponents include the group A) into the lost sales category, while it clearly doesn't belong there.