Is Piracy Wrong?

[quote=“Deuce Dropper”]Didn’t The Avengers just break the box office record this weekend?

I think Hollywood is coping well with the pirates.[/quote]

I laughed at this one, I guess lowest common denominator really works for these type of films.

yeah - the people keep going! :loco:

I thought I was the only person who hated that movie. Fortunately it was a free ticket. Guess they couldn’t sell them at full price.

What bothers me about copyright restrictions on electronic media is that they take away traditional property rights. If I buy a paper book, I’m implicitly granted the right to sell, lend, or give away that book to anyone I like. Same with a music CD. And why should I not? If I buy an electric drill, a wok, or even a cup of coffee, it is my right to share it as I see fit. If electronic books or music are being rented - available for my use only until I get bored with them, and then taken away or left idle - then I expect to pay rental prices, not just a $ or two discounted off the physical price.

DRM even restricts my right to use things myself. A few years ago, I bought an expensive (technical) e-book. I wanted it in electronic form so it was easily portable (the paper version weighed a couple of kilos). I forget exactly what happened - Adobe Acrobat upgraded itself, IIRC - and the ebook stopped working. I wrote to Amazon: I want to download the book again. No. Bad luck. We have a “policy”. No skin off their nose to give me another copy, but they have their policy. Well, my policy, when companies rip me off, is to head over to The Pirate Bay, where I was lucky enough to find an unlocked copy. I honestly wouldn’t have downloaded it otherwise, but that book was mine. I paid for it.

When I was a kid, my cousin had the same computer, and we use to ‘share’ - i.e., copy - games, which at the time were on cassettes and easily duplicated. Did the publisher lose anything? No, because neither one of us would have bought the product for our own individual use, but we considered it worthwhile to buy one between us. The publisher almost certainly sold more copies because the tapes were easy to copy and share around. I think economists have a word for this phenomenon. It’s not just me justifying my childhood of petty crime.

Paradoxically, the difference today is that copying is TOO easy. Copying a tape was a pain, and it often didn’t work, so virtually nobody was making a business out of it. The method was used only to share as one would normally share one’s stuff.

[quote=“finley”]

Paradoxically, the difference today is that copying is TOO easy. Copying a tape was a pain, and it often didn’t work, so virtually nobody was making a business out of it. The method was used only to share as one would normally share one’s stuff.[/quote]

To copying is wrong because it’s too easy. It was OK with tapes but not with CDs? It was OK with tapes, so-so with CDs but WRONG with mp3?

Ehem

No, I didn’t say that.

I was arguing that I have a right to share (for example) a cassette tape in the same way as I have the right to share any other item of my property. Any physical item can be shared when it is not being used, and nobody makes a fuss about that. Sharing is usually considered a Good Thing. I could, for example, have lent my cousin the original tape to let him play the game, and I doubt anybody would cry “piracy!”.

Giving him a copy of the tape is essentially identical to lending him a sole copy because, although I can’t actually guarantee it, it’s a bit unlikely we’d both be playing the game at the exact same time. Giving a copy to my entire class at school - different thing entirely, but then again: because I was able to share the tape (by copying it), the game company made one extra sale. Had I been physically prevented from doing that, it would have made zero extra sales. I can imagine a scenario in which a very expensive game, which no single one of my classmates would have thought worthwhile to pay for, might have been sold to a group of half-a-dozen kids. Again, one extra sale (although one-sixth of the profit), which is better than no sales.

The point about ease-of-copying is that a CD can be replicated thousands of times with virtually zero effort, with the copies being sold for profit, whereas tapes simply weren’t worth the trouble, so piracy was self-limiting. Making thousands of copies DOES rob the publishing company of profits, because many of the buyers would have been willing to pay full price. A very small number of copies, shared between people who would otherwise definitely not buy the product, increases company sales.

Of course, you might consider it “wrong” that the company is prevented from making their predetermined per-unit profit margin on a smaller number of total sales. Fair enough, although I bet their accountant would be more than happy with the aggregate outcome. I was simply making the point that I consider it wrong for a company to restrict the rights which I normally expect when purchasing property, while pretending that they are not. If I am not being granted my full set of rights, then the price should be reduced accordingly, or alternative incentives offered to make it worth my while to accept that reduced package of rights.

I think the various pay-per-use distribution methods (for software) are a much better idea. They accurately describe the transaction - it’s NOT a sale of property, but a charge for services - and they’ll go a long way towards reducing piracy and satisfying people like me who think the present rules are unfair to consumers.

So we are back at square one.

The argument you are making (that the quality and the number of the copies made effects the ethical staus of copying per se) is, to my mind, essentially the same as the argument ‘copying is piracy, piracy is wrong.’

Surely you are not going to make the argument that one murder is OK but hundreds of murders are wrong? Or stealing $10k is OK but stealing $100k is wrong. I say surely because then we are in the awkward position to ask at what point right becomes wrong; i.e. what is the essential ethical difference between 100,000 or 99,999? Surely, we have to say it is not the amount of stealing that you do but that stealing per se that you do is wrong.

Therefore, with piracy (and in ethics generally) we usually reduce it to the single act - the copy (or the murder, etc). Be it done once or be it done twice, or three times, or three thousand times!

Perhaps you are arguing that it is not really wrong if I sit at home and make a thousand copies of my favourite albums, just to keep them backed up, say, or from copying them from one hard drive to another over whatever time? If this were the case you perhaps would be arguing that DRM should be implemented that only allowed a certain number of copies by a given owner, or each should copy according to the maximum allowed by his conscience.

Perhaps then you were arguing that it is OK to share but not OK to profit from the sharing? So, in that case you would argue it is OK to copy and give one to a friend but it is not OK to sell the copies (as bootlegs) at a market (like they used to with tapes). And again, it’s OK to make a torrent but it is not OK to have a website that sells advertising to people who download torrents.

So, please clarify: is your argument to do with the numbers of copies or is it to do with who you give them to or is it do with where you share or is it to do with how many sales you might be denying the copyright holders?

Something like that. Copying does not equal piracy. Under certain conditions copying can actually cause an increase in the copyright owner’s profits; some under-the-radar musicians have exploited exactly that effect to turn a profit. Theft is wrong is because it deprives someone of something that they’ve worked to acquire. Mass copying and re-sale does that; it is therefore theft. Small-scale copying does NOT appear to do that - it puts MORE money in the originator’s pocket. Therefore, it isn’t theft. Unfortunately it’s hard to tell where the “crossover” occurs, and it would certainly be impossible to define in law.

The comparison with murder is spurious because no such effect occurs.

Again the evidence seems to contradict what you say.

What is the Pirate Bay (and torrents in general) but mass impersonal copying and a profit making enterprise, to boot?

Yet, this year, we have the biggest grossing movie and record breaking record album sales.

There are two parts to copyright: one, protecting works so that the creators can make a profit thus not only rewarding them but encouraging future work; and the creation and protection of a rich public domain of work. From the start the public good was considered as important as rewarding work. Therefore copying works is not the same as theft as copyright law in essence grants that your access to any piece of work is a fundamental good. And eventually you will get complete free access to it unlike a piece of property which you never get a piece of no matter how many years you stand outside looking at it.

I was talking to a successful author last night about how everything in his books and DVDs was readily available for free on his Web site, and he explained that there was a very obvious hike in sales the more his stuff was available online for free. Go figure. :loco:

Your author friend is not alone. Paulo Coelho famously went on Pirate Bay to promote his latest book. He says pirates are responsible for his success after some Russian websites copied and distributed millions of his books, i.e. made him millions of fans (~12 million). Now every book he writes (not to mentions the sales of the old ones) all go straight to the top of the charts across the world, thanks to pirating. Talk about encouraging new work.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/01/paulo-coelho-readers-pirate-books

On a personal note, I looked at what remains of my CD collection the other day (long story short: I gave all my CDs away when I got my ipod :doh: :doh: :doh:). Every CD I own I first had been given a copy of or acquired a copy of on torrent or heard on mp3, via podcast or on the radio - either I got a copy if a certain song or an album or just got into a musician or even a style of music. It is how I got into most of the music I listen to. The gigs I’ve been to were of artists of whose I owned pirated material. They GOT sales off me and continue to get sales and get promoted by me BECAUSE I first got into them by hearing their music for free. Of course, this is besides the fact that now every CD I own is a digital copy. If I upload, I promote. If someone gets paid (advertising, say, on Pirate Bay) that makes the world a better place. More jobs, more money, more knowledge, more creativity.

I think you’ll find history contradicts you on the interests at work at the start of copyright.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law

OK, so its wikiP but you can see from the first sentence the book publishing companies are the first to get on the legislative job with copyright.

But I’m glad you mention it. Significantly, it’s books they start to prohibit the copying of. Can you imagine the historical absurdity of outlawing copying books!? If books were not copied over and over by scholars (the people who mainly read them) we would have practically no books to speak of! All the works of antiquity - the Bible, the Greek classics, etc, etc, - we would have nothing! :roflmao:

Interesting bit of research:

http://torrentfreak.com/history-shows-that-copyright-monopolies-prevent-creativity-and-innovation-120205/

Comparing a situation where only an elite few had the means or the knowledge to copy books with a world where virtually anyone can make multiple copies of any work in seconds is really not valid.

As an author, it is discouraging to me when I sell a single copy of a book, and know perfectly well that the teacher has made 30 copies for every kid in the class to use. That is a significant difference in revenue for me. I don’t believe that providing the entire work online for free is the answer – they will simply skip the part where they have to do even a minimal amount of work to rip off the book.

I’m all for protecting an artist’s source of future revenue, but some of the writers I edit have all said the same thing you mention.

[quote=“ironlady”]Comparing a situation where only an elite few had the means or the knowledge to copy books with a world where virtually anyone can make multiple copies of any work in seconds is really not valid.

As an author, it is discouraging to me when I sell a single copy of a book, and know perfectly well that the teacher has made 30 copies for every kid in the class to use. That is a significant difference in revenue for me. I don’t believe that providing the entire work online for free is the answer – they will simply skip the part where they have to do even a minimal amount of work to rip off the book.[/quote]

I hear you. But one must remember what the copyright laws were originally intended for, which is to say that for a limited period of time the writer would be protected from other publishers wishing to profit by reprinting and selling the work, thus depriving the author of any revenue and motivation to create new work. The idea that I couldn’t have resold a book in a flee market, or lent it to a friend or read passages in public would have sounded absurd.

Although obviously an exception, J.K Rowling’s ability to amass a billion dollars somewhat undermines the argument online copying is causing writers to go broke, and how will copyrighting her work for another 100 years encourage her to make more public works? Isn’t it just a means to prohibit others using what is now part of our popular culture, like Superman or Yoda from Star wars, at some point shouldn’t people be allowed to make derivative works? How is continued copyright on Elvis Presley encouraging new works?

[quote=“ironlady”]Comparing a situation where only an elite few had the means or the knowledge to copy books with a world where virtually anyone can make multiple copies of any work in seconds is really not valid.

As an author, it is discouraging to me when I sell a single copy of a book, and know perfectly well that the teacher has made 30 copies for every kid in the class to use. That is a significant difference in revenue for me. I don’t believe that providing the entire work online for free is the answer – they will simply skip the part where they have to do even a minimal amount of work to rip off the book.[/quote]

The point is, if there were no copying there would be no knowledge. Copying not only preserves knowledge and ideas but spreads the fame and renown of the author.

The argument is valid. Your argument is make-believe. You can not say that you would have sold those books. If the teacher were unable to copy yours, the teacher would buy another and copy that. Copying actually gets you sales.

In fact most text books are made to be photocopy friendly. If you are a teacher and you know you are going to copy the book to distribute to the students you buy the copyable ones. It’s a feature.

You don’t seem to know much about the educational book market.

“Copyable” books (also known as blackline masters) are priced far above “regular books”. You can’t get people to buy at those prices if they are not teachers.
The problem in educational writing is this: there are two kinds of readers, and only one of them is a teacher.

Reader A is a person learning Chinese on his own. He will legitimately buy a single copy of my reader, and read it. He will then sell it, give it away, lend it, or whatever. I have absolutely no problem with any of that. I’ve been paid for one copy of the reader, and there is one copy out there. Unless people want to sit on each other’s laps, no one is going to use them simultaneously or in different locations or do anything else that would normally require two copies in the real world.

Buyer B is a person teaching Chinese. Miss B has 150 students in her public school classes. She would like every one of those kids to have a copy of the book, so she buys a single copy and goes to the Xerox machine in her school and makes 150 more copies. EVERY YEAR. I’ve been paid for one copy of the book, but over the course of five years, there are over 750 people reading it. That action would require at least 751 copies of the book (for each to have his own, or 31 copies minimum if you’re using class sets to be left at school), not one copy. I’ve just lost a significant amount of revenue.

I strongly suspect that most of the people who are so happy to run down copyright and declare that everything should be freely reproducible have never taken the time to write a book, code a program or compose a piece of music for sale. Even a “little reader” such as the ones I write take hours upon hours to produce. If you are proposing to take away any financial benefit from copyright, the “little people” will no longer be able to write and code and compose. This isn’t about Tom Cruise earning money from DVD residuals. It’s about an ordinary person who looks at their workday and says “How much time can I afford to devote to creating a new work today? Will I see any economic benefit from it at all?”

If you don’t offer protection to small producers, we will soon only have large producers – which sadly is the direction education is going in the US.

Damn, my post seems to have disappeared.

I agree with ironlady that there are instances where copying really does hurt. Education is one such field as the author gets no benefits from copying: no increase in fame or ability to secure a better contract.

This is different from many other fields., I suppose it may come down to whether copying increases your fan base. If it doesn’t then you lose. If it does then you gain.

[quote=“ironlady”]
If you are proposing to take away any financial benefit from copyright, the “little people” will no longer be able to write and code and compose. This isn’t about Tom Cruise earning money from DVD residuals. It’s about an ordinary person who looks at their workday and says “How much time can I afford to devote to creating a new work today? Will I see any economic benefit from it at all?”

If you don’t offer protection to small producers, we will soon only have large producers – which sadly is the direction education is going in the US.[/quote]

No one is proposing to take away any financial benefit from copyright. I notice you didn’t address any of the points I raised about excessive length to copyright, or its use in restricting new ideas and competition so here’s some more points.

Groups like the RIAA and MPAA are under current laws extorting money from anyone they can lay their hands on. A couple of years back I was in a exhibition in Frankfurt. A couple of weeks later we got a bill for around 300 Euros for playing music at the exhibition. It was our music, we produced and recorded it, and now we have this presumption of guilt and have to fight not to pay, outrageous.

The RIAA and MPAA have been sending out threatening letters requiring settlement from any owner of an IP address that illegally downloaded material, and now, some judges are realizing, an IP doesn’t equate to an individual, these are extortionist practices. Should we talk about the size of the fines people have received for copyright infringement?

By the way, someone copies the entire book for her students? Really? It must be a very short book, anything beyond a couple of pages my teachers were too lazy to copy for me and I would be told to buy a book. Also, if you want to protect your work there are measures, I take extraordinary lengths to protect my software. Books are harder I admit, but any written document I get under NDA is quite likely to have my name watermarked on every page, my email and company on footers and headers, just to make sure I am less likely to copy it to people who shouldn’t have it.

[quote=“Mucha Man”]Damn, my post seems to have disappeared.

I agree with ironlady that there are instances where copying really does hurt. Education is one such field as the author gets no benefits from copying: no increase in fame or ability to secure a better contract.

This is different from many other fields., I suppose it may come down to whether copying increases your fan base. If it doesn’t then you lose. If it does then you gain.[/quote]

Exactly the problem I’ve seen with local content publishing companies: teachers photocopy the material for teh students, no books are sold, can’t make profit, can’t make more books, the only books that survive are cheapie newspaper quality paper printed and copy paste unoriginals that are cheap, cheap, cheap. We used to prepare this extra thing like tests as a hook -which teachers love, as they do not have to prepare tests- and those were copied not only by the teachers, but other companies which literally printed them even more cheaply and charged. :laughing: My favorites were the ones who copied from the Internet the government tests, complieled and charged. :thumbsup: So still the big companies copyright infridgement was more harmnful than a single class instance of piracy by copying the tests/textbooks.