Well, that's why I keep bringing up the tech support issue, because many pirates DO cost the company money without supplying any revenue.

But I hear you on the sales thing. I just think it's a separate issue to be addressed orthogonally. Every game company wants to sell as many as possible, it's just sometimes difficult to figure out HOW. I know the Steam folks have been pushing the price mantra recently, and they were nicely set up to do some studies. That may actually help the PC market in the long run; not sure what it will do for console games given their economics, barring a major shift in approach to consoles which goes beyond the developers.

You're voting with your wallet, and more power to you for doing so. That's the right approach if you think games are too expensive.

As it pertains to used books and games, that is why there is a COPY right. The publisher could define that they want 100,000 copies floating around in the world, get paid for 100,000 copies, and then not have to worry any more. If the demand was really high that 100,000 was just not enough in circulation, they would print more, pay all the appropriate people, and everyone was happy. A nice functional economy.

Copyright law was sufficiently enforced because the only person that could really piss you off, was another publisher, who had the machinery to print 100,000 copies as well... cases of this occurred sufficiently enough that they developed a whole field of law about how to stop it. Since the targets were easier to identify, and it was easy to assess damages, the civil courts did a fine job I am sure.

The concern of the modern day is that even before you send out the first copy of your E-book, that someone has grabbed a copy, replicated it en masse, and is offering 100,000 copies at reasonable quality for free against your I-store selling it for $9.50. The price argument is fallacious, because you have $0 (and limited chance of being caught) on one side, and a gradually reducing price on the E-book on the other side. There may be a price that is low enough to prompt the cheaters to contribute, but often it is at a level where you are not maximizing profits (even if you assume costs approach 0, you still want to maximize dollars multipled by volume, not just volume).

No one is saying all pirates should go to jail, for the most part it would be a waste of taxpayer money. The whole point though is to make a major disincentive to the behavior. If suppliers of the pirate material start to doubt the point, for instance, having to pay for bandwidth, no chance of commercializing at all, and on top of that ending up with a fine/lawsuit (99% of the time IMO) or jail time (rare 1% of the gross violators trying to make a business out of it)... it will start to dry up. At least, it will either reduce to little Becky directly sharing with little Nancy, or to private peer to peer networks (which would need to stay relatively smaller than otherwise).

As for you Sony example, that is outright theft. My original anti-piracy motivation was actually anti-corporate, I personally want people to be able to independently distribute their content to get away from businesses ripping them off. Unfortunately, in the way is the perception that if you are an indy you need to deliver everything at a cut-rate price, and that you need to give it away for free like a charity, which is opposite what it should be, since a giant corporation has plenty of money to spare, but if you don't make sales off your first game/e-book/whatever, you probably have to go back to your day job. If I ever get up the guts to release something in that model, I don't want the first loser to create a copy out there to dictate my business model.

Heck, I'm sure even Front Office Football has been cracked or pirated out there somewhere.

I would be very surprised to find out this is true. To my knowledge, only 1 elicense game has been pirated (EHM2007) and I've never heard or read about any others. I always assumed that FOF and OOTP were not pirated due to the close knit community around those games, as well as the personal connection felt between that community and the developer. I have no data to back that up, it is merely an assumption I have made.

The contradiction to this belief is CM/FM/WWSM, which I think is widely pirated. It could be that demand for that game is simply too large for the pirates to be held at bay by the community surrounding the game. Despite the piracy, don't they usually set high marks for sales every time?

Steam was only a small part of what I was talking about. I was speaking more specifically about his speech at DICE earlier this year.


That's fine. Everyone that refuses to address the problem at its root and instead looks to the government to step in a fix things for them can watch as companies that actually get it reap the benefits.

Companies that adapt to people's behavior will be far more successful than those that try to change it.

I'd love to see the company that is being more successful embracing piracy than the companies that are fighting it. Right now they're doing about equally well...

Explain this "get it" part to me. Are you talking about all those comapanies that are giving stuff away for free? I still don't see how giving in to thieves and letting your content get passed around for free is a long term option for many people. The pro-piracy group always uses the "adapt" argument but doesn't seem to realize that it's pretty tough to adapt to this.

A common tactic for many is to misrepresent the position of others, so as to make it seem like something it is not. Pro-Lifers try to portray Pro-Choice as Pro-Death. Anti-drug types try to portray the decriminalization movement as pro-drugs. These are all bogus, yet people still love to portray their opponents as something worse than what they really are.

Where in the hell have I said I'm pro piracy?

Call it whatever you want, I didn't mean to cause a stir over semantics. Please explain what you mean about these companies "not getting it".

People who pirate games and software typically don't pirate everything. They pay for some games/software, but not all. At the very least they're willing to spend a large chunk of money on a computer, so the resources to buy stuff are there. If you remove these pirates altogether by fining them heavily, sending them to jail, or whatever then you're taking part of your own industry's revenue away. On top of that a lot of these people are teens or college kids and the industry as a whole is seen as "the man", so to speak, so anytime they come down harshly on the public its very bad PR (RIAA) and the industry as a whole suffers from it.

So instead of coming up draconian DRM measures, hoping the government or someone steps in for me, or something similar. Why are these companies not asking the question; why do I have a major problem with piracy and this other company doesn't?

If you look at Valve and Blizzard, since they're two major companies that aren't experiencing the piracy issues of, lets say EA, you ask what are they doing differently?

Blizzard put millions into making a MMO. MMOs are fairly safe from piracy, but not many companies have the resources blizzard had when they started making WoW.

Valve, on the other hand, wasn't exactly rolling in cash when they made Steam. They're also working on new technology that gives each individual that has their games a unique executable file making piracy damn near impossible on their stuff in the future. Beyond that, however, they're also driving more and more toward online content that is regularly updated as it gives people an incentive to buy their stuff. What they aren't doing is attacking their own customers and treating them all as if they're criminals.

Left for Dead, you can pirate single player, but if you really want to have fun with the game you need to buy it. Team Fortress 2, you could pirate it and host your own server, but the purchased copy has the advantages of regular updates and the ability to play anytime you want as you don't have to rely on the small number of people playing on your private server to log on.

The other option is going the route of EA, slapping Securom on all of their shit, and watching multiple games make the top 10 most pirated lists each year.

Ok. Certain forms of DRM doesn't stop piracy, it just pisses off and inconvenience real, paying customers.

That explain it well enough for you?

Absolutely, I believe it was Rainbow Six Vegas 2 that I had to go and download a cracked .exe to get it to run properly in multiplayer.

It's still their choice, not the customers'. Why are people so upset about what they perceive as bad business practice? The only logical answer of course, is when it restricts them from getting free stuff they feel they're entitled to. Otherwise, if trying to defend against bad piracy is bad business, then those business will fail, and the ones that embrace piracy will succeed. Like any other business (at least pre-Obama/Bush). If I don't like a product, I don't buy it.

That part I understand and get.

However, the assertion that some other companies have less issues with piracy (as in, folks stealing games, not in their attitude towards pirates) is patently false. Stardock and Valve both have games pirated as well, and they both have to deal with the costs involved.

One side of this keeps bringing it back to going after individual users of pirated copies to point out draconian measures, and I've said several times that the real target is the distributors and enablers, like Pirate Bay. You HAVE to keep going after them, or you have multiple distribution channels, only one of which you control / profit from.

So, in order to fight piracy, you demand that game companies invest in a major online infrastructure to prevent their game from being pirated? FWIW, this may actually be the best approach, but I'll just point out that it's a lot more expensive than just shipping your title, so again the pirates are costing these companies money...

This is bullshit. Of course Valve games get pirated, but they absolutely have less of a problem with piracy than a company like EA that just relies on Securom.

Top 10 Most Pirated Games of 2008 | TorrentFreak

How many of those games are from EA? How many are from Valve? How many are from Blizzard? How many used draconian forms of DRM?

We're talking degrees here. Feel free to post the list; I'm not heading to a site named "TorrentFreak". How about a top 20? Top 100? There are THOUSANDS of games released every year.

Anyway, there are many "issues with piracy" beyond number stolen, there is also the impact they have on paying customers, tech support, and other areas we've discussed. And again, those companies have put a major infrastructure in place (read: cost) that has not come close to eliminating the issue for them. It may have reduced it some, but at a noticable cost to the company.

I don't demand anything. As I said above, I'm simply pointing out that companies that actually adapt to the public are going to be more successful than those that try to change public behavior. I gave an example of companies coming up with ways to minimize piracy. I'm sure other innovative companies will come around with new ways of approaching things.

There is a security expense for many industries.

Here's the list. If you want a bigger list you'll have to find another one because this is the only one I saw released for 2008. As you can see, though, the number of downloads decreases dramatically after the top few so I think its safe to say valve doesn't have the issues that EA and other Securom supports do.


For those that don't know, torrentfreak is a torrent blog frequently linked directly by kotaku and other sites so they're safe.

No, you completely missed the point. In the effort to defend against piracy, where more and more restrictive forms of DRM are used.. the only people they're pissing off is the paying customer. The pirates don't give a fuck.

Kinda reminds me about the quote from the first Star Wars. "The tighter you grasp, the more worlds will slip through your fingers".

So, what do you do? You buy from companies who "get it" Look at Stardock and the Customer's Bill of Rights. I specifically bought DemiGod to support them, and I make a lot of purchases through Steam and Impulse, that balance the companies need to try to control the distribution of their game, to the customer's viewpoint for it to be as unobtrusive as possible.

Of course, there are asses, look at what happened with DemiGod.. GameStop released it early, and when they opened their servers, all the connections were swamped by people playing torrented versions.. but Stardock actually didn't go ranty/ravey or threatening to sue people, etcetera, they restricted the pirated versions them to one tiny server (that probably no one will ever stay connected to), and you have to be a registered user (with a valid serial code) to get any patches.

In a digital era, trying to come up with a way to stop piracy 100% is like King Canute trying to command the tide not to come in. Do you need to come up with a way to slow down the tide of piracy? Yes. But you also need to understand that the tide's gonna come in, and you're going to look foolish with your feet wet.

But why aren't the software companies entitled to protection under the law like other companies? Car lots have to put up fences and enact some security, but they still expect police help if someone walks onto the lot and drives off in a car without paying. And software customers object to any kind of fences and security (even Steam has its detractors on this very board).

These companies pay taxes, too, so why don't they rate government protection for their business?

Game players are more than welcome to vote with their wallet. Witness the demise of StarForce as a used copy protection method. Piracy didn't change that, the effect on legitimate customers did.

Game companies are trying to figure out the best way to deal with piracy without trying to tick off legitimate customers. Missteps have been made (StarForce) and may continue to be made. Customers have the right to not buy those games, and drive those companies out of business if they don't adapt in a way that the market will handle.

But to consider pirates a market force that should not be punished, and consider media companies entities that are not entitled to legal protection from those that attack their business foundation, is ludicrous.

The discussion about how to combat piracy from a company standpoint is orthogonal to the discussion about whether or not piracy should be punished. I actually agree with much of what is being said about the best ways for a company to handle this (I'm a big fan of Steam personally, and have been switching more and more of my personal game buying to it), but none of it excuses what pirates do or changes what needs to be done to punish the pirate distribution houses. They are criminals and should be treated as such.

FWIW, aside from the MMO games, these are some of the top SELLING games of 2008 as well. There is often a correlation between sales and piracy. The best games tend to be both sold a lot AND pirated a lot. Valve won't release sales figures, and I would not be surprised at all to find out it was hard to get figures on piracy. Another thing to note is that about half of those titles were distributed via Steam as well as via traditional CD / copy protection, yet still were heavily pirated.

Um, I would object to the last part of that. They didn't appear on Steam for quite a few months after the game's release, and one would assume that a majority of the pirating occured before then.

I would expect within the next 5-10 years (if not sooner), for example, the PC game market is nearly all digital download, because anything CD/DVD related can and will be broken.

I would agree with this, especially since retailers don't like to carry PC games anymore...

I think that's kind of a silly argument. It's like saying "don't punish a kid for shoplifting jeans because sometimes he actually buys them".


I'd argue that a lot of those companies don't have problems with piracy because they are geared toward online players. It's much easier to protect your product when they must logon to your server and have their copy verified. Blizzard is probably the best example there.

The problem with that is you are pigeon holing programmers into building a certain type of game. We have already seen companies shift away from the PC as well as focus most of their energy on multiplayer.

They based their numbers off of what bittorrent reported to them so Valve had no control over it.

Video games is also just one minor element of online piracy. A lot of game makers have shifted their focus to consoles too to avoid the headache of dealing with PC piracy.

What about software makers? TV shows? Movies? Music? It's easier to say that a company can adapt in the video game market, but a musician can't offer multiplayer and updates.

No, its me saying I'm going to come up with the least intrusive means to minimize my risk instead of waiting on the government to step in and save me. If they ever do, that's great for me, but I'm doing what I need to do in the meantime.



That's the point. Companies that do this or other innovative things are going to reap the benefits from those that aren't adapting to public.

Its no different than games in the sense that innovative companies or musicians that respect their customer base will tend to thrive.

You call it adaption, I call it pigeon holing. Essentially what it comes down to is that you have to create a multiplayer game with updates to survive these days. While having endless first person shooters may seem "innovative", it just dulls the video game market and destroys its variety.

There isn't much you can do in the music sector. A song is a song.

Stardock, even with the demi-god problems, is doing just fine without focusing first person shooters and strictly online content.

I'm not pretending to have all of the answers here. What I'm saying is there's better ways to approach things than hope someone else solves the problem for me. Its not fair. They shouldn't have to do it. But I shouldn't have to lock my doors and windows at night. I shouldn't have to lock my car when I get out of it. I shouldn't need 10,000 passwords to do anything online. However, I'm taking the means necessary to protect myself instead of waiting on the government to get rid of all crime.

So NiN is just sitting on their asses hoping piracy is someday fixed?

VG247 » Blog Archive » Demigod - 18,000 sales, over 100,000 pirates

I know they've had some success with other games. But 120,000 people trying to play with 18,000 who actually bought it. If you think that isn't a huge problem, than I don't know what to say. I know their CEO knows how to play the PR game well, but it's kind of silly to act like piracy hasn't had an effect on them.

way to try to use something I already brought up to buttress your failing point. Those accounts got pigeonholed to a small server of their very own, and won't get any patches. He even joked that he didn't need to release a demo, the torrenters had done it for them.

That is a great example of a way around the problem. From what I have read, it is working out pretty well for Trent Reznor.

And in the meantime cost them at least one negative review (which may have been updated / retracted, I haven't checked yet) plus all the time to pigeonhole them. It just helps point out the pirates DO have a cost on the industry, even for those who are trying to accomodate them.

NiN has been a big name for nearly 20 years in the music industry. I have a feeling that there aren't a ton of musicians with millions of millions of dollars in the bank that can just give away albums for free because they know they'll sellout arenas across the globe.

And if 10% of those thieves had purchased the game instead of downloading it illegally, they would have doubled their sales. They also wouldn't have pissed off all their paying customers on release by having overloaded servers.

An ironic side note (in my tragically warped mind)... I started my own anti-piracy stance because I felt that a small time independent would have a hella rough time making a buck if they did not have a massive company worth of enforcement machinery behind them. Essentially, you are arguing that they should just build a massive, secure infrastructure to sell things at a lower price, to people that will pirate their material en masse if there is one leak.

Valve is researching new types of DRM, no doubt spending a few salaries worth on finding ways to protect their revenue streams, even as they try to embrace a new model (I would argue it is NOT the pirates model, they want to innovate their channel, but not that whole giving away stuff for free aspect that proves annoying come payday).

If you table the argument on 'what is the best channel' to deliver content, or assume it goes whatever way you want, you still have the core problem. If there is one channel, and it is free, as long as it is open some fraction of that number is otherwise paying customers (at worst) and at best people freeloading (enjoying your hard work without contributing to your company creating further titles).

Even if Steam at ultra low prices (Fallout 3, $10!) becomes the norm, Valve is probably going to jump on the same bandwagon of asking the government to close off competing pirate sources.

In the worst case, you build these systems, and don't police the pirates (the supply side), and you give the big companies that much more leverage over startups and indies who need to come to them for protection (since no one else will provide it, and the culture supports piracy as commonplace).

I don't see why we need pirates to make any of this work, they are a drain on the system and that is it. Will they hasten the demise of some companies, probably. Just like any criminal activity preying on a business could kill it off, whether it is innovative/profitable or not. You are not going to bring down EA with piracy, it has deep pockets, but I'm sure along the way the pirates will contribute to the death of no small number of creative game developers trying to work outside the machine, and forcing them out of the business, or to the arms of some place like EA that will suck their brains out with a straw. As it is, don't game developers have enough trouble trying to do their job because they don't know when their funding is going to be yanked, their parent company bought out, or their schedule pushed up for 'business reasons' so they release buggy half finished crap?

I dunno, I find this field particularly interesting... I'm actually considering an independent game company as one potential foray into opening a business of my own. I'm more on the 'embrace technology' side of the spectrum, but I don't stretch that to giving things away for free. If anything, I'd probably challenge things and sell games at a high price, with a focus on differentiation from the corporate game mills. I could build an epic game of the year, try and charge a $100 for it, and not make a cent off it until everyone pirates my game, EA notices, and asks for my soul and a sequel in exchange for some funds.

I'd rather just make a sweet demo, try to be as nice as I can about distribution, and have at least an inkling that I could shut down the sites annoying me the most without more red-tape that I can handle... but the more likely thing is I'd just engineer an incentive mechanism that makes it so the more people pirate my game, the less content and updates they would get (until theoretical zero and I go back to playing stocks and working for the man). Even so, I'd doubt that would work either, I could say: "If I hit X revenue I'll release an expansion pack for free to everyone" and still probably have flat sales and mass piracy. I really have little faith in the common sense of modern man, to understand making stuff takes cash (in my case time more important than money, since I make more sitting around doing nothing than anything else these days).

If I put it in black and white, hey I'm small time developer, and every dollar made goes into financing an art team for more games and content, I bet I could have game of the year pirate distribution (saying it was truly awesome) and a relative pittance of paying customers (I'm assuming they are already cost neutral if they are paying at all, so $100 or $50... its all the same volume wise most likely because everyone else is getting it for $0).

Anyways, I'm diverging way off topic... I just think killing off entire classes of business models for the sake of criminals is not a very smart thing to do. There are countless examples in history of people taking advantage of others until the law caught up and started to enforce a standard. The first copyright violators after all were businesses screwing over writers. I know that has been perverted, as Tekneek has pointed out, but I'd like to think we work from establishing what makes sense ethically, and working from there (in which case I think the Disney laws should pretty much be stricken as frivilous). In this case, it means acknowledging that attacking piracy as wrong is a fundamental truth, and that all steps to alleviate the problem should be pursued (practically that means better business models, better security, better laws, and better enforcement of those laws).

My own anti-piracy stance is mostly self preservation I guess. I work for a software company, and I guess luckily most of my company's money come from mainframe applications (which I am guessing are not quite as hot a target for pirates), but we still do have a good selection of software, some of which I am sure has been pirated at some point or another.

I really have gotten to the point of hating threads such as this on the internet, but always find myself unable to look away either, so I just read along and try to understand the other's side point of view, but it gets me so angry inside.

In the end, I understand on the grand scale of things, software piracy isn't as "bad" as murder or many other crimes, but it still hurts people, and is still wrong. I don't really get too worked up when someone says they downloaded music illegally or whatever, I'm sure I do plenty of things that are wrong too (I speed at times, I'm sure I have messed up with taxes in the past, etc) so don't really look down on people who do choose to steal music/software/whatever... but on the other hand, I see the market currently, I see that my company has laid off too many people just like many others in the tech sector. I know that all of those lay-offs aren't directly due to software piracy, and perhaps just only a small part are, but part of me feel that when people steal the software that my company produces, they are stealing from me as well.

I guess that just makes me bitter, and it really clouds the entire theoretical discussion that several are trying to make for the opposite point of view here, but I honestly have a very tough time being open to hearing that side of the discussion, that is how frustrated this type of thing has led me to become.

I work on a product that routinely has keys and keygens pirated. We also have less than 5% of downloads convert into sales, while the download numbers consistently remain strong. A full quality trial period, try before you buy distribution model, with incredibly good marks along the spectrum for customer service and tech support. It costs a pretty penny, but anyone who has paid it says that it has delivered its price several times over in value.

Is piracy the other 95%, I find that doubtful. But still, when you see the key-vid on youtube get more than a magnitude more hits than your sales in the same month, it would probably make you dejected. Of course, my stance was formed before this job.

The truth is no business model can compete with free, and its only free because they are breaking the law. Civil pursuit of the violations is occurring, and you could argue we should step up security measures (which would only annoy those people who are paying)... but am I going to say no to it being enforced as a crime? No. It won't hurt anyone who is doing the right thing, and most of the people doing the wrong thing (the suppliers, not necessarilly the people watching the key-vid) I'm perfectly fine with them getting a sternly lettered warning a few times before they get hit with the hammer. But if the hammer is out there, maybe you will get people to hesitate just that bit more before they distribute to the entire internet, especially if they have no real financial motive, and can face a penalty, even at low probability.

But why are you assuming that musicians should rightfully make millions? For the bulk of human history musicians lived on what they could make from live performances and patrons. I'm sure there were far fewer rich musicians, but society as a whole didn't hurt for a lack of music.

Recorded performances and the money that comes from their distribution is a very recent phenomenon. Society can choose whether or not to create a system that guarantees profits for recordings, but there's no natural law that says it must be so.

I'm not. I'm saying that if a creative person creates something, they should be able to do what they want and charge what they want for it. Whether that's free or lots of money.

That's another issue with this mess that really doesn't get brought up. If the Pirate Bay was doing this for free I still think it's wrong, but not as bad. But these guys were making millions of of other people's life works and passions. These guys aren't noble crusaders, they were just talentless hacks who had to leech on other people's innovations to make a buck.

Although a pretty small sample size, the results of this aren't really surprising to me.



Study: pirates biggest music buyers. Labels: yeah, right
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/...erage-folks.ars


Those who download illegal copies of music over P2P networks are the biggest consumers of legal music options, according to a new study by the BI Norwegian School of Management. Researchers examined the music downloading habits of more than 1,900 Internet users over the age of 15, and found that illegal music connoisseurs are significantly more likely to purchase music than the average, non-P2P-loving user.

Unsurprisingly, BI found that those between 15 and 20 are more likely to buy music via paid download than on a physical CD, though most still purchased at least one CD in the last six months. However, when it comes to P2P, it seems that those who wave the pirate flag are the most click-happy on services like the iTunes Store and Amazon MP3. BI said that those who said they download illegal music for "free" bought ten times as much legal music as those who never download music illegally. "The most surprising is that the proportion of paid download is so high," the Google-translated Audun Molde from the Norwegian School of Management told Aftenposten.

Record label EMI doesn't quite buy into BI's stats, though. EMI's Bjørn Rogstad told Aftenposten that the results make it seem like free downloads stimulate pay downloads, but there's no way to know for sure. "There is one thing we are not going away, and it is the consumption of music increases, while revenue declines. It can not be explained in any way other than that the illegal downloading is over the legal sale of music," Rogstad said.

Rogstad's dismissal of the findings don't take into account that the online music model has dramatically changed how consumers buy music. Instead of selling a huge volume of full albums—the physical media model—the record labels are now selling a huge volume of individual, cherry-picked tracks. It's no secret that the old album format is in dire straits thanks to online music, which is a large part of why overall music revenue is going down.

BI's report corroborates data that the Canadian branch of the RIAA, the Canadian Record Industry Association, released in 2006. At that time, the organization acknowledged that P2P users do indeed buy more music than the industry wants to admit, and that P2P isn't the primary reason why other people aren't buying music. 73 percent of of respondents to the CRIA's survey said that they bought music after they downloaded it illegally, while the primary reason from the non-P2P camp for not buying music was attributed to plain old apathy.

So they found that people who love music are more likely to buy music, right?

Shocking isn't it ? :D

Edit: Oh, it has been nice to read some of the discussions in this thread. Especially SportsDino has had some very well constructed posts.

*chuckles*

I'm curious what the motivation is behind the minimization of the impacts of piracy. It's all throughout this thread, and you see it everywhere:

-Pirates don't steal things they would have otherwise bought
-Pirates are the biggest music buyers
-Pirates spread good word of mouth about a product
-Pirates help to beta-test products
-Some products aren't available in countries where pirates live
-Businesses have ripped off customers for years
-Business treat everyone like criminals so they might as well steall anyway.

I'm sure there's some I'm missing.

What's the point of these minimizations when people spout them off? It sounds like they're justyfing/supporting/defending piracy, but when you say that, they all worked up and deny that.

So what's the point? That copyright shouldn't exist because it doesn't protect artists?

Otherwise, the points are completely irrelevant. Because whether or not those justifications are true, it's 100% up to the owner of the copyright whether they believe them or not, and it's up to them to decide how they want their works copied. If a record company says all of those justifications are wrong, and they prefer to defend their property as they see fit, that's their choice. If the record companies' reason was "we just feel like it" - THAT'S a legitimate reason, because they're the owner. There's no requirement that they have to defend their copyright protection through data.

I just don't see any other reasons for carrying on, minimizing the impacts of piracy, beyond the old stand-by: people feel entitled to free stuff, and if they don't get it, or they're punished for getting it, they get all pissy and hate the companies that prevent their theft.

molson, I think that rather than justifying/supporting/defending piracy, as far as I've read it, they're saying that piracy exists, will be very hard to eradicate, so perhaps the best method for solving the problem would be to find ways to minimize its effect.

Kind of like Hamsterdam in Season 3 of the Wire.

Yup. I get the arguments about "once I bought it, I should be able to do what I want with it", and even the "I have three computers at home, shouldn't I be able to play on all of them if I bought it?" arguments, but the belief that anyone has a RIGHT to these things is ludicrous.

I understand that, that's a good point on its own, but they don't seem to mesh up to me.

Piracy exists anyway, so intellectual property owners should find a way to manage it = Piracy's impact on the economy and property owners is minimal?

How does the latter support the former?

It just seems like an attempt to make the theives the good guys and the record companies the bad guys.

And while the posters here are trying to be subtle, I think, about their support for piracy, that's not the opinion that record companies are dealing with. The Pirate Bay is a pro-pirate adovacate. They are anti-copyright. And they're very influential. How are their actions not criminal? How are they the good guy?

So I guess my question would be, what premise is supported when people minimize the impacts of piracy? Are they just pointing out how poorly intellectual property owners manage their copyrights? Why do you care how someone else manages their own property (unless you feel an entitlement to it)? And if the piracy impacts are minimal, aren't the intellectual property owners actually doing a great job of protecting their property from crime?

I'm all for copyright owners deciding how they want to exercise their rights. The problem is, the recording industry continues to feel the need to justify its stance by blaming others for their own inadequacies, when information suggests that people who pirate music actual purchase quite a bit of it. IMO, they can't have it both ways. Either piracy is bad just because and people shouldn't do it - irrespective of the financial impact on them - or piracy/free acess can be beneficial to sales, so they should shut up about it and focus on sales models that make them the kinds of money they believe they should be making. They are the ones framing this as a "we're losing money because of piracy" argument, so I think it's appropriate to point out the problems with that causal link. But that's really beyond the threshold "is it bad or good" discussion, and I didn't post that article as justification for piracy.

I'm not going to respond to your points about minimizing the impacts of piracy since that's not my discussion. I think the impacts are probably in between what the two sides would argue, but probably closer to the companies' thoughts.

My only bone of contention in this whole thing is that The Pirate Bay, deplorable as what they do is, is being found guilty for pointing people in the direction of where they can commit a crime. It's like if I posted a list of drug dealer's phone numbers online, I would be found guilty of dealing drugs. That doesn't sit well with me, and the response of the "smirk test" brought up way on page one unnerves me a bit.

It's called "being an accessory".

If you run a Pirate-Bay type website for drug trafficking, listing contacts, helping to get people in touch with each other, and profitting off that, you can expect to be arrested for conspiracy to commit drug trafficking.

People think there's this criminal loophole there, but it just doesn't exist. If you buy the gun with the intention of someone else getting murdered with it, you're guilty of murder, even if you don't pull the trigger.

A topical question, then, should craigslist be found guilty of pimping?

Craiglist/Google are different than the pirate bay. I don't see how people can make that comparison with a straight face.

If Craiglist was 95% open prostitution, and took no steps to restrict the prostitution they were openly faciliating, they would absolutely be guilty of pimping. If ebay catered to the drug culture, and 95% of auctions were drug sales, and made no attempts to restrict those sales, they'd be taken down and be criminally liable (even though they're not selling drugs themselves). But since Craiglist is less than 1% massage services/stripping (that are often prostitution ads), and they cooperate with authorities, have some kind of policy about restricting prostitution, then it's not criminal. If they take steps to discourage prostitution, then they're not acting in furtherance of conspiracy of a criminal act.

dola,

I guess a related question then: Was Pirate Bay ever explicitly notified that specific torrents were in copyright violation and asked to take them down, to which they refused? If that's the case (and I don't know if it is) then I'm perfectly happy with them being convicted.

I'm not going to open this link at work, but it appears that not only do they get those letters, they flaunt them:

Legal threats against The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay - The world's largest BitTorrent tracker

I'm not trying to make the distinction morally, I'm trying to make it legally.

What's the breaking point? If 30% of craigslist posts were for illegal services? Who do we trust to decide which websites open to the public use are criminal and which just have a little criminal activity on them?

I don't see why you can't follow 'Hamsterdam' and law enforcement at the same time. There is nothing wrong with saying that the copyright should be protected and enforced, and simultaneously saying that the best way to reduce the amount of piracy occurring is through new economic mechanisms.

A combination of both of them would probably have the biggest effect. Reducing the cost to participate ethically and simultaneously increasing the penalty for misbehaving, will get you to an equilibrium faster than either alone.

-----

After piracy gets out of the mainstream, it will probably be easier to locate violators and enforce it, so smaller distributors might have a chance to run outside the big security machines.

You'd have to look up the criminal statute at issue. It won't give you a %, but it will tell you what's a illegal. The courts, through caselaw, have established what isn't a crime, and what is a crime. Everything in between in open to argument (there's lots of grey area in law).

And while a % would be nice to know, that's not realistic. It's more than %, that's just one factor. Two websites with 10% prostitution or drugs may have varying guilt if they vary in overt support for the criminal action/efforts to combat criminal activity.

With Pirate Bay it's easy. 99% illegal stuff, which is supported, defended, faciliated, and profitted from. Google is easy on the other side, being legal. Craiglist, definitely legal, but they could easily drift into dangerous waters if they were too lax on prostitution.

So, I take it from what you've been saying that you think that the onus of ensuring that no illegal activity is taking place on a website should be that website's responsibility? I'm willing to buy that if an appropriate authority (either the police, or a copyright holder) alerts someone to illegal activity on their site they should have a responsibility to remove it, but I'm not sure they should have to keep vigilant watch to make sure its never put up in the first place. I have to admit I've got a bit of libertarian streak in general, and especially when it comes to the internet.

Just as the company has a right to determine how they will sell it, the customer has a right to do what they want with it once they buy it.

People have a responsibility not to commit crime. It doesn't just fall on the authorities to prevent it.

It's pretty tough to bring criminal charges against somebody that simply wasn't vigilant enough themselves to prevent crime. That's not Pirate Bay though. Pirate bay is an active participant in crime. They're the criminal, they're not simply inadvertently making crime easier via their pursuit of an otherwise legal venture. They can try to come up with technical justifications that that's not the case, but they're not very convincing.

Facilitating crime, ignoring crime, not being vigilant enough about crime - those aren't the crimes. Those are merely evidence of criminal conpiracy. A criminal conpiracy is kind of a intangible idea. It's about an intent. Pirate Bay's intent is to faciliate distribution of pirated material. There's no one slam-dunk defense or damning fact. Not actually hosting the the pirated material doesn't automatically make them innocent. Making money on the site doesn't automatically make them guilty. Taking all the evidence together, provides evidence of their intent, and that's what makes the act criminal. They can claim that their have no such criminal intent, that they're merely operating a legal-neutral service. But the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.

On the other hand, what's Google's intent? Craiglist? Like I said, craiglist is closer to being in dangerous waters. If they act to try to prevent or mitigate prostitution, that doesn't automatically make them innocent, but it's evidence that their intent is not criminal. But if Craiglist went on a big pro-prostitution campaign, and someone uncovered an internal document that described how they intentionally faciliate the sex trade - then the Craiglist CEO would be going up the river for a long time.

I could rent a house, which is a totally legal activity. But if the intent of that act was so that others could operate it as a drug house, that's a crime. Evidence of the intent might be if it could be shown I had knowledge of what was going on there, and didn't do anything about it. That's just EVIDENCE, I may have a darn could reason to keep quiet (maybe they threatened my life). On the other hand, telling the police about any drug activity that went on there would be pretty good evidence that my intent wasn't criminal. But telling them that I never myself exchanged drugs is not a defense (at best, it would be very weak evidence that I didn't have a criminal intent).

We talked about % of pirated content before, and that too, is merely evidence of that intent. 99% is pretty strong evidence of criminal intent. 1% is not. 10%? - then you'd probably want to see other evidence of intent.

And I said I understand those arguments: making backup copies, playing it on your home LAN, etc (there have been plenty of copy-protected multiplayer games that allow LAN clients to not have the disc in the drive, for example). All things that copy protection can interfere with that have a legitimate case of being "fair use" or whatever the current legal term is.

As long as "do what they want with it" doesn't imply you can give it to all your friends. That's where I'll argue with you.

Edit: Sorry, re-read my post. What I meant by "right to these things" was talking about the right to acquire music / games / videos, not the right to do some of these things once you own it. Sorry for the confusion. Yes, I think you should be able to do things with your personal copy that some copy-protection schemes prevent, but I don't think you should be able to acquire that personal copy in any way you choose at whatever price you choose. Maybe that will make more sense.

Looks like I need to quote myself from the first page:


In my opinion Craigslist is in a similar position to Google, although there are pending cases regarding prostitution and Craigslist's facilitation thereof. Again, though, unlike websites which openly list "escort" directories and use euphemisms for aspects of the sex trade, Craigslist has implemented ways for these postings to be removed, and has no clear intent to support the sex trade.

The "information suggests pirates buy music" is just plain silly. Sure they may buy some, but they also steal a ton. If they buy $10 worth a year, would they spend $50 if they weren't able to illegally download it for free?

The best source of information for the effect of piracy is in total music sales. They've fallen off the face of the Earth. PC video game developers have been dropping like flies. Piracy has a real toll on companies and livelihoods. Silly arguments with no real statistical evidence behind it have no merit in my book.

Got this in the mail today from Cory Doctorow:

Internet Evolution - The Big Report - Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It's 1996

It's a long article, so here's the intro only:

Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It's 1996
Introduction
Written by Cory Doctorow
4/21/2009 Post a comment
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The entertainment industry wants to retreat to the comfort of 1996. It was a good year for them. CDs were selling briskly, but no one had figured out how to rip them and turn them into MP3s yet. Music fans were still spending money to buy CD versions of music they owned on LP. DVDs had just been released, and movie fans were spending money to buy DVDs for movies they already owned on VHS.

And most importantly, the laws regulating copyright and technology were almost entirely designed by the entertainment industry. They could write anydamnfoolthing and get it passed in Congress, by the UN, in the EU.

Private agreements with electronics companies guaranteed that all new devices were crippled: Remember the Sony Minidisc players that could record sound digitally, but could only output it on the headphone jack, meaning that you couldn't just record your kid's first words and digitally transfer them to your computer for safe keeping?

1996 is gone, and good riddance.

In 2009, the world is populated by people who no longer believe that "Thou shalt sell media on plastic discs forever" came down off the mountain on two stone tablets. It's populated by people who find the spectacle of companies suing their own customers by the thousands indefensible. It's populated by activists who've figured out that the Internet is worth saving and that the entertainment industry is prepared to destroy it.

And the entertainment industry hasn't figured that out, and that's why they're doomed.

To be fair, while this is significant, the other one has been driver and support issues. Everyone complains about buggy games (and I won't deny games have bugs and many support calls are legitimate, that's not the point), but from a developer perspective it's also hard to deal with overclockers, buggy drivers, viruses, etc. If a game crashes, it's the developer's fault, no matter WHAT is going on on the target machine. The support costs are astronomical compared to those on consoles, and you're often troubleshooting something that has nothing to do with you aside from the fact that your game was the one that exposed it.

My favorite story was back in the old days where one user had 3 separate types of RAM in his computer (a stick of PC-66, one of PC-100, and I think the third was a stick of PC-100 with different timings) and he was overclocking to boot. My worst time was when DirectX 8 shipped and it took nearly a year before reliable AGP drivers were available for most motherboards. Try explaning to an end user that they need a MOTHERBOARD driver update, let alone a video card driver update.

You periodically have issues with the consoles, but they are much less frequent, limited in scope, and you know exactly who to talk to and have a direct line to them.

That article is a bit of a sweeping brush. There's a middle-ground here. The key is many entertainment companies are moving towards it (Steam, iTunes, Netflix, etc) but pirates still want to steal it all.

This has more to do with the incredible growth in consoles over the past decade than the PC market itself. Its hard to get numbers from Steam and D2D, but the analysis I've seen suggests that PC game sales have held steady over the past several years. Physical media sales are way down, but its estimated that at least 50% of all PC sales are now done digitally.

Sorry, that's bullshit. Now that you can buy singles online, no one buys a $18 album ($10-$15 online) for 2 good songs and 12 filler songs. The record companies didn't see this coming, and are trying to blame piracy as the sole factor, completely neglecting the fact that people now spend $2 for the 2 good songs on an album, and completely ignore the songs they don't want.

I'd say that it's this, more then piracy. (Not that piracy isn't a factor, mind you, but it's grossly exaggerated)

That's kind of an ironic statement.

But there are a lot more artists out there these days and it's much easier to put together an album. While they are losing money on full album sales, they shouldn't be losing much on total music sold. I probably spend as much as I used to on music but now have it across many more artists than I used to.

I do agree with you though that full album sales have hurt. But I also know I don't think I have a friend who has paid for music in years that have their iPods filled with stuff.

Or you could say the reverse.

I disagree. People are just not spending the same amount on music, period. I do agree that the newest stuff is being pirated the most, mind you, but also, we do not exactly have a ton of great artists right now, and where the paid services shine is the back catalogue, stuff that you won't find in any torrent because it's more then a year old. That is a majority of the music being purchased out there.

I really applaud outside the box thinking services like lala (have I gushed too much about their service? :D). There needs to be more of it. Remember, this is an industry that just a few years ago, sued mp3.com out of business because they had a service that allowed people to listen to MP3's they had ripped from their own CD's!!!!!

The Recording industry, like the computer game industry with consoles, had the customer model change out from underneath them, and basically, were whistling dixie on the train track, and refused to get off, and now are being run over by the speeding train.

Cory Doctorow doesn't make his money by finding the middle ground. :D

I have a theory that because of piracy, the quality of musicians being put out are poorer. My feeling is that they are avoiding musicians that play into the demographics most likely to pirate music (males 18-34) and instead playing to demographics that are somewhat internet literate, but not enough to be able to use torrents. So you end up with music targeted toward teenage girls.

If you take a look at the Billboard charts, it's filled with bubble gum pop songs and crappy hip-hop. You won't find many hard rock or alternative bands anymore.

Because of Piracy, there's lesser artists out there? I find that VERY hard to believe, to say the least (I cancelled the first two things I said). More like the RIAA companies figured that the bubble would always be there, and focused on the bubble area, and then when the bubble popped, had no where to go.

So explain Debbie Gibson, Tiffany, and much of the mid-1980's to me. ;)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009...buy-more-music

Thought this was interesting, considering they made people provide receipts for this study. Don't shoot the messenger..

Latest news from Sweden is that the trial might have to be re-done. The Judge sits on the board for an organization called "Swedish Association For the Protection of Industrial Rights", along with the prosecution main lawyers Monique Wadstedt and Henrik Ponten.

Linky: Was The Pirate Bay Judge Biased?

I would think that, if these guys were as purely evil as they are portrayed to be, that the government (and industry) would do everything they could to make sure the prosecution went down without a hitch. Not leave a pretty glaring conflict of interest angle right in the middle of it.

I don't think anyone referred to them, or pirates in general, as "purely evil", or made such implications. Why do you feel the need to constantly exaggerate your point? That's usually a sign that one thinks their argument is weak.

Constantly? I've not done it nearly as much as you guys. I'm just trying to keep up.

If true, this is A) Really freaking stupid of the judge and prosecutors not to see this giant mine that will explode in their faces, B) Yes, cause for at least a new trial. (And considering some of the stuff they pulled during the trial, where they changed the charges a couple times around, really eye-opening).