I've been on the internet a long time, and it looks like that time has finally come, as it must for every netizen eventually. That time when I must give my thoughts on the problem of Piracy on the web.
I was spurred to do so by the recent Penny Arcade comic and post "A Cyclical Argument With A Literal Strawman". You don't have to read it, the part I am responding to is the underlying assumption that Piracy is an immoral act. Laying aside, for the moment, any arguments which are at their core, "morality is relative, and thusly does not exist." I will broadly allow morality to be a reflection of the core values of our society. So, murdering people is bad (typically, except in war) because as a species we think it is bad. Take whatever you think of as "moral" behaviour and ride along with that.
By piracy, I don't mean stealing a ship and sailing the seas looking for plunder, I mean copying distributing or receiving someone else's intellectual property, without their permission. Broadly speaking, this is theft, and therefore wrong. However, the advent of the digital age changes how piracy works. The OED defines theft as " the felonious taking away of the personal goods of another" (along with some other, irrelevant definitions). If I make a copy of a song, that hasn't directly taken anything away from the artist, so it isn't directly theft. However, under the usual assumptions of our capitalist system, I should pay the artist for their work, at a price they have set. If I do not do this, then I have cost them money.
The entire concept of western capitalism rests on the following idea: for any good, every person values that good some number of dollars. The vendor sells that good for some number of dollars, and if it is being vended for less than or equal to its value, a person will buy it. It is a simple idea we all understand and has served us tolerably well for hundreds of years.
Usually, the vendor selects a price based on 1) guesses about consumer's valuation of the good and 2) how much the good costs to make. But in the digital age, the good costs absolutely nothing to make. Instead, you have your initial cost of creation, and then everything else is profit.
Suppose, for example, I am making a video game. I have 100 employees. It takes them 100 hours each to finish it, and I am paying them $30 per hour. So, I have spent a total of 30x100x100 = $300 000 on making my game. If I sell my game digitally, then I have little to no extra cost per copy sold. Let us suppose that we sell the video game for $30, and we find 200 000 people who value that game as more than $30. Then they will all buy it, and we've made $300 000 in the process.
But suppose there are more people out there who value the game at $5. They wouldn't buy it at $30, but they would at $5. Under the assumptions of the capitalist system, they won't get to play the game (until the price drops low enough after enough time has gone by. Unless the game you made is Starcraft, and it never drops that low). So, we have all these people who would like to play the game, but not enough to pay the full price. Thus, the video game developer would never get any money from them anyways.
The central idea of piracy is to allow these people to play the game. It hasn't cost the developer anything, since they wouldn't have paid anyhow, but more people are able to play the game. One can also assume that occasionally someone who pirates a game will actually buy it if they like it. In this case, what the pirates are doing can hardly be seen as theft, since it takes nothing away from those who hold the copyright. Thus, piracy is not always an immoral action.
That said, many people pirate games/music/videos simply because they can. These people have the means and the ability to purchase the media, but choose instead to download it for free. This is theft, and is morally wrong. The only possible justification is that the entire copyright system is morally bankrupt, and thusly, it cannot be wrong to thwart it. That's a pretty dumb argument though, since firstly two wrongs don't make a right, and secondly, it's pretty hard to say that copyright has no redeeming value.
Content creators aren't dumb, and they know about the first group of pirates, but they care mostly about the second. Those are the ones who are the most vocal, and cause the most damage. I think I can safely say that the content industry cannot hope to prevail against this group. There has never ever to my knowledge been a successful stoppage of piracy. The pirates always get around any protective measures, and they always will.
And here is where we get to what the music industry has finally realized, as will the other industries eventually. Give up. You can't win against the pirates, so stop trying. Instead, offer easy to use, hassle free media with easily circumventable protection. I suspect it would actually boost profits, since you don't have to sink money into protecting your stuff.
The other issue is to address the first group of pirates. The people who want to use what you have, but don't want to pay the full price. Things like student pricing are a good idea, but it could be better. I'm not sure how, but if we could somehow figure out what everyone's valuation of a good was, and offer it to them at that price, maybe you could make even more money. Some kind of barter based system might be effective. The theories of economics that underpin our marketplace are ill suited to the digital world, and I think that instead of trying to change the digital world to fit our theories, we should really be changing our theories to fit with the digital world. After all, that is the point of a theory.
The problem with the whole debate over piracy is that each side accuses the other of immoral behaviour. Each side is justified in what they do, but neither side seems to understand that they're arguing different things. The pirates are arguing that the copyright system is flawed, and the content creators are arguing that piracy is theft. Both and neither are true, and I think it's high time we found a new way of looking at it.
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