[kochbeck]

What's particularly galling about this post (and the SOPA / PIPA / whatever people on the other side too), is that I haven't found anyone on either side of the argument who's stopped and said, "Hey, wait! Somebody's getting some major economic benefit from piracy. Let's see who." Everyone - supporters and detractors alike - are either talking about their own positions (like this guy's) or these nebulous entities like the "music industry." (I worked in the "music industry," and I can't define it.)

The guy who wrote that is receiving, at best, nominal returns from criminality along with the satisfaction of making the, "Fuck you, that's why," argument. Crime isn't paying well at all for him, because he's committing a potentially life-altering crime in increments of $0.99 in music. So let's just set all those people aside for a moment, because on an individual basis, that's just a wreck to explain. Would take interpretive dance. These sorts of people only matter economically in the aggregate (think: Bittorrent), but "people-in-the-aggregate" isn't in charge, doesn't steer anything. Real individual human beings are.

So how about some individual human beings who are benefitting mightily from piracy? Somebody must be making out big time. They must have a lot of power and a strong justification for having the system be just so.

And if you took a moment to ask, say, the former CTO of any political campaign, they'd tell you who those people are. But since you didn't ask, I'll just tell you: it's politicians. Heard it here first people: political campaigns PIRATE THEIR ASSES OFF. I know with 100% certainty that one of the sponsoring senators for PIPA won big riding on top of a sea of pirated software in their campaign office. You betcha. One of the sponsors.

In the last decade, when money into campaigns has increased by orders of magnitude, piracy has actually increased on campaigns, many of which can now afford to pay. Why? Laptops. Back when desktops were still king, odds were good that you'd have one or two legal copies of, say, Office that you were installing across all the machines in your phone banks, another couple copies for your volunteer centers, maybe one for your staff offices... all those places where fixed machines were. So at least you were installing at like 5:1. Not legal, but not crazy.

But that's not how it works anymore. Now everybody plays BYOL. Need Office? Sure, there's a copy on Bob's shared drive. Need MapInfo? That's on a fileserver. And everybody at a machine (and I mean everybody) needs basic commercial software to work. Some need even more - the Adobe Suite or Visio or MapInfo or... it just goes on and on. Copies of SPSS floating around. If it's a campaign for an incumbent, you need, at minimum, everything on your desktop in the campaign that the staff on the Hill have, because you're going to be passing lots of files. So incumbents' campaigns tend to get right into piracy real fast, because they need application parity with their official staff.

Multiply that by every staffer and every intern and every volunteer who brings in their laptop and that's a huge number of copies. A successful presidential campaign is probably pirating on the order of at least 3,000+ copies of just Office alone. Seriously. Go audit Romney. They're there.

Funny thing is, it was the artists(!) who ultimately cracked down on the rights management firms that made campaigns stop pirating music. Possibly the one time ASCAP and BMI actually did anything for the artists, and it was against politicians. The deal was, artists were tired of politicians they didn't agree with playing uncleared, public performances of their music. If they hated the guy, they sure didn't want him to also get the music for free. So the rights firms cracked down. Odds are, big campaigns now have a CD of cleared music with usually BMI. They don't do it till they think they're likely to get caught, so they STILL PIRATE THE DAMN MUSIC. But eventually they make good. Want to check that one out? Call the compliance desk at the folding Cain campaign and ask if you can see their BMI clearances. Bet they don't have any - they bowed out too soon to get caught.

Oh, oh! Don't forget TV. A good rapid response operation is capturing all the news in areas in play and all the advertising for themselves and their opponents. Nowadays, there are firms that suck it down, and then they take the files and share them around the office. Much like Pirate Bay in the TV section. "Hey, did you see yesterday's AC360 on the other guy? Here's a copy!" Back when I was doing this crap, TiVo was still pretty much the best you could do on short notice, so I had a shelf of hacked TiVos. Ah, how life has gotten easier.

One more thing. Lists. Copyrighted lists. Mailing lists. Demo data. All the information detritus from campaigning. Stealing lists is a serious no-no. Reason being, the way politicians get rich (if they don't start rich, of course) is their list: because your campaign is not a shareholder-based corporation, the candidate ends up owning the assets. The key asset that gets created is the supporter list. A good list from a very successful national single run can bring in millions. Even for the loser.

So lists are precious. You'd think that somehow there would be an honor code around this, at least. "Thou shalt not screw thy coworkers out of their primary asset." That would, unfortunately, be untrue. Go ask any campaign data manager how they've "salted" their list. They'll tell you. They hide tripwire data in the list - emails that go to warning scripts or phone numbers that forward to their own cell. Because pirating each other's data in politics is also a national tradition.

A few things, some of them quite complex, are at the root of all this. A good example is campaign finance reform where there are matching funds spending caps and such. Piracy is a really good way to keep from moving spent money into, say, Iowa and incrementally lay waste to the cap before you've decided if you're going to get matched. It's a complex set of considerations and public perceptions. There are a lot of little dances that campaigns do, and piracy is a really good way to disappear major expenses in a very cash-constrained environment.

But a very senior Democratic political operative sat me down once when I was trying to convince him to buy legal licenses for an Iowa office. He said, "Dave, here's the deal: if we lose, there's nothing to go after. We'll leave the stage with negative money and nobody to pin it on. If we win, we are the Executive Office of the President, and we've got the Antitrust Division. Do you really think Microsoft, of all companies, is looking to pick that fight?"

tl;dr: Politicians operate vast organizations with questionable legal practices called campaigns. These campaigns get them elected to power and make them rich. Once elected, they legislate against the citizenry doing the things they did to gain power and wealth. This is not a conspiracy. Turns out they're just assholes.