The best way to reduce piracy of copyrighted works is to cut the copyright period by 75% relative to current standards. To be fair to individual living authors who hold their own copyrights, this would mean copyrights persisted 18 years past the author's death, or for 24 years after date of publication for for-hire contract jobs.
This is comparable to the lifetime of technical patents, and so would allow for a reasonable period to collect revenue from the work that can be used to finance new works and so on.
Otherwise, you just have consolidated interests squatting on material and collecting rents for no justifiable reason. It's entirely ridiculous, for example, that a 1957 film like the Seventh Seal isn't yet in the public domain.
This kind of reasonable change to copyright law would go a long ways towards justifying legal crackdowns on piracy of more recent works, I think.
> It's entirely ridiculous, for example, that a 1957 film like the Seventh Seal isn't yet in the public domain.
That's way too generous. It's ridiculous that films made before 2010 aren't in the public domain. We're all going to be long dead before this stuff enters the public domain. Our culture should belong to us, not a bunch of corporations. If they want to keep making money, they should have to make new stuff instead of endless remakes of past successful IPs.
It's sort of humorous that "rule against perpetuities" is a fundamental legal concept [1] [2] but copyright just sidesteps that and allows for locking up culture for almost two centuries.
Well, that's not that different. That's 21 years after the life of some person in being. If you want it to last a long time, you say youngest living descendant of someone well-known, like the King of England, as then you presumably get the full ~90 years of some baby plus 21 years.
Corporate copyrights last a flat 95 years from publication.
I don't think so. Copyright already has an equivalent rule in the constitution, and that applies to the whole term, not just to transfers of copyright in a will.
That being said, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the subsequent SCOTUS case Eldred v. Ashcroft[0] showed that this rule is very flimsy. The biggest protection against copyright perpetuities is that Congress currently shows no appetite for a further extension. The life+70 extension we got last time happened in a time when copyright was an uncontroversial and boring matter. This stopped being the case just a few years after the CTEA, when the masses realized that this fancy new digital realm called the Internet was functionally owned by whoever owned the copyrights on the data running through it.
Even 10 years is too generous. I'd rather make it 0 instead. I said 10 years because it's what would make copyright tolerable. The right thing as far as I'm concerned is abolishing it straight up. 10 years is a reasonable compromise.
Remember, copyright exists at all because we allow it. The raw reality these monopolists face is that public domain is the default state of all information. We're all just pretending that we can't easily copy this stuff. The social contract was: we pretend we don't know how to copy their stuff, they get to make their money and then the works enter the public domain. They're clearly not keeping up their end of the social contract. Why should we? We should all just stop pretending we're dumb enough not to download their stuff at zero cost.
> Even 10 years is too generous. I'd rather make it 0 instead. I said 10 years because it's what would make copyright tolerable. The right thing as far as I'm concerned is abolishing it straight up. 10 years is a reasonable compromise.
That's not a reasonable compromise. Your proposal of 0 years in a nonstarter, and walking slightly back from that is still a nonstarter. It's pretty clear your prioritizing only your own interests and desires, and not even really thinking about anyone else's.
For instance: have you considered that abolishing copyright would abolish the GPL, too? As in, you'd have no right to demand the source to modified GPL code that was distributed. The foundation of the GPL is copyright.
Copyright was created for good reason. It is not reasonable to get mad and burn it all down without considering those reasons, and the other effects burning it down will cause.
> Remember, copyright exists at all because we allow it. The raw reality these monopolists face is that public domain is the default state of all information. We're all just pretending that we can't easily copy this stuff.
We're also all pretending that we can't easily kill other people (btw, we totally can, and you probably regularly operate a 3,000lb death machine).
> The social contract was: we pretend we don't know how to copy their stuff, they get to make their money and then the works enter the public domain. They're clearly not keeping up their end of the social contract. Why should we? We should all just stop pretending we're dumb enough not to download their stuff at zero cost.
They're advocating for their interests, "we've" advocated for ours, so stuff is entering public domain (Steamboat Willie is almost there, and there are no copyright extensions in the works to keep it there).
The correct solution is to dial back the previous excesses in term lengths to something long enough that it wouldn't imperil investment in the production of new works (which can be hundreds of millions of dollars per).
> That's not a reasonable compromise. Your proposal of 0 years in a nonstarter, and walking slightly back from that is still a nonstarter.
On the contrary. Copyright itself is a non-starter. Remember, public domain is the natural state of information. They're the ones who need to convince us to respect whatever social contract they seek to impose. They are doing such a horrible job at it that it can be argued that copyright infringement is civil disobedience and a moral imperative.
> It's pretty clear your prioritizing your own interests, and not even really thinking about anyone else's.
I am. I don't really care about the "interests" of some perpetual information monopolists at all. The fact they even exist at all is offensive to me. I'd rather they didn't.
> For instance, have you considered that abolishing copyright would abolish the GPL? As in, you'd have no right to demand the source to modified GPL code that was distributed.
> Copyright was created for good reason. It is not reasonable to get mad and burn it all down without considering those reasons, and the other effects burning it down will cause.
The reasons don't matter. The actual implementation does. That's why 10 years is an exceptionally generous compromise. It's the only thing that would allow these monopolists to continue existing. If that's rejected, the only reasonable alternative is for society to stop recognizing copyright as legitimate and go back to treating everything as public domain by default.
The social contract was: we'd pretend we couldn't copy this stuff, you'd make your money for a while and then your work would enter the public domain. You and I are both gonna be long dead before we see any of those public domain benefits and that's if they don't keep perpetually extending the duration into functional infinity. Clearly they're not keeping up their end of the contract. So why should we keep ours?
> We're also all pretending that we can't easily kill other people (btw, we totally can, and you probably regularly operate a 3,000lb death machine).
You're seriously comparing the killing of human beings to the copying of bits. I'm not sure I want to continue this debate.
Sure...in your fantasy land. In the real world, it's not (because, as a sibling comment noted, it's the status quo and not even a very controversial one at that).
> That's why 10 years is an exceptionally generous compromise.
Being selfish but calling it "exceptionally generous" doesn't make it so. It just means you're deluded or a liar.
>>> Remember, copyright exists at all because we allow it. The raw reality these monopolists face is that public domain is the default state of all information. We're all just pretending that we can't easily copy this stuff.
>> We're also all pretending that we can't easily kill other people (btw, we totally can, and you probably regularly operate a 3,000lb death machine).
> You're seriously comparing the killing of human beings to the copying of bits. I'm not sure I want to continue this debate.
Come on. All I was doing was show that you're confused and you don't really seem understand the implications of the arguments that you're making.
If there's any reason to not continue this "debate," it's that you're unreasonable and will likely stubbornly stick to your unreasonable position.
Wanting to control what other people do between themselves is being selfish. Ignoring the absurd demands of such a person is not.
The only valid argument for something like copyright would be that it improves society as a whole. I don't think it does. I have not seen any evidence that it does. I have seen plenty of evidence how it hurts everyone. That some benefit or even rely on it is absolutely completely irrelevant.
> Sure...in your fantasy land. In the real world, it's not (because, as a sibling comment noted, it's the status quo and not even a very controversial one at that).
> deluded or a liar
LOL I'm deluded? You're the one who believes in owning numbers.
Let's talk about the real world then. In the real world, barely anybody even knows or cares what copyright even is. Copyright infringement is the norm. People infringe copyrights all day every day and they don't even realize they're doing it. They infringe copyright when they save pretty pictures off the internet, when they print screen Instagram posts because the app won't let them download the photos. They infringe copyright when they create funny memes and share them with friends. They infringe copyright when they listen to some illegally uploaded music on YouTube. Could even argue we infringed each other's copyrights when we quoted each other's posts. All of this is happening every single day at unprecedented scales and exactly zero people lose any sleep over it.
You see, in the real world, copyright is so irrelevant it barely even registers in people's minds. Copyright infringement is the custom and banning it is like banning alcohol consumption. This is the real status quo. Nobody really gives a shit about "creators", "authors" or whatever. People do what they can do and what they want to do. The world changing technology that is computers allows them to freely manipulate information so that's exactly what they do. Information is infinite, it's numbers. No amount of copyright will ever change that. You'd have to completely destroy computers to roll the world back to a state where copyright matters.
> All I was doing was show that you're confused and you don't really seem understand the implications of the arguments that you're making.
Only thing you've shown is you don't understand what you're talking about. We're talking about ownership of ideas, naturally infinite, intangible. You move the argument to the scarcity of the physical world and then compare copyright infringement to killing people.
The fact you even think you can "easily" kill someone is notable. Have you ever killed someone? Killing another human being fucks you up for life. Even when you're justified in doing so. Pulling the trigger on a weapon even in self defense has significant psychological costs. It gives people PTSD. You can find accounts of soldiers whose entire jobs were to use weapons to kill others -- it fucked them up for life. Militaries all over the world have to literally dehumanize the enemy in order to soften that blow to people's psyches because otherwise you'll get soldiers who have the enemies in their sights but are unable to pull the trigger.
Killing people is universally understood to be a terrible thing even when you're right. That you're even putting this in the same conceptual space as something so victimless as copyright infringement is straight up offensive. I'm honestly too angry to even argue coherently. Not a single person in this world loses any sleep over copyright infringement. Only lawyers even understand exactly what that even is.
> Remember, public domain is the natural state of information.
Nah, decaying is the natural state of information. It requires non-trivial effort to keep information available for reading and interpreting. Even paper, one of the best mediums for storing data over time, decomposes if not actively protected.
Libraries handle the preserving and sharing to the public of information. In spite of copyright, not thanks to it.
Historically they literally copied one book into paper to duplicate/preserve it. That would be copyright infringement now.
And more recently copyright holders are trying to delete any archives that could be used for that purpose like the internet archive or LibGen.
In other media we have game roms and copies of shows being illegal. Same treatment if it has been a week since release or it's been 20 years and you can't get it legally from anywhere.
It was basically impossible to survive solely as a writer until copyright. Imagine publishing a book in the 16th century. At best you'd get some royalties from the initial publisher. After that if you work becomes popular every printer across the continent can start printing copies without paying you anything. That's obviously a huge impediment to innovation and progress.
So? There are plenty of written works from before copyright. There would be more if we had been better about preservation. People will still write without copyright. Maybe the quality will even go up as there are fewer incentives for quantity over quality.
If your argument for copyright relies on protecting speicific jobs then you have no argument. Jobs become obsolete all the time.
If you want welfare then argue for that. Best if it isn't restricted to a small class of people.
Yes. Way less of them do cause very few people could afford to write.
> Maybe the quality will even go up as there are fewer incentives for quantity over quality
Maybe people who write/etc. time on average produce better quality than those who can only dedicate a few hours per day for it. Also you want to eradicate entire creative industries like cinema and television for no apparent reason.
> If your argument for copyright relies on protecting speicific jobs then you have no argument
No my argument is that copyright protection (including patents) was one of the main driving forces behind the progress of human progress over the last 300-500 years. Obviously the current system is not perfect, I'm not saying it is... Overall it still made the world a much better place than it would have been without it.
Humanity would be more than happy to make that effort if there was no risk of getting sued to oblivion for it. There's more than enough distributed storage capacity out there to hold it all. Copyright holders are the ones who are outright hostile to any and all preservation efforts, to the point preservation of culture is an argument for getting rid of copyright.
Preservation has nothing to do with copyright. Buy a book, and preserve it yourself. Done.
Oh, but you're only arguing against copyright so you can freely take others work without remuneration. IF you're a creator, and you believe that copyright shouldn't exist - everything you produce, please... put it in the public domain and see what happens.
> Preservation has nothing to do with copyright. Buy a book, and preserve it yourself. Done.
Wrong. My house burns down, the book is gone. Your advice is worse than using RAID is as a backup solution.
Preservation requires multiple independent redundant copies widely distributed over large geographical areas, cryptographically verified. Surely you can see how that flies in the face of copyright, a legal mechanism to give authors a monopoly on the production of copies.
Truth is bittorrent did more for preservation of culture that copyright ever did. You could even quantify how well preserved the data was since you could count how many redundant copies were present in the swarm.
> Cryptographically verified? How did we do it all these years?
Yeah, how did you? Data can get corrupted, you know. Things like hashing and error correction are essential.
> And I would like a source for your claim regarding BitTorrent.
Launch any torrent client. There will be an indicator of how many complete copies exist amongst the peers in the swarm. The higher the number, the more well preserved the data is. Really simple. It's also self-healing since you can check the data and fix errors by downloading the damaged blocks again.
Bittorrent is essentially the Linus Torvalds "real men publish things online so the whole world can mirror it" approach to backup and preservation. Shame copyright holders had to ruin it.
On the contrary. Copyright infringement is the norm. People infringe copyrights all day every day and they don't even realize it. You infringe copyright every single time you "save as" a picture you like from the internet. You infringe it again if you send that picture to your family and friends via a messaging service. Made a funny meme? It's a derivative work, copyright infringement. It's the 21st century, all of this is normal and expected, it happens at massive scales and not a single person loses a second of sleep over any of it.
It boggles my mind that people think they can own and control this stuff. Think of the tyranny necessary to prevent that and enable something as archaic as copyright to work in the 21st century. You'd have to destroy computers as we know them today. You'd have to destroy our computing freedoms and everything the word "hacker" stands for to achieve such a dystopia. You'd have to turn computers into passive content consumption appliances fully owned by corporations.
What are the "good reasons" you speak of? It seems like the primary purpose of copyright is to help enrich individuals or corporations (and only the ones who have the resources to fight legal battles). Most people on the Internet completely ignore copyright in their everyday life. And most of the time, nobody really cares, not even the owners of the copyright.
You’re clearly someone who just wants to consume content without rewarding the authors for it. There’s no point arguing against a position that’s fundamentally flawed.
Do you wanna know how many thousands of dollars my Steam account is worth? My PSN account? My physical video games and media collection? How much money I've spent on streaming services? For your information, I'm one of the idiots who was dumb enough to buy Windows Vista Ultimate. I have the shiny box and discs to prove it.
Not a single person on this website can accuse me of not supporting creators. I do it willingly, even though I don't believe in copyright, because I don't believe in punishing creators for flaws of the system. I do it even though I know deep down I'm getting an inferior product: "pirates" get blu-ray remuxes free while I get shitty ass Netflix video with compression artifacts in 90% black frames.
That's absurd. I don't pirate, I pay for content because the cost is pretty much negligible to me. I'm happy to reward authors for creating content I enjoy. But I agree with grandparent: copyright is immoral and it should be abolished for the benefit of humanity. We can share culture with the entire world at pretty much no cost at all, having copyright laws that put it out of reach of only the poorest for the exclusive benefit of a few rich is bullshit.
Would you be pleased if that applied to all of your work too? That immediately anyone can start taking your work and making money off of it?
Copyright at least makes big players pay the original creators for the rights to the works. Netflix going ahead and making money off of subscribers while paying nothing to creators would be a significantly worse situation.
Copyright does not protect authors, it protects publishers. This is justified as protecting authors in the very narrow sense that authors did get to negotiate with publishers first, but at the most disadvantaged position they will ever be at in their career. They have to pay, but they can pay a pittance and authors will take it because they have no better options.
The low- or zero-copyright world would at least end the practice of publishers buying rights to works and then pushing the artists who made them out of it. For example, there are loads of unfinished trilogies whose authors would love to finish them, but the publishers don't want them to, because they consider it a lost cause. Nor do they want their authors self-publishing or going with another outfit, so they won't revert ownership back to the artists, because an unexploited, worthless copyright is still worth more as part of a horde of gold that they sleep on.
NDAs would still apply even in a zero-copyright world. Of course, there's the related question of whether or not publishers would actually agree to nondisclosure in said world, and whether or not authors would care to actually refuse publication agreements that lacked them.
The thing about publishers is that none of them are interested in publishing without copyright. Authors have inherent advantages in their craft that would at least leave them with something in a zero-copyright world - you can still crowdfund literature, and that's why you see plenty of self-published authors but not that many self-published filmmakers[0]. But publishers can't - all the things that make them money require not just copyright, but also sublicensing rights on derivative works. In the zero-copyright world they're all fighting to republish things that people already have. So they need copyright ownership with licensing terms that subtly disfavor authors instead.
That being said, I'm not an advocate for zero-copyright. That's the nuclear option. But it does need to be pared back to protecting artists from publishers[1], rather than protecting publishers from readers.
[0] YouTubers and TikTokers don't count, that's a different medium.
> Would you be pleased if that applied to all of your work too? That immediately anyone can start taking your work and making money off of it?
Sure. From now on I either release my software as AGPLv3 or I don't release it at all. Truth is even if someone violates my license I'm not gonna waste my limited time on this earth litigating against them in court over it. I have better things to do.
Stallman would disagree but I think licenses like GPL shouldn't even exist at all: they all depend on copyright to enforce their terms and copyright shouldn't exist in the first place. It's fair as long as nobody is protected: billion dollar corporations can make money off my code but I can make money off of theirs too. Netflix code gets leaked? Oops, looks like it's our code now.
Also, Netflix literally exists to solve the problems created by copyright itself. It's ironic how it was ultimately destroyed by copyright holders when they pulled their precious content and started their own shitty streaming services instead. Were it not for copyright, we'd all be using peer to peer technology invented decades ago to consume content much more efficiently. Everything humanity ever created would be available at our fingertips.
> Netflix literally exists to solve the problems created by copyright itself
You do realize that barely any of that content they provide would even exist without copyright. There would be two outcomes either movies only get released in cinemas and the original copy is for projection is heavily guarded with not official "home video" releases at all or no movies with a significant budget ever get released.
> Everything humanity ever created would be available at our fingertips.
Yes but "Everything" in that situation would only be a marginal proportion of what is available now. Forget expensive movies/tv shows/etc. how could even any writer make a living on his own without having to rely on some reason patron or a full time job like back in the 16th century?
You're telling me these creators can't find a way to continue working without copyright? Come on. Even big companies use stuff like kickstarter and patreon to raise funds. They'll be fine.
> Why not just make it public domain? That's the default in a world without the right of ownership of code.
Because if I do that I'm just unconditionally transferring wealth to corporations just as you claimed. No point in doing that while they still get to be "all rights reserved". It's only fair if nobody's protected.
> How would you make money of it? It's not like you can sell it.
By using it to do improve our own systems. Apparently what the GPL already provides used to be the norm back in the day before copyright protection was applied to software. We should go back to those days.
> How would it be paid for, since there's nothing that could be sold?
Selling copies after the fact doesn't make sense. Paying for the product before the work is done does. Crowdfunding, patronage. I'm sure they'll figure it out if they have to.
> Crowdfunding, patronage. I'm sure they'll figure it out if they have to
So basically every creator would have to have a rich patron/be funded by a government/etc. who would obviously generally want to impose their own agendas?
> Crowdfunding
So unless an author already has a widespread reputation and a large group of people willing to support him he has no right to benefit from his works? Somebody who is completely unknown but ends up publishing a book which ends up widely popular gets absolutely nothing?
I find it inconceivable bizarre that anyone would ever want to live in such a dark and intellectually subdued world for some ideological reason. I mean abolishing copyright would throw us back to the 15-16th century just with internet instead of the printing press...
But most of that happens already? That's how record labels and publishers do business. You are already living in that dark an intellectually subdued world. A few examples I remember:
> Copyright is not in place to protect the authors, but to protect the corporations that own the rights.
The system is not perfect, obviously. There are problems that need to be addressed. But I refuse to view the world in black and white terms
Copyright does protect the author or at least most authors to varying degrees. Just go around and ask any author whether they'd prefer the entire concept of copyright to be abolished because it's used to "protect the corporations"...
> You are already living in that dark an intellectually subdued world
And I'm certain it could get even darker with no copyright protections at all.
> I refuse to view the world in black and white terms
But you are "certain" copyright is good, and removing it would be terrible. That's awfully close to painting things in black and white.
> Just go around and ask any author
I put all my work under open source licenses and creative commons. If copyright disappeared I would just continue to do so. Corporations would be screwed, but art can go on without them.
> So basically every creator would have to have a rich patron/be funded by a government/etc. who would obviously generally want to impose their own agendas?
Already a thing. They even have an euphemism for it: "producer". Every time you watch a film or something, look for the producers in the credits. Those are the guys with the money.
Generally their agenda is just to make more money. This is a relatively benign agenda and in certain cases allows (or used to anyway, not sure about nowadays...) authors a high degree of creative freedom.
If it's no longer possible to make any profitable movies whatsoever, just try to imagine what happens...
Well they managed to realize a couple of decent movies in the USSR so maybe the situation of 99% government or interest group funded cinema and TV production won't be utterly terrible just very miserable.
Thos who do want to make money will need to adapt to other business models - probably something closer to crowdfunding or patronage. How exactly is irrelevant for copyright reform as the law should not concern itself with protecting specific jobs.
I'm capable of pirating and yet I have a Netflix subscription because the service is better and I like some of the shows they produce.
There's still a customer base, it's just not held hostage.
Yes, and we can make it stop existing if we want to. Even without a billion dollar lobbying campaign. It's called civil disobedience. Convince yourself some law is fundamentally flawed and shouldn't exist, make the choice to disobey and accept the consequences.
> Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law. - Martin Luther King Jr.
The problem with copyright is that it was defined by politicians and lobbyists. Since this is about our culture, which concerns everyone, perhaps a national poll is in order where people can vote for a period between e.g. the two extremes 10 and 70 years.
Frankly, I can't understand such movies aren't monetized more. I can imagine there' some money to be made from ads, especially from movies most people will never watch anyway.
My teenage daughter will most likely never watch The Seventh Seal. Unless she stumbled upon it on Youtube or something.
The other 'best way' to reduce piracy would be to sell all electronic works through the same online interface without the need for any other apps or DRM.
Otherwise, the pirated product is actually better than the paid one.
I’m not sure one single interface is the solution, but making a product that people actually want to buy is. At the moment you can subscribe to half a dozen different streaming services, only to end up with some of the content you want to watch. Spotify basically solved music pirating. Today it doesn’t really matter if you subscribe to Spotify, or Apple Music, or Tidal, or YouTube Music… most people can get most of the music they want to listen to from one of them, and the experience is good enough that pirating music would just be needlessly tedious (for most consumers).
Having a single online interface means that people will fight to control it (and it's not partition tolerant). Better to go content-addressed and let people move bits around in whatever way suits their use case. Then, separately from delivery, have player plugins which compare hashes of the content to an online database to decide who ought to get paid for the bits I've consumed. It's the player, after all, which knows how my attention was allocated, not the downloader.
> The best way to reduce piracy of copyrighted works is to cut the copyright period by 75% relative to current standards.
Personally, I believe this would have a negligible effect on piracy or even online arguments around copyright. I believe that, because I think the most piracy concerns recent works, e.g., computer games and movies of the last few years.
I completely agree with you, but I think the issue with something like this is the sheer volume of lobbying power that companies like Nintendo and Disney have to stop it.
It shouldn't be legal to hire groups of professionals to do that, it also shouldn't be legal to send your representatives gifts, take them on vacations, or out to dinner
Abolish copyright. It’ll be like open-source software. The works created will be less in quality and quantity, but they’ll be works of passion, and I can watch everything. Worth the tradeoff.
Of course this comment is nothing other than an internet rant because humans has no control over humanity’s large scale activities. They’re almost deterministically emergent.
The best way I have found to prevent the piracy of my book (https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust) is to inundate pirate platforms with only the first chapter and with a discount code inside for those who can't afford the original price.
My hypothesis is that if they enjoyed the first chapter, most people would want to support my work instead of being freeriders.
So far it worked really well.
Thinking that you can prevent bits flowing from internet is delusional, it's better to think about how to align incentives.
I’ve worked to prevent piracy of a SaaS software for a niche industry.
When we put the first anti piracy solution in place during the winter of 2020 they tripled the number of subscribers within a week.
Some might argue this was due to Covid lockdowns but this was months after most businesses had already been locked down and the timing directly coincided with the implementation. Support was inundated with requests to disable the new feature that had prevented piracy.
Subscriptions have kept growing nicely.
On the other hand, I got started in software development as a kid by learning about how to use hex editors to implement hacks in games. The warez scene was big in those days.
Not sure what the right answer is to addressing piracy. I’m sure it helps kids and those in developing countries get into the industry but if people don’t pay for something it’ll no longer be offered.
An argument is that those who would pirate aren't going to pay regardless. I think a software for a niche industry has a lot less flexibility for the customer to do that than a piece of entertainment like game or movie.
Piracy definitely has a negative effect on sale. But whether that effect is worth the effort to implement DRM solutions or not is a different issue.
Some of those who would pirate aren't going to pay regardless. This is unremarkable economically -- we're all used to the ideas of price points and elasticity. Every market for a good or service will segment into people whose demand is inelastic, people who register at somewhat elastic levels of demand / substitutability, and people whose demand is very elastic and substitutable. Piracy & other forms of uncompensated acquisition just invite us to think about segments where the price point is vanishing.
DRM probably works best in situations where it's also paired with convenience and there are modest to high levels of inelastic demand (and in the realm of low-to-modest levels of inelasticity, convenience might be enough even w/o DRM)
The other fact about piracy that's probably worth considering is that in some cases it can produce future sales. Not all people have an agreeable desire to contribute economically and understand that piracy means they haven't compensated the provider, which threatens their incentive/ability to provide more, but some do, and will eventually buy in when they're less price sensitive or more convinced of the value in a work by experience with it.
(This last point, incidentally, is one reason why I think Spotify's narrative of having saved the industry from piracy is self-serving and wrong to the point it may even have done more damage than the piracy it replaced via convenience for many. Someone engaging in music piracy knows they aren't contributing to a musician economically but may well decide to make legit purchases once they're a fan with a relationship to the artist's work. Someone using Spotify is encouraged to believe they're engaged in a legitimate economic exchange with the artist and is less likely to feel a need for later fan buy-in... when in fact the economics of platforms are practically indistinguishable from piracy for many artists.)
I would guess that a lot of the folks who suddenly needed licenses might not have ever used your software if they hadn’t pirated it first. In other words the piracy acted as marketing that eventually converted to sales. Hard to know for sure.
How was the SaaS product pirated? I've always used that to refer to a delivery model where the software is centrally hosted. Was it that people were sharing their logins?
I’ve seen my fair share of web-apps where the subscription check is entirely client side JS and a simple self MITM is enough to bypass payments. Not saying this is the case in this particular instance but it’s definitely something I’ve seen more then once.
I’ve brought it up as an issue with some companies but I’m usually met with a shrug and a response in the realms of “our users wouldn’t know how to do that”. I’ve even seen car charging poles with entirely client side JS to validate account/login to charge for the electricity.
I too have grown up, playing games with a hex editor in one hand and tcpdump in another so I have a habit of poking around to see how stuffs made.
Niche industry I'm not surprised. The cost per seat is generally quite high and thus a strong incentive for businesses to use more seats than they have licenses for.
> The report found that illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games, according to the report.
> The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films: “The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”
Of course it is - the title says "Piracy Doesn’t Harm Sales", and most sales aka revenue comes from blockbusters. Global box office in 2019 was $42B[1], and the top 10 highest grossing movies alone accounted for $13B[2].
If losing some small portion of their tens of billions to piracy actually helps hundreds of smaller producers to somewhat level the grossly inequitable playing field, then I think the title is fair.
If hundreds or thousands of smaller businesses are allowed to flourish or even survive, thanks to the higher sales due to piracy leveling the playing field a bit, then it would be kinda wild to suggest that "piracy harms sales", as if only Disney matters.
Btw, 10 out of those top 10 films you cite for 2019 were sequels or remakes. All of them came from huge established megacorps - 7 Disney, 2 Sony, 1 WB. My sympathy for them could dance on the head of a pin.
While I also DGAF about disney/sony/wb bottom line, my point is that "Piracy Doesn’t Harm Sales except for companies I don't care about" is not the same as "Piracy Doesn’t Harm Sales."
I also wonder to what degree the study was actually suppressed. I mean, it sounds pretty scandalous to say it was suppressed, but also a non-result is not super interesting. Maybe they just didn’t trumped it.
> The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.
Remember that absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. The study seems to point at the first one. I don't care enough to be bothered with reading a 300 page report but if you consider taking it as truth, I would recommend you to read and analyse the method before drawing conclusions based on the headline.
Although, it is easy to misinterpret your quote because of the removed context.
> The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films:“The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”
This is only true for a subset of films, “major blockbusters.” (Of courses, this is where the “top” in your quote comes from, but it seems easy to miss).
This is accounting for piracy of games, music and movies - in total, having only one place where sales are affected is quite minimal - and looks like an anomaly if everything else is unaffected.
Can't put CD into your phone; but you can put MP3 on it. As Gaben said, "piracy is a service problem".
Look at years; that's when portable music players; then smartphones; started to become popular
Pirating is easier than buying CD then ripping MP3 just to listen.
If we had the ease of use of today's music streaming the dip would probably be much lower; but between the tech at the time and RIAA cockblocking anyone that tried.
Re: Gaben quote - While there are some grains of truth to the quote, I think it’s oversimplifying the problem. After all, Gaben’s primary product is essentially a DRM platform (one of the first online DRM platforms for that matter!), evidently he believes he can’t compete with piracy on service quality alone.
Continuing the game piracy line, game piracy is often a significantly worse service outside of the “free stuff” aspect. You have to learn how torrents work, download risky executable files from the internet, and/or run sketchy cracking utilities. VS Steam or GoG which are generally fairly polished experiences that offer nice value-adds (updating, social features, etc).
Take Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. You can buy a DRM free copy from GoG pretty easily… yet the torrents for it are still quite active from what I can see.
> After all, Gaben’s primary product is essentially a DRM platform (one of the first online DRM platforms for that matter!), evidently he believes he can’t compete with piracy on service quality alone.
He absolutely can. Steam is DRM but it's the least shitty DRM implementation I've ever seen. I get very angry when corporations start rolling their own shitty stores instead of just using Steam for everything. I have games on my account that used to be sold on Steam but aren't available anymore because the corporation made their own store. It's hard to describe how aggravating that is.
Back in the day I'd buy games I already had on Steam just for the convenience of having them on Steam. There's a reason people don't remember what PC gaming used to be like before Steam and it's because Steam made them forget all about stuff like downloading multiple 500 MB incremental patches just to play online. Steam is essentially the Windows package manager.
I disagree, I think Gabe does genuinely believe service alone can prevent piracy. Steamworks DRM is opt-in for developers and easily broken (which we have to assume is intentional because Valve definitely has the means to make something stronger). People like to assume that a game being on Steam automatically equates to it having DRM, but there are a number of games in my library that can be copied to a thumb stick or any other drive once they're installed and work fine forever just like you would do with a GOG game. The existence of Steamworks always seemed more like a placebo to ease developers onto the platform than anything.
> After all, Gaben’s primary product is essentially a DRM platform (one of the first online DRM platforms for that matter!), evidently he believes he can’t compete with piracy on service quality alone.
Steam DRM is entirely optional and not required to put the game on Steam. DRM is game developer choice, steam is just giving a (shitty, easily breakable) option.
> Take Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. You can buy a DRM free copy from GoG pretty easily… yet the torrents for it are still quite active from what I can see.
Well, some people won't start paying even if they have means. And some will not have enough money to ever say "okay I will actually buy game instead of putting it towards updating my rig". Question is really how many of those would be converted vs. just not play the game, especially now where there is plenty of F2P stuff, or insane value bundles or sales.
You’re kinda arguing the same thing. Just because a torrent is active doesn't mean the volume is high or even remotely comparable to actual sales. For the right price, people will do what is most convenient, generally. The fact that Steam has DRM only matters to users here. Steam/GoG is easier than torrenting is easier than driving to the store.
Sure, not everyone has $70 to drop on a AAA, but then you get into the copyleft argument that authors would still benefit by giving their content to people who cant afford the list price for a reduced price or even free since you wouldn’t have sold it at full price anyway so you’re missing out on the word of mouth marketing and any lower revenue paid.
> Pirating is easier than buying CD then ripping MP3 just to listen.
Really? I've never thought so. Perhaps if you consider buying the CD as a major burden, which I don't get.
Put CD in computer. Rip at your choice of bitrate. Listen.
vs.
Download pirating software. Search for song. Download song. Verify it's not a trojan for an executable or zip bomb, etc. Verify you got the full songs. Verify you got the actual songs you were looking for. Verify that it's not a low quality rip. Listen.
The article you're citing literally blames streaming, which incidentally has also been largely responsible for a decline in music piracy - it's too cheap and convenient for most consumers to bother pirating instead.
It makes absolute sense. There's tons of music/movies/books that I never would have been exposed to if it weren't for piracy. As a result, I've bought a ton of legal media from those artists that I wouldn't have otherwise.
I have a Netflix account and I still torrent the content because unless I use edge I don’t get greater than 720p.
I torrent a lot of games because 2 hours (steam refund) is a very narrow window for a lot of games. The reality is 90% of them I don’t end up meshing with. The ones that I do, I buy.
Even then, I don't believe they stream 4k to browsers. They only stream to devices like smart tvs or official Netflix apps with high quality. Your average browser is limited to 720p. This is the quintessential "pirating is better" example.
It’s so often a services problem. I honestly probably wouldn’t pay if it weren’t a family shared account, but my parents use it and they don’t know or care about the video quality like that.
I also just prefer the video player of my choice.
Paying customers should never have a worse experience than pirating customers. I think this is a huge reason for the success of music streaming. Less so for video streaming now with the huge fragmentation.
Before Poland joined the EU, one of leftovers from communism was that IP laws resembled these in China - in reality there were none in effect.
Imagine farmers' market but with bootleg VHS and audio cassettes, CDs, brand clothes etc. In every major city. On a weekly basis.
Great majority of Poles were poor as shit and buying original copy of music or video cassette was a very distant thought. Piracy was "normal". I was introduced to The Prodigy by my math teacher, who lent me a copy-copy of their Music for the Jilted Generation. I learned English from pirated movies. Got to know a lot of great music and TV shows.
I now own all of Prodigy's CDs as well as hundreds of other legal music CDs and BluRay sets/boxes. Not a chance in hell I'd buy all this without a taste of a product beforehand.
Looking at this from 2023, I believe that our access to affordable (pirated) creations of western culture allowed up to leave Soviet (or communist as we were not a part of CCCP) mentality behind more quickly.
I remember my friend basically paid for all his PC upgrades by investing in CD writer and just ripping stuff for people for equivalent of $5 a pop.
If we didn't pirate we wouldn't "buy more games", maybe once a year, coz we were poor. Once steam become a thing and once I started earning wages and just bought stuff, it was easier and it come with updates. Piracy is mostly a service problem. And it also enables gamepass-like usage, download, play for 2 hours ,if you don't like it just delete it. I guess Steam refunds cover that angle well now.
Sure, from time to time someone will go "fuck you Squeenix, I won't pay $70 for port 2 years after the release", but overall people who massively pirate usually can't afford most of what they pirate in the first place.
I dunno, having to re-download next pack (if game is popular enough to even get that) every time new DLC comes isn't a bad motivation to get the game on next sale instead of continuing pirating.
Similar situation here in Brazil. There are little markets selling random stuff in pretty much every city, including counterfeit physical items and infringing media of all kinds. Sometimes the US screeches loud enough for police to mount operations against these things but it doesn't seem to do much more than temporarily disrupt their operations.
> Great majority of Poles were poor as shit and buying original copy of music or video cassette was a very distant thought. Piracy was "normal".
Yeah, I know what you mean. Minimum wage here in Brazil is about 256 USD. People who make minimum wage can barely support themselves. Very few people will purchase video games at $50+ price points.
Argentina was not poor as shit but have the same experience as Poland and many other parts of the world.
I think it is more connected to the culture and economic "platform" than to economic means: piracy is linked to the "fungible" nature of media and software.
I think now less piracy is connected to subscription services where you never own the software. On the other hand, anti-piracy means for software such as Microsoft Office or Adobe should be considered malware.
There are flea markets and party stores where you can buy the same in the US. I don't really think it leads to people buying more of the legitimate stuff. Except in the case where the bootleg quality is really, really bad (hand-held camera in a theatre vs a DVD rip for example)
Netflix has successfully driven me back to piracy. Their catalog is shit, they have only one part of a lot of trilogies, Harry Potter keeps disappearing and their UI is so full of bugs I wonder if anyone working at Netflix actually uses it.
but the idea of EU suppressing a commissioned report that "goes south" is absolutely diabolical to its reputation. That does not sound very progressive.
Not publishing is not suppressing. The EU's reputation is that of the greatest regulator on the planet. It acts in the collective interest of EU citizens not the libertarian (or progressive) fantasies of American capitalists.
Let's say IP such and such is protected by copyright, which is bound to restrict piracy, which can be defined as enjoyment and/or distribution of copyrighted IP without retribution to rightful ownership. This is all fine when you have some control over distribution, which is not the case anymore, mainly because torrent protocole.
IP rightful owners went the easy way, weaponizing willfully abiding legal systems and what not (paid with our taxes), while dealing directly with large IP distribution platforms, before launching their own distribution platforms. This is where we're at. Big deal. Torrents are still a thing, as much as sharing on other protocoles, through territories outside the rule of law, but not only.
How about trying something else? How about putting up a realistic price on IP, so anyone willing to pay (and get a receipt for it) could enjoy and distribute IP legally, no matter how and from where they got said IP in the first place? How about a price per head per event (phe fare?), a price that is affordable enough for anyone to compete any big corporations? Even with some temporal and/or geographical restrictions, I'd gladly pay, if that means I can legally enjoy and share stuff outside platform limitations. How about I open my own repertoire theater and show any movie I want, or start my own niche platform? Suits, please, think about it. If it's simple and affordable enough, people will gladly use it.
Most of the comments were about either piracy is harmful or not. Another point here is that, for me, it's natural that the EU rejects or neglects a comprehensive report because it contradicts previous findings, especially in cases like piracy that have innate harmful characteristics.
Well... To be fair "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", the study concluded that they couldn't prove there was a relation, but didn't proved there no such relation. In that regard, the study is inconclusive and the EU is right in not publishing it, lest the media take it to mean that piracy had no effect on sales.
But it does harm free and freemium copyrighted content, because now they don’t just compete with their costlier (but likely better produced) alternatives, but also their pirated copies as well.
It basically kill competition and helps big players.
The study did not find that piracy does harm sales. There's a difference. (One might infer from the data that it doesn't, but that's different to the study having concluded that.)
That sounds like a charged question from someone that's not actually interested in learning more, but in case you are actually interested, or if anybody else is curious: the above line of thought is based on a faulty conflation of physical items vs information, similar to how "intellectual property rights" try to glom onto physical property rights to give it a sheen of legitimacy.
They're fundamentally different things, and technology has made that difference obvious. Instead of adapting, some people prefer to try using legal means to turn back the clock and pretend that this whole computer thing didn't really happen. That approach hasn't worked out well, and will become even less effective as technology progresses.
The solution is not to look backwards like luddites, it's to embrace the new options that technology gives. There's several great ways to earn a living while producing information that people use today:
- Get paid before producing the information, like Kickstarter
- Get paid in an ongoing manner to produce information, like Patreon
- Produce the information in order to attract interest in other ways to make money, such as a band going on tour or doing limited print runs of vinyl records
- Get paid directly for the information, like Bandcamp
- Less ethical options, such as ad-supported
So to directly answer the "entitled to other people's work for free" fallacy, remember that the "other people" in this scenario are the ones sharing their work. If you don't want the world to sing your song, keep it to yourself. If you do want to share it, there's plenty of ways to make a living while doing so.
The better question is why you think you're entitled to an inheritable multiple lifetime government assigned monopoly on literally any intellectual production of your mind. Even the proponents of patents aren't that entitled.
Intellectual property can be logically reduced to number ownership. Art, films, music, source code... It's just data. Data is just bits. Bits are numbers in base 2. You're trying to own numbers in the 21st century, the age of information and permanently networked pocket supercomputers. That's how delusional ownership of ideas really is.
It’s the nature of how computers make copying an initial work nearly zero additional cost.
This has never been the case in human history prior to digital/analog recording of content, and it keeps getting closer and closer to zero cost to duplicate.
This breaks people’s moral framework because they now have to grasp things like game theory to understand second and third order harm.
This comments relies on a faulty assumption that other people share the same moral framework as the commenter. Unfortunately, people commenting like this don't tend to realize how much of their own moral framework is simply an ill-fitting hand-me-down from previous generations.
The moral framework we have inherited from the past was in contrast to the ‘might makes right’ ‘crush the weak’ and ‘take what you want if you can’ moral framework of the Greek/Roman era.
I still don't understand - even if the cost is literally zero to copy, that still wouldn't necessarily entitle one to someone else's work without compensation if that is what they require.
For most people it comes down to trying something they aren't sure they will enjoy. If you're not sure you'll like something that costs a significant amount and piracy is not an option, you most likely just won't buy it. If piracy is an option, maybe you still don't buy it, but now you get to try it. Both outcomes have the same effect on the publisher of the work so the act of piracy hasn't harmed anyone, costed anyone anything, and now the user can come away knowing whether or not they liked the work which is a positive. It's not that hard of a concept but easy to be confused by if you look at it from the traditional sense of physical wares where a "stolen" sale causes harm.
I think people consider a copy of work differently than the original in some abstract sense. Digital is the first medium that makes the copy equivalent to the original.
Perhaps (and I'm just assuming), you were never too poor, without a library to access any kind of media and decent internet/computer to watch something on streaming?
This is comparable to the lifetime of technical patents, and so would allow for a reasonable period to collect revenue from the work that can be used to finance new works and so on.
Otherwise, you just have consolidated interests squatting on material and collecting rents for no justifiable reason. It's entirely ridiculous, for example, that a 1957 film like the Seventh Seal isn't yet in the public domain.
This kind of reasonable change to copyright law would go a long ways towards justifying legal crackdowns on piracy of more recent works, I think.