Piracy is a business model that has better distribution channels and better pricing than most of the competing business models.
Also, you can’t really compare it to stealing a car, because piracy is all about copying stuff. The creator/owner is still left with the original and in that sense hasn’t lost anything, except for the potential profit from licensing fees. But that pirate person probably wouldn’t have bought in in the first place, anyway.
It’s adapt or die, I’m afraid. Create good enough content and people will be willing to pay for it.
Off Topic:
As a side note, in Finland it is legal to make a copy of an original work for your own personal use if you can do it without “breaking a strong copy protection”. For that right we – like some other countries – pay another (yay!) tax (For details, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy).
Instead, why don’t you spend the money on an objective look at why people are pirating SP books, and what effect that actually has on business. I think that information would be far more valuable - although probably very hard to garner due to the nature of studying illegal activities - than paying someone to send takedown notices. I mean, it’s like hiring someone to bail water out of a leaky boat instead of trying to fix the leak. Either way I’d be very interested in seeing a writeup on this process and any tangible results.
Personally I’m in two minds about file sharing. On the one hand, I have a friend that publishes a couple of books, and I would never share those without permission. On the other, I encourage her to do so, and see file sharing as a pretty much victimless crime. I guess that’s just basic psychology - some dude named bob dies on the other side of the planet and I don’t blink, my dog dies and I shed a tear - but at the end of the day, if I had to choose between hers (and any of my) works being forcibly shared vs the end of sharing, I’d have no hesitation going with the former.
@dvduval do you have any stats on how many of your take downs turn into paying customers?
Property is tangible. You can touch it. You can’t touch 0s and 1s representing digital media. Nor can you touch ideas or words or sounds.
The thing about software is the rights are asymmetrical. If you buy a piece of software in the USA, you cannot return it for a refund no matter how big a piece of crap it is.
Music and movies are trivial. You really don’t need them and if they were to disappear, society would continue on just fine. But you take software away, society will crumble.
Patents are another issue. Stuff like software should not be patented for more than 5 years due to its rapidly changing nature. And patents get awarded for the dumbest things, too. Isn’t Microsoft threatening to sue Linux users because Linux infringes on 17 lines of code or something?
On the library idea:
Say the library buys a book for 10 bucks. Said book gets checked out 10,000 times over it’s lifetime. That 1000/10000 = 1/10 of a center per ‘sale’. But, 1000 people like that book, and buy it, that’s $10,000 in profit from one sale.
For pirated books, someone, somewhere got a legal copy to put on the net. Using the same logic as above, that’s something like 1/1,000,000 of a cent per download. But, you get something like 10,000 people who like it enough to buy it, so that’s $100,000 of sales.
Plus, there’s 5,000 people, who never would have known it existed, who bought it because they heard of it from a illegal downloader.
I just realized that that’s the classic ‘illegal downloading is advertising’ argument. Does anyone know if some real research has been done on that? Or is it just something pirates made up to rationalize their bad feelings away?
Check out http://baen.com/library/. The first page explains the rational behind offering many of the books for free.
I work as an artist and I dont mind if people rip my work off, I upoad to Flickr etc full size so if anyone wants it fine i just produce loads of work, I cant copyright my process thats in the open domain, my main body of work i protect to the best of my ability (ie never upload a full quality image etc) i have the original files that i can prove are mine so I’ll send the boys round if you try.
Personally I think that the parasite businesses (pirate companies and individuals selling other people’s products) is the real issue with piracy, not the individuals who would not buy otherwise anyway.
I’ll just reiterate that piracy can be used to your advantage as an author as hard as it may be in some cases. But the parasite companies are not and are the real threat. So I wouldn’t be so quick to say the take down notices are of no use. You should at least eliminite the “competitors”.
If you like analogies, it’s the same as running a bakery and having a competitor open up next to you, use your equipment and resources without permission and sell the same line of products at a fraction of cost (they have little to no costs to produce so why not).
To be honest shouldn’t you be glad people are pirating your stuff? Because it means that your books are so popular that people are actually telling other people about it otherwise nobody would ever know about your books.
Yes, because no-one uses Amazon or the hundred other legitimate book retailers and no-one ever visits stores that may sell books and no-one visits this website do they… oh wait! If you’re going to make an argument for or against piracy, try to say something that isn’t filled with as many holes as the titanic
I agree 100%. But do the RIAA, MPAA et al actively pursue such people? Or do they take the path of least (enforcement) resistance and target individuals?
I don’t know about the RIAA but the SGAE (the Spanish version of the RIAA) does… But they can only infract the hairdresser that puts the radio while she’s working and talking to her customers… since hers is a public place, she’s supposed to pay for the right of turning on the radio…
Also, they have people inviting themselves to weddings to make sure that in the party no copyrighted song is played and that kind of stuff.
Hi, I’m new on here but have bought a couple of sitepoint books in the past and found them useful.
I completely agree with many posts above:
1 - downloads do not equal lost sales, but downloads can lead to new fans who are then potential customers. The potential upside greatly outweighs the (assumed, and as yet unsupported by factual evidence) downside.
2 - hiring third parties to police the web for infringing copies is probably a waste of money. As someone above said, are there stats on how many takedown notices converted into paying customers?
3 - copyright is not inherently bad, it’s just a long way off being an incentive for creators to create. There should be a system where creators can monetise their work but it should be part of a system where fair use is the norm and sharing is good.
Whether or not it’s illegal in one country or another, I couldn’t care less. The definition of law etc is irrelevant to me here.
If you are gaining something without consent of the owner, without earning it, you are stealing. If, under any circumstance, you require some kind of software to earn money, but can’t afford it in the first place, get a loan. No one person has any right to say that they deserve something for free which other people have to pay for.
Heck, if you feel any requirement to go illegal for a while to gain money which you otherwise wouldn’t have access to, the least you could do is pay for the full version once you have said money.
You’re going to hate me for saying this Jake but… that’s youth talking. I suspect that you don’t have a clue of what necessity means and no, not everybody can get a loan. Although it seems that the world is in crisis because banks gave loans and mortgages literally to everyone, that’s not exactly true.
I agree with you that if you find something you like and, once necessity is over, you should buy it and support the creator.
Yet, it is also true that some people download would never become customers… furthermore, they may have not even known that the book/singer/movie/software existed before the downloaded it out of curiosity!
Some of them, if they like and can afford it, will buy it. Many of them were not be potential buyers anyway.
I also agree that a creator has to be paid fairly for their job… but that the system is changing and possibly this era of residual income due to copyrights will be over as technology advances and everything will be in the cloud, not owned by anyone in particular by collectively.
RIAA and similar companies don’t want to lose the control. They charge authors and creators to protect their rights, and that’s their job… else, they would not get paid… but also, they get quite a big money from the pie of copyrights since they get the money first and then distribute it to authors and singers.
I don’t know how much a musician receives for writing music in other countries (I mean the one that wrote the music, not the singer or band that sings it) but in Spain, musicians are forced to pay their fees to the SGAE and they only receive 0,5% for copyright. If you’re writing for someone famous, that will make you a decent living but if you’re not…
Therefore, only famous, important bands and singers want this system. Only the groups that are popular. But the musicians themselves… they would love to be able to distribute their music freely through the net… because more often than not, they found that they could give concerts (when before they were tied to the music lables) and earn more than when their music is protected.
Now, SGAE wants to make downloading illegal and the goverment is up to it (after all, they have a strong support from famous people because they’re helping SGAE). If downloading is still legal here is, among other things, because they’re finding opisition from the musicians too.
Now, the big dilema here is that many people have your music or book, and you need to turn them into customers. How do you do it? I guess providing something of value that they will only get if they buy it (like customer support) or converting them in brand evangelist and your biggest fans. Easier said than done, of course
Need does not justify taking. I could not stand by and let you say this molona, I have been sitting on my hands on this one and will continue to do so.
We have been through this before, so just look at the old posts if you wish. You know my thinking
Now what is this you’re saying. If that turns out to be true then I’ll use the right that no-one can’t take away from me - the right to stop producing. And I’m sure I’d not be the only one.
Being able to be paid what I want for my job means the world for me. And what you talk about is the complete opposite, as you point out very correctly, the collectivism. I’ll just say I’m against that and end it there as it’s a forbidden zone
Personally I think (I hope) that’s not gonna happen.
A lot of people in the US are talking about going Galt now. The way it all is developing where rights of the individuals are violated left and right, that is not a bad idea at all
