Three big caveats that the linked article doesn't sufficiently mention:
1. The study was restricted to Denmark. It was part of a larger study looking at Danish attitudes towards economic lawbreaking: tax evasion, benefits fraud, copyright infringement, taking home company property, etc.
2. The study asked people to rate how acceptable copyright infringement was on a scale from 1 (completely unacceptable) to 10 (completely ok). The 70% figure is everyone who answered anything except 1. But clearly a 2 out of 10 is still not very positive, especially since in context it could simply have meant that someone found it bad, but less bad than e.g. benefits fraud. Only 20% gave an answer >= 7.
3. The study specifically asked about copyright infringement for personal, home use.
---
From the report (rough translation):
Seven out of ten Danes accept to some extent the copying of music and movies without paying for them. So long, mind you, as it is limited to copying for one's own use.
Thus finds the Rockwool Foundation's study of Danish ethical attitudes in 2010.
In the study, a representative sample of people were asked to respond on a scale of 1 to 10, whether it is ok to pirate music from the internet for personal use. Those who believe that this act is acceptable under no circumstances, corresponding to a 1, total 30%.
The rest, i.e. 70%, accept pirate-copying to some degree. 50% give a rating between 2 and 6. They're probably skeptical in relation to piracy, but they seem not to think that it is totally unacceptable. The rest, around 15-20%, rate 7 or higher. This group mostly or fully accepts piracy.
The views are different however for making money on illegal music downloading. The population has a somewhat stricter view on that. In fact, three out of four respond that it is absolutely unacceptable to retrieve pirated music online and resell it to friends.
The difference between the two forms of lawbreaking is also clear in the average for all responses. Piracy for personal use has an average of 3.8 on the scale, while the score for selling to friends is as low as 1.7.
This sort of summarization (read manipulation) of scientific results by news organizations to influence viewership is extremely bothersome. Most people who read that article take it at face value, don't check the sources, and go on with life having been misinformed. I know I would have. Irritating.
When people abuse statistics it makes my head hurt. Would it really have been that hard for them to spell it out, as the original article did, in three distinct categories? It speaks to the fact that the answers to the question rest on a continuum.
I'd be curious to see what the results of this study would be if it were conducted in the US.
As I've pointed out before piracy is a misnomer. Sharing has always been an integral part of the way people are exposed to and consume art. There are even institutions that have been built up to support such things for older media: libraries, used book stores, radio stations, museums. We treasure and value such institutions because they help to preserve and to spread our art and our culture.
However, when you take this incredibly vital and ingrained mechanism for spreading appreciation and knowledge of various works of art and you translate it to the limits (or lack thereof) and character of modern communications and storage technologies you get a phenomena which externally is nearly indistinguishable from piracy (at least without further context of individual behavior).
To put it lightly this is a very serious problem. Imagine if libraries and museums were as much legal pariahs as speakeasies during prohibition, how would the world be different? And yet increasingly the collision of outmoded legal frameworks (already bent beyond reasonable measure by the corrupting influence of large "intellectual property" institutions such as Disney and Sony) with technological advancement is leading to conflict and strife between ordinary people engaging in traditionally ordinary behavior and governing institutions who see that behavior as a dangerous threat.
P.S. Whether sharing in the digital realm is compatible with profit is an equally important question, but the onus is on producers to figure that out (current evidence seems to indicate that it's not such a big problem, given record box office revenue in 2010, for example). It's quite simply infeasible (technologically, legally, socially, and culturally) to demand that people stop sharing because the power of sharing and of stealing are too closely related.
Selling used books is not comparable with putting an ebook on PirateBay. Lending books and returning them when you're done reading is also not comparable to putting an ebook on PirateBay. You also can't display the same painting in 2 museums unless one of them is just a cheap copy and people don't appreciate copies in museums.
All cases of "sharing" the "older media" you describe are subject to the laws of scarcity. Even xeroxing a book is subject to it, as the cost of that can be even higher than just buying the book; and is mostly done for technical references for which you can't find the original.
"people sharing" is a romantic notion; in a perfect world there would be no problem with it, but writing a book / creating a game / composing a song / creating a movie - takes time, lots of effort and monetary cost that can be quite substantial.
Would people create movies such as Avatar (in the interest of sharing) if the movie industry would go bankrupted? I doubt it. Would people donate money if movies were released for free? Sharing is all fine for people, as long as it doesn't cost them too much. But few people give away their work for free and even fewer do it for altruistic reasons (it's like "spending other people's money" - how can you not be fine with that?)
the onus is on producers to figure that out
And they have, with DRM and all that. Only problem with it is that it's a PITA for honest customers, but technology evolves and people always find ways to build better mouse-traps.
So the onus really is on all of us - if you don't like the current legal frameworks, think of something to reward the original authors; otherwise the situation is only going to get worse.
Unless I am misremembering, decriminalizing drugs in Portugal led to less people using them. Going from this, criminalizing libraries might be the best thing that could ever happen to education.
I love the irony of large corporations trying to lecture me on ethics and morality. Totally agreed, if someone invented the Library today they would be sued out of existence, and look at all the good that public libraries have done to our culture.
Authors do benefit from libraries; not as much as if everyone bought every book they ever read, but enough.
Public libraries actually have efficient economic properties from a macroeconomic perspective that governments should try to replicate and extend:
* Authors are paid by the government on behalf of the public in proportion to the demand for their work (libraries buy more copies of popular books to meet demand from patrons).
* The public pay the same amount no matter how much information they consume (via their taxes).
From a macroeconomic perspective, information has different properties to physical goods:
* Information has high fixed costs, and low variable costs.
* Variable costs of disseminating information can be spread to individuals other than the original creator.
* Once the fixed cost of information that improves productivity is met, the most efficient outcome is to distribute the information as widely as possible.
Therefore, there should be a way to compensate information creators in proportion to value to society, without imposing a price disincentive to consume information.
One way to do this would be to have an alternative economic system for digital works where there is no limit on how much digital information an individual or company can consume after they have paid a fixed amount in the main system, with allocation of the individual's total in proportion to some metric - such systems are tricky to get right while not incentivising dividing up one invention / work into small pieces or creating complex entity structures to game the system.
> Whether sharing in the digital realm is compatible with profit is an equally important question, but the onus is on producers to figure that out (current evidence seems to indicate that it's not such a big problem, given record box office revenue in 2010, for example).
Part of the problem with the piracy debate is that advocates of unrestricted personal use copying tend to pitch it as sticking it to The Man, where the man in question is a big name movie studio that puts annoying unskippable messages on the front of every DVD or a record label that charged absurd prices for CD singles for a few years.
This is a problem because (a) many smaller companies and individuals rely on copyright protection just to make a living, and (b) many copyright-protected works are developed because they are useful rather than because they are inherently fun to work on, artistic, or otherwise worthy of volunteer effort. In their haste to show that Big Media "can afford it", critics of copyright seem amazingly willing to overlook the number of small businesses from inde games developers to niche publishing houses that have been going to the wall in recent years as the Internet has made copying quick, easy, and practically free.
There is a valid argument when assessing damages from copyright infringement that not every copy made necessarily represents a lost sale. You can't know for sure either whether everyone would have bought the product at its legal asking price or whether the free but illegal distribution channels have positive effects on legal sales because of secondary effects like advertising.
However, there is also a valid argument that we don't really know how much work would be created in a world where copyright was fully respected or could be strictly enforced, but never gets made because the current illegal activity makes it too risky to get a project off the ground in the first place.
> It's quite simply infeasible (technologically, legally, socially, and culturally) to demand that people stop sharing because the power of sharing and of stealing are too closely related.
People used to make that sort of argument about driving after a couple of pints at lunch time and about driving while using a phone. They were always better than everyone else, and what harm did it really do?
And yet, today there is no doubt in the mind of anyone who has seen the real evidence, or worse, the result of a driver who overestimated their competence and caused a crash, that we should not condone bad driving just because it means some people will have to suffer some minor inconvenience.
The trouble with the copyright debate is that while we have ample empirical data to support policy on driving law at this point, we simply don't know exactly the effects of different models for promoting content distibution to consumers while still incentivising the original creation and sharing by artists.
However another argument: If 99% of the people thought that every 18 year old female must be raped repeatedly until shes 19, will that make it right? A lesser example. If every man believed that a woman must be whipped in public for not wearing the appropriate clothing, is it right? If every man believed that a woman cheating on her husband is grounds for execution, while a husband cheating on his wife is completely acceptable. Is all that moral or right? Consensus does not mean morality.
I feel that InclinedPlane's points raise the correct questions: What part of "piracy" is what people feel is sharing/socially acceptable behaviors taken from the physical to the digital world, and what part is really theft. Intent is important. And how do we separate the theft intent from the sharing intent.
Also another point: Perceived value. If by now people perceive music as worthless commodities, to them downloading it illegally is moral BECAUSE they feel that buying it is a rip off. They are buying something of no value. This could be a side-effect of theft they committed in the past. The content industry must change from "steal and we'll fucking sue" to "steal and you will miss out on big values of the product"
Social norms are not a topic in which we are especially
expert. Still, it is a relevant topic: property rights are never
enforced only by the law-and-order system, or even by costly
private monitoring of other people's behavior. Broadly accepted
and well functioning property rights systems rest also, one is
tempted to write "primarily," on a commonly shared sense of
morality.
Then it quotes another economist, Eric Rasmusen :
Video rental stores and libraries, of course, reduce
originator profits and hurt innovation, but that is a
utilitarian concern. What is of more ethical concern is that
whenever, for example, someone borrows a book from the
public library instead of buying a book, he has deprived the
author of the fruits of his labor and participated in
reducing the author's power to control his self- expression.
Thus, if it is immoral to violate a book's copyright, so too it
would seem to be immoral to use public libraries. Libraries
are not illegal, but the law's injustice would be no reason
for a moral person to do unjust things. The existence of
children's sections would be particularly heinous, as
encouraging children to steal.
To entirely deter copying would require a norm inflicting a
considerable amount of guilt on copiers, since legal
enforcement of copying by individuals is so difficult. To
partially deter it would be undesirable for two reasons.
First, it would generate a large amount of disutility while
failing to deter the target misbehavior. Second, it would
reduce the effectiveness of guilt in other situations, by
pushing so many people over the threshold of being moral
reprobates. At the same time, the benefit from deterring
copying by individuals, the increased incentive for creation
of new products, is relatively small. I thus conclude that
people _should_not_feel_guilty_about_copying_.
> well functioning property rights systems rest also, one is tempted to write "primarily," on a commonly shared sense of morality.
I feel that is true of most general laws -- for example basic law and order is hinged on a collective sense of morality. If 80% of the population decided all of the sudden to riot, break windows, and flip over cars, there are just not enough policemen to keep the peace. But it just so happens that most people do not find that behavior acceptable and would actually step in to help enforce the peace.
When it comes to information products, I think it is very simple (and this just my uneducated feeling) -- individuals see it as copying not stealing. They copy a product, but the owner still has the original. In their minds there is a huge difference between that and walking into an individual's backyard and taking a shovel from the shed.
Now I know it is a copyright issue and each stolen copy is potentially a lost sale, but I am just highlighting how I think the majority thinks about it.
Are the AA's and their equivalents not shooting themselves in the foot? Framing the argument in the way they have done (piracy is KILLING art) might work for a while but sooner or later a thinking person will come to realise that it really doesn't. Home taping didn't kill anything. Of course, if everyone suddenly stopped buying and only used torrents then the system would collapse, but will that happen? If everyone stopped paying taxes the country would collapse too. No country has an army big enough to enforce that.
You smoke pot, you're a drug-crazed menaced. Except millions already do, they just keep it quiet (from the law at least). The more you push the drug-crazed menace part, the more anyone will any sense will push back as it's demonstrably untrue.
It might work great as a short term strategy and help you get favourable laws passed but I think they might be approaching the end of the line soon.
No need to be too sore though, Mickey Mouse has had a better run than virtually anyone in history.
So $4 out of the $26 I pay for a hardcover book goes to the person who is actually responsible for the content? I submit paying $22 in rent is ridiculous, and as long as something like this holds true, thepiratebay looks pretty good.
I buy a lot of ebooks in the $10 range, and I would buy even more in the $5 range -- especially if the $5 went to the person who actually wrote the book.
Something that's always irked me is that the recording industry, and artists themselves, seem to have this notion that every advance in technology should benefit them, despite them often having no effort in the development of these technologies.
Secondly, I imagine most everyone here has seen that picture of what its like watching a non-pirated dvd vs a pirated one.....the non-pirated one takes forever to get through all their copyright warnings, movie previews, etc. If they'd show their paying customers a bit more respect they might get some in return.
I doubt it. Most of these warnings and previews that you mention are the direct result of piracy. I also don't think the movie and music industry are going to play that game anymore.
in 1999 when Napster came out, everyone said music was too expensive (so they pirated it). Later, it was because there was no "try before you buy" and because the artists were getting screwed by the record companies.
Now that we have services like last.fm, pandora, and grooveshark to preview songs and you can buy songs for less than $1 (which is pretty damn cheap). Hell, you can even get DRM-less music and artists can easily sell their own music without a label.
Has piracy stopped at all? no. It's gotten worse and so have the excuses. Why can't people just admit that they don't give a damn about the artist and just want free music/movies?
The problem, I think, is that we need to discriminate between maybe-questionably-fair-use copyright infringement (like sharing) and real, for-profit, hawking of pirated goods.
Yes, although alternative terms like "forbidden sharing" aren't quite as catchy and don't have the associated glamour factor from dramatic swashbuckling movies.
Maybe that's because illegal copying violates no natural law and is in fact allowable under a common understanding of property rights. If I own a hard drive, I can store anything I want on it. Copyright limits that natural property right by saying you can't store certain media or images that have been designated as "copyrighted" on your own property. This idea is foreign to most cultures and nearly all ancient societies.
I tried very hard to pay Oscars.com this year to get a stream of the Academy Awards event. They would not take my money. I tried three different browsers and two different credit cards. No go.
Then later I read that people who did pay the money were duped. They ended up getting not the broadcast stream, but a bunch of bullshit side-angle camera streams, not one of which was the broadcast. This after a build-up that strongly suggested (pretty much promised, the way I read it) that this was the ticket to watching the Oscars online.
This isn't the first time crap like this has happened. People get burned, and they learn.
The term 'socially acceptable' makes the conclusion hard to pin down.
I'd say piracy is 'socially acceptable' - in the sense that not many people would bat an eyelid if you said you'd downloaded one of the latest movies illegally. But that doesn't mean I think it's right or that people should do it - it's just an observation on what seems to be "socially acceptable." What is socially acceptable does not typically match up with what I believe to be right.
At first I saw the source (torrentfreak) and thought it would be a survey of their users... But it actually seems like it is a viably study with a good spread of the subjects. I am actually not that surprised. First of all, it's a Danish study. As I am myself living in the south of Sweden, I know that we and the danish have similar views, and that piracy is pretty well accepted here.
Even more interesting, would be a survey within a bigger geographical spread. Is there differences within Europe? What about the rest of the world? Are the opinions similar world wide? I would also appreciate a more detailed view into the selection of the group that answered.
The most interesting thing about the article is that it is spun very heavily in the direction of piracy... The actual answers about piracy for private use, is that less than 20% accept piracy, slightly over 30% not accepting it. The rest have answered that they are sceptical to piracy for personal use.
Accept is 7-10 on a scale from 1-10, sceptical is 2-6 and don't accept is 1 on the same scale. All from the linked report in Danish.
Sometimes I feel I'm the only person left in the world who a) still buys media; b) doesn't mind doing it; c) thinks it's wrong to pirate things; and d) doesn't consider it my right to be able to consume any media I want, and the only reason I'm not doing it is because it's priced too high - IMHO, DVDs, CDs, etc. are luxury goods.
Still, I realise I'm in the minority here - the 70% figure definitely doesn't surprise me. Just, for some reason, makes me a little sad.
You are not the only person; I buy when I can. But the emphases on can here; in Europe where I live, you get, via the web, news about every new tv show, movie, game and book immediately after it comes out. And then you have to wait for ages (depending on the popularity) before you can watch / buy it here. Digital products like ebooks, games, movies and tv shows should not have a geo limiting factor to them; they are digital. As long as they do, I don't see how copying can be prevented.
Take apps like Pandora; very easy to use, very nice to use. Doesn't work in the EU. Lame.
If 90% of the cool content you can buy online wouldn't be US only for such a long time after release and if everything was easier to use, I believe copying would be less common. Why would you risk (viruses, the law) it or go to the trouble of acquiring illegal materials if you can easily get it at the same time US citizens get it?
(I'm using the US as an example here mainly because most content I like from other countries I can immediately buy, but that might differ depending on your taste.)
Well I just bought a new TV that can play DivX and XVid. I don't think I can watch Netflix or anything like that, because Samsung does not yet implement it (?maybe Netflix, but I am not in the US, so no use for me).
What I could probably do is bittorrent movies and watch them on my TV.
I occasionally rent movies from the store, but I always overpay because it takes me too long to return them. Somehow bittorrent seems like the only sensible option. I wouldn't mind paying, but they don't let me.
Everyone is copying media. _EVERYONE_. How can it NOT be socially acceptable ?
The other 30% just doesn't realize that lending a game or buying a game and selling it after you've finished it is exactly the same thing as what an internet pirate is doing.
There is often a disconnect. At the time when Apple were parading busted teenagers in order to promote iTunes, this friend was going "hmmmm, yes, but they DID break the law. So they kind of deserve it".
Yet the same person sends yearly compilation CDs to all his friends. One batch had a few songs that didn't play because of the iTunes protection. So he went out, brought CD's, ripped them and sent a new batch. At no point did he consider himself as having comitting a crime.
Lending a game is not exactly the same thing as piracy, in that case there is one copy that is being shared. When you pirate something, two people have a copy and can use at the same time in different locations.
Piracy is socially acceptable, but politicians are passing ever more draconian laws in a futile attempt to prop up the music industry's obsolete business model.
If you want to stop this, and live in Scotland, you can vote for the Pirate Party this May. I'm one of their candidates.
Interesting thought, if piracy did manage to put a big dent into say the profitability of books, would we then see a lot more projects popping up on sites like kickstarter which would probably be very popular given the diminished choice in the market for readers.
Socially acceptable or not, anti-piracy advocates fail to realize that if i am pirating something, i had no intention to buy it. They really, really fail to see this. You can inflate the amount of money you are losing because of me all you want, the reality remains.
And it is this childish obsession that tickles my pirate nerves and makes me pirate even stuff i would gladly pay for. Because the industry is dishonest and thinks i sit on the far left of the IQ bell curve. They are lying in my face, and they know it. They don't deserve my money.
'I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital "book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.
Imagine what these people must think of libraries.'
The fact is that, scare-mongering aside, piracy doesn't seem to have nearly as big an impact on profits as the large content creators would have us believe. What worries me more is that they seem to be leveraging this fear campaign to chip away at the basic concept of "ownership," pushing for a world where products are "licensed" rather than "bought." This scares me because, being rather old-fashioned, I enjoy the concept of buying a book, rather than licensing the words in that book for reading.
This was a Danish study, does anyone know the size of their sample? Did it include other Europeans, anyone from North America, Asia? I would imagine it would make a bit of a difference in the results, and would be interesting to compare.
"best bet is probably to focus on lowering the incentives for people to pirate"
No. It's very hard to not get people to do something and esp to stop doing something they currently are and tripple esp to do either without some replacement. As this "study" demonstrated and should be common sense.
Instead they need to incentivize legal downloads / legal media consumption.
Of course, that's extremely hard cause they literally add no value. They actually have a huge anti-value hill to climb just to reach parity with downloading. Their middle-man business model is broke and requires ever more bizarre/ridiculous laws to keep it shored up.
[+] [-] _delirium|15 years ago|reply
1. The study was restricted to Denmark. It was part of a larger study looking at Danish attitudes towards economic lawbreaking: tax evasion, benefits fraud, copyright infringement, taking home company property, etc.
2. The study asked people to rate how acceptable copyright infringement was on a scale from 1 (completely unacceptable) to 10 (completely ok). The 70% figure is everyone who answered anything except 1. But clearly a 2 out of 10 is still not very positive, especially since in context it could simply have meant that someone found it bad, but less bad than e.g. benefits fraud. Only 20% gave an answer >= 7.
3. The study specifically asked about copyright infringement for personal, home use.
---
From the report (rough translation):
Seven out of ten Danes accept to some extent the copying of music and movies without paying for them. So long, mind you, as it is limited to copying for one's own use.
Thus finds the Rockwool Foundation's study of Danish ethical attitudes in 2010.
In the study, a representative sample of people were asked to respond on a scale of 1 to 10, whether it is ok to pirate music from the internet for personal use. Those who believe that this act is acceptable under no circumstances, corresponding to a 1, total 30%.
The rest, i.e. 70%, accept pirate-copying to some degree. 50% give a rating between 2 and 6. They're probably skeptical in relation to piracy, but they seem not to think that it is totally unacceptable. The rest, around 15-20%, rate 7 or higher. This group mostly or fully accepts piracy.
The views are different however for making money on illegal music downloading. The population has a somewhat stricter view on that. In fact, three out of four respond that it is absolutely unacceptable to retrieve pirated music online and resell it to friends.
The difference between the two forms of lawbreaking is also clear in the average for all responses. Piracy for personal use has an average of 3.8 on the scale, while the score for selling to friends is as low as 1.7.
[+] [-] ecounysis|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aw3c2|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ffumarola|15 years ago|reply
When people abuse statistics it makes my head hurt. Would it really have been that hard for them to spell it out, as the original article did, in three distinct categories? It speaks to the fact that the answers to the question rest on a continuum.
I'd be curious to see what the results of this study would be if it were conducted in the US.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|15 years ago|reply
However, when you take this incredibly vital and ingrained mechanism for spreading appreciation and knowledge of various works of art and you translate it to the limits (or lack thereof) and character of modern communications and storage technologies you get a phenomena which externally is nearly indistinguishable from piracy (at least without further context of individual behavior).
To put it lightly this is a very serious problem. Imagine if libraries and museums were as much legal pariahs as speakeasies during prohibition, how would the world be different? And yet increasingly the collision of outmoded legal frameworks (already bent beyond reasonable measure by the corrupting influence of large "intellectual property" institutions such as Disney and Sony) with technological advancement is leading to conflict and strife between ordinary people engaging in traditionally ordinary behavior and governing institutions who see that behavior as a dangerous threat.
P.S. Whether sharing in the digital realm is compatible with profit is an equally important question, but the onus is on producers to figure that out (current evidence seems to indicate that it's not such a big problem, given record box office revenue in 2010, for example). It's quite simply infeasible (technologically, legally, socially, and culturally) to demand that people stop sharing because the power of sharing and of stealing are too closely related.
[+] [-] bad_user|15 years ago|reply
All cases of "sharing" the "older media" you describe are subject to the laws of scarcity. Even xeroxing a book is subject to it, as the cost of that can be even higher than just buying the book; and is mostly done for technical references for which you can't find the original.
"people sharing" is a romantic notion; in a perfect world there would be no problem with it, but writing a book / creating a game / composing a song / creating a movie - takes time, lots of effort and monetary cost that can be quite substantial.
Would people create movies such as Avatar (in the interest of sharing) if the movie industry would go bankrupted? I doubt it. Would people donate money if movies were released for free? Sharing is all fine for people, as long as it doesn't cost them too much. But few people give away their work for free and even fewer do it for altruistic reasons (it's like "spending other people's money" - how can you not be fine with that?)
And they have, with DRM and all that. Only problem with it is that it's a PITA for honest customers, but technology evolves and people always find ways to build better mouse-traps.So the onus really is on all of us - if you don't like the current legal frameworks, think of something to reward the original authors; otherwise the situation is only going to get worse.
[+] [-] humblest_ever|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xpaulbettsx|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] A1kmm|15 years ago|reply
Public libraries actually have efficient economic properties from a macroeconomic perspective that governments should try to replicate and extend: * Authors are paid by the government on behalf of the public in proportion to the demand for their work (libraries buy more copies of popular books to meet demand from patrons). * The public pay the same amount no matter how much information they consume (via their taxes).
From a macroeconomic perspective, information has different properties to physical goods: * Information has high fixed costs, and low variable costs. * Variable costs of disseminating information can be spread to individuals other than the original creator. * Once the fixed cost of information that improves productivity is met, the most efficient outcome is to distribute the information as widely as possible.
Therefore, there should be a way to compensate information creators in proportion to value to society, without imposing a price disincentive to consume information.
One way to do this would be to have an alternative economic system for digital works where there is no limit on how much digital information an individual or company can consume after they have paid a fixed amount in the main system, with allocation of the individual's total in proportion to some metric - such systems are tricky to get right while not incentivising dividing up one invention / work into small pieces or creating complex entity structures to game the system.
[+] [-] Silhouette|15 years ago|reply
Part of the problem with the piracy debate is that advocates of unrestricted personal use copying tend to pitch it as sticking it to The Man, where the man in question is a big name movie studio that puts annoying unskippable messages on the front of every DVD or a record label that charged absurd prices for CD singles for a few years.
This is a problem because (a) many smaller companies and individuals rely on copyright protection just to make a living, and (b) many copyright-protected works are developed because they are useful rather than because they are inherently fun to work on, artistic, or otherwise worthy of volunteer effort. In their haste to show that Big Media "can afford it", critics of copyright seem amazingly willing to overlook the number of small businesses from inde games developers to niche publishing houses that have been going to the wall in recent years as the Internet has made copying quick, easy, and practically free.
There is a valid argument when assessing damages from copyright infringement that not every copy made necessarily represents a lost sale. You can't know for sure either whether everyone would have bought the product at its legal asking price or whether the free but illegal distribution channels have positive effects on legal sales because of secondary effects like advertising.
However, there is also a valid argument that we don't really know how much work would be created in a world where copyright was fully respected or could be strictly enforced, but never gets made because the current illegal activity makes it too risky to get a project off the ground in the first place.
> It's quite simply infeasible (technologically, legally, socially, and culturally) to demand that people stop sharing because the power of sharing and of stealing are too closely related.
People used to make that sort of argument about driving after a couple of pints at lunch time and about driving while using a phone. They were always better than everyone else, and what harm did it really do?
And yet, today there is no doubt in the mind of anyone who has seen the real evidence, or worse, the result of a driver who overestimated their competence and caused a crash, that we should not condone bad driving just because it means some people will have to suffer some minor inconvenience.
The trouble with the copyright debate is that while we have ample empirical data to support policy on driving law at this point, we simply don't know exactly the effects of different models for promoting content distibution to consumers while still incentivising the original creation and sharing by artists.
[+] [-] GrandMasterBirt|15 years ago|reply
However another argument: If 99% of the people thought that every 18 year old female must be raped repeatedly until shes 19, will that make it right? A lesser example. If every man believed that a woman must be whipped in public for not wearing the appropriate clothing, is it right? If every man believed that a woman cheating on her husband is grounds for execution, while a husband cheating on his wife is completely acceptable. Is all that moral or right? Consensus does not mean morality.
I feel that InclinedPlane's points raise the correct questions: What part of "piracy" is what people feel is sharing/socially acceptable behaviors taken from the physical to the digital world, and what part is really theft. Intent is important. And how do we separate the theft intent from the sharing intent.
Also another point: Perceived value. If by now people perceive music as worthless commodities, to them downloading it illegally is moral BECAUSE they feel that buying it is a rip off. They are buying something of no value. This could be a side-effect of theft they committed in the past. The content industry must change from "steal and we'll fucking sue" to "steal and you will miss out on big values of the product"
[+] [-] wazoox|15 years ago|reply
Social norms are not a topic in which we are especially expert. Still, it is a relevant topic: property rights are never enforced only by the law-and-order system, or even by costly private monitoring of other people's behavior. Broadly accepted and well functioning property rights systems rest also, one is tempted to write "primarily," on a commonly shared sense of morality.
Then it quotes another economist, Eric Rasmusen :
Video rental stores and libraries, of course, reduce originator profits and hurt innovation, but that is a utilitarian concern. What is of more ethical concern is that whenever, for example, someone borrows a book from the public library instead of buying a book, he has deprived the author of the fruits of his labor and participated in reducing the author's power to control his self- expression. Thus, if it is immoral to violate a book's copyright, so too it would seem to be immoral to use public libraries. Libraries are not illegal, but the law's injustice would be no reason for a moral person to do unjust things. The existence of children's sections would be particularly heinous, as encouraging children to steal.
To entirely deter copying would require a norm inflicting a considerable amount of guilt on copiers, since legal enforcement of copying by individuals is so difficult. To partially deter it would be undesirable for two reasons. First, it would generate a large amount of disutility while failing to deter the target misbehavior. Second, it would reduce the effectiveness of guilt in other situations, by pushing so many people over the threshold of being moral reprobates. At the same time, the benefit from deterring copying by individuals, the increased incentive for creation of new products, is relatively small. I thus conclude that people _should_not_feel_guilty_about_copying_.
[+] [-] rdtsc|15 years ago|reply
I feel that is true of most general laws -- for example basic law and order is hinged on a collective sense of morality. If 80% of the population decided all of the sudden to riot, break windows, and flip over cars, there are just not enough policemen to keep the peace. But it just so happens that most people do not find that behavior acceptable and would actually step in to help enforce the peace.
When it comes to information products, I think it is very simple (and this just my uneducated feeling) -- individuals see it as copying not stealing. They copy a product, but the owner still has the original. In their minds there is a huge difference between that and walking into an individual's backyard and taking a shovel from the shed.
Now I know it is a copyright issue and each stolen copy is potentially a lost sale, but I am just highlighting how I think the majority thinks about it.
[+] [-] davidw|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingofspain|15 years ago|reply
You smoke pot, you're a drug-crazed menaced. Except millions already do, they just keep it quiet (from the law at least). The more you push the drug-crazed menace part, the more anyone will any sense will push back as it's demonstrably untrue.
It might work great as a short term strategy and help you get favourable laws passed but I think they might be approaching the end of the line soon.
No need to be too sore though, Mickey Mouse has had a better run than virtually anyone in history.
[+] [-] towelrod|15 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/03/01/business/01eboo...
So $4 out of the $26 I pay for a hardcover book goes to the person who is actually responsible for the content? I submit paying $22 in rent is ridiculous, and as long as something like this holds true, thepiratebay looks pretty good.
I buy a lot of ebooks in the $10 range, and I would buy even more in the $5 range -- especially if the $5 went to the person who actually wrote the book.
[+] [-] mistermann|15 years ago|reply
Secondly, I imagine most everyone here has seen that picture of what its like watching a non-pirated dvd vs a pirated one.....the non-pirated one takes forever to get through all their copyright warnings, movie previews, etc. If they'd show their paying customers a bit more respect they might get some in return.
[+] [-] rick888|15 years ago|reply
in 1999 when Napster came out, everyone said music was too expensive (so they pirated it). Later, it was because there was no "try before you buy" and because the artists were getting screwed by the record companies.
Now that we have services like last.fm, pandora, and grooveshark to preview songs and you can buy songs for less than $1 (which is pretty damn cheap). Hell, you can even get DRM-less music and artists can easily sell their own music without a label.
Has piracy stopped at all? no. It's gotten worse and so have the excuses. Why can't people just admit that they don't give a damn about the artist and just want free music/movies?
[+] [-] arethuza|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] chopsueyar|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reedlaw|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forensic|15 years ago|reply
Which partially explains why most cultures and nearly all ancient societies had little to no intellectual development.
Thinkers gotta eat or they won't exist.
Intellectual property feeds the families of most of the people on HN.
[+] [-] natch|15 years ago|reply
Then later I read that people who did pay the money were duped. They ended up getting not the broadcast stream, but a bunch of bullshit side-angle camera streams, not one of which was the broadcast. This after a build-up that strongly suggested (pretty much promised, the way I read it) that this was the ticket to watching the Oscars online.
This isn't the first time crap like this has happened. People get burned, and they learn.
[+] [-] petercooper|15 years ago|reply
I'd say piracy is 'socially acceptable' - in the sense that not many people would bat an eyelid if you said you'd downloaded one of the latest movies illegally. But that doesn't mean I think it's right or that people should do it - it's just an observation on what seems to be "socially acceptable." What is socially acceptable does not typically match up with what I believe to be right.
[+] [-] hasenj|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funthree|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahrens|15 years ago|reply
Even more interesting, would be a survey within a bigger geographical spread. Is there differences within Europe? What about the rest of the world? Are the opinions similar world wide? I would also appreciate a more detailed view into the selection of the group that answered.
The most interesting thing about the article is that it is spun very heavily in the direction of piracy... The actual answers about piracy for private use, is that less than 20% accept piracy, slightly over 30% not accepting it. The rest have answered that they are sceptical to piracy for personal use.
Accept is 7-10 on a scale from 1-10, sceptical is 2-6 and don't accept is 1 on the same scale. All from the linked report in Danish.
[+] [-] saw-lau|15 years ago|reply
Still, I realise I'm in the minority here - the 70% figure definitely doesn't surprise me. Just, for some reason, makes me a little sad.
[+] [-] tluyben2|15 years ago|reply
Take apps like Pandora; very easy to use, very nice to use. Doesn't work in the EU. Lame.
If 90% of the cool content you can buy online wouldn't be US only for such a long time after release and if everything was easier to use, I believe copying would be less common. Why would you risk (viruses, the law) it or go to the trouble of acquiring illegal materials if you can easily get it at the same time US citizens get it?
(I'm using the US as an example here mainly because most content I like from other countries I can immediately buy, but that might differ depending on your taste.)
[+] [-] Tichy|15 years ago|reply
What I could probably do is bittorrent movies and watch them on my TV.
I occasionally rent movies from the store, but I always overpay because it takes me too long to return them. Somehow bittorrent seems like the only sensible option. I wouldn't mind paying, but they don't let me.
[+] [-] hasenj|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bvalmont|15 years ago|reply
The other 30% just doesn't realize that lending a game or buying a game and selling it after you've finished it is exactly the same thing as what an internet pirate is doing.
[+] [-] benohear|15 years ago|reply
Yet the same person sends yearly compilation CDs to all his friends. One batch had a few songs that didn't play because of the iTunes protection. So he went out, brought CD's, ripped them and sent a new batch. At no point did he consider himself as having comitting a crime.
[+] [-] mistermann|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WorkingDead|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cabalamat|15 years ago|reply
If you want to stop this, and live in Scotland, you can vote for the Pirate Party this May. I'm one of their candidates.
[+] [-] robryan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgtm|15 years ago|reply
And it is this childish obsession that tickles my pirate nerves and makes me pirate even stuff i would gladly pay for. Because the industry is dishonest and thinks i sit on the far left of the IQ bell curve. They are lying in my face, and they know it. They don't deserve my money.
Go Minecraft.
[+] [-] slavak|15 years ago|reply
'I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital "book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.
Imagine what these people must think of libraries.'
The fact is that, scare-mongering aside, piracy doesn't seem to have nearly as big an impact on profits as the large content creators would have us believe. What worries me more is that they seem to be leveraging this fear campaign to chip away at the basic concept of "ownership," pushing for a world where products are "licensed" rather than "bought." This scares me because, being rather old-fashioned, I enjoy the concept of buying a book, rather than licensing the words in that book for reading.
[1]http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/12/16/
[+] [-] forensic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacemanaki|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sesqu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|15 years ago|reply
No. It's very hard to not get people to do something and esp to stop doing something they currently are and tripple esp to do either without some replacement. As this "study" demonstrated and should be common sense.
Instead they need to incentivize legal downloads / legal media consumption.
Of course, that's extremely hard cause they literally add no value. They actually have a huge anti-value hill to climb just to reach parity with downloading. Their middle-man business model is broke and requires ever more bizarre/ridiculous laws to keep it shored up.