[krig]

Now you are making a different argument, but I can argue just as effectively against this one. :)

In my role as copyright superhero have I not only worked as an employee at companies producing copyrighted works, I have also, personally, produced and sold copyrighted works that have, to some extent, been pirated. I have yet to feel any self-righteous anger. The only anger I might feel is a certain frustration where some of these copyrighted works have not been as successful as I would have wished them to be, but I would be foolish to lay the blame on piracy. More likely, the timing was not right and the quality was not high enough to ensure success.

Any business endeavor entails risk. I would hope that my employer has factored in piracy rates and other non-specific factors in the business plan before hiring me to create a video game for him. Sometimes, things don't work out as hoped and the result is a flop. That can happen for many reasons. I have yet to see a convincing argument where piracy was the reason something did not succeed. On the other hand, I can point to numerous examples were piracy was the deciding factor that let something become a success to begin with. The currently popular example is Minecraft, which spread entirely through word of mouth. How successful would that game have been if there had been no way to send it to a friend while telling them to check it out because it's awesome? I really doubt anyone would have known about it at all.

[bluebridge]

Well then, I stand corrected, you do have some basis for your statement. :)

Though it doesn't sound like you gained your livelihood from the production of such works. My dad is a farmer who wanted to pass on the farm to my brother. They had various communication issues, but one of the underlying complaints of my father was that my brother didn't understand the seriousness of being in business. He would say, "His nuts aren't in the ringer."

I don't think piracy ruins businesses. However, I don't think that anyone can make the argument that they ethically have the right to disregard the producer's terms for consuming their product, regardless of the form the product is in or how unreasonable those terms are. The creator of the product has the right to define their terms and if you violate his/her terms, it's a transgression. It's not a favor, a lesson, or a statement, you're taking without honoring their work in the way they've decided. Maybe it will turn out great for them in the end, maybe not- it doesn't matter, they set the terms and you violated them.

Piracy is parasitic, not productive, and everyone loses. We get these stupid censorship bills rolling through and resources are spent in trying to control the phenomena instead of innovating and addressing real issues.

Regarding Minecraft-- I did not realize that it was successful because it was pirated. I know that it got some good reviews on popular sites and I believe they sold a cheap development version and were successful because of this accessible model (versus a Microsoft approach). Wikipedia says that the developers decided to start their video game company and focus exclusively on it with the money they earned from their sales. To me, this does not sound like a pirate success story. It actually reinforces my belief that it absolutely requires resources to back any serious effort and this is something that piracy never provides.

[krig]

No, I've never worked for myself as in paying the bills based on my own copyright, although not from a lack of trying. I, like many people, started out with dreams of fame and glory through music, but gave it up quite early as the risks involved in choosing that career far outweighed the potential benefit. Plus, this was during the first dot com bubble, so getting into computers seemed like a good deal.

I see you brought it back to a question of ethics, which is something that I think is ultimately not very interesting. Ask any horse-cart driver during the infancy of the car industry, and they would probably curse cars for being noisy and dangerous, and car drivers for being unethical and immoral for supporting this metal abomination. These days no one cares. In the same way, hopefully, we'll one day look back at the era of government anti-freedom bills and shake our heads in disbelief.

Because short of actually going into the heads of all the people who, unlike you, don't see piracy as a parasitic activity, what can you actually do about it?

It's so easy to copy works digitally that many people are no doubt doing it without realizing it. If you have a blog, and someone links to a youtube music video, and you like it and want to share the experience of seeing it with a friend.. you put a link to the video on your blog. But! Unbeknownst to you, that video was put there without the permission of the original creator, and you just committed a crime (by proxy, in this case, but a moral crime nontheless).

A short history of Minecraft, as told by me (guaranteed to be inaccurate in many ways):

Minecraft rose to fame by being heavily shared while in the alpha/beta stage at various indie game forums, 4chan, something awful and other places like these, from where the word of mouth spread wider and wider. From the start, it was for sale (I think for $10), it has never been a free game as far as I know. It was pirated like crazy from the beginning. By the time notch formed mojang, he was already a millionare from the sales of minecraft.

Of course he didn't become a millionare from the piracy directly. The piracy didn't stop him from becoming one, though. In fact, I don't think it's possible to say definitively what impact piracy really had, other than that it helped spread the word. Given the graphics of Minecraft, would millions of people buy it without trying it? Maybe. You say that piracy doesn't provide resources, but in this case it did provide that one elusive thing that every independent developer desperately needs: exposure.

[bluebridge]

I agree on ethics. No one can prove right or wrong, so it has limited charm. I think though, that most would understand that beyond ethics, piracy is directly compromising the agreement that the producer sets out- similar to lying or stealing in that it's not admirable behavior, regardless of how many Johnny Depp posters you have put up (like one of the pro-piracy blogs that was posted earlier.)

Don't get me wrong, I don't support these asinine bills, however I do see people who pirate as directly supporting them. Which is upsetting because they're creating a demand and a rationale for censorship, which affects everyone.

On the same note, I see bandied around that the bills creators don't understand the fundamental architecture of the Internet and the damage it would cause. I see, "pirates," as not understanding the fundamental architecture of capitalism and ignoring the damage it causes.

Specifically, the exchange of resources where both parties benefit.

If a provider wants exposure and wants to give away their product for exposure, that's up to them, not anyone else. And for digital products it's a hell of a lot easier to provide them public domain or open source than it is to sell them.

However, exposure doesn't pay the bills. I am self employed and I see similar sentiments expressed on a regular basis. Product or service provider, if what I provide is valuable enough for you to ask for or steal, I obviously don't need the exposure that bad. There was a $6,000 photograph post up earlier that expressed the same idea.

If you liked Minecraft, there is nothing to prevent you from paying for it and touting it. Minecraft is an especially relevant example because the developers set the bar so low in regards to price and people still pirated something they claimed to love? That's so bizarre to me- I want to support independent developers much more so than the big guys and they weren't asking for much.

[krig]

Okay, so the problem that I'm seeing is that in your mind, you are equating a pirated copy with a lost sale. But that's an outdated and incorrect assumption, and hopefully one that time will deal with (when we've all grown up with infinite copies available from birth). A pirated copy is definitely not the same as a lost sale.

Plenty of people payed for and touted Minecraft, obviously. A huge category of people didn't pay, but still touted it.

Would that category of people have paid if piracy was impossible? Well, I've argued against that reality since making piracy impossible would most likely also make Minecraft impossible (since you'd have to distribute through government-approved channels). I don't see how someone could possibly create an independent product and be able to self-distribute if piracy is technically impossible. And arguably the environment that spawned and formed the successful indie game maker is heavily dependent on free and easy peer-to-peer sharing of information, code and software.

Secondly, clearly these people didn't have any moral issue with pirating the game while at the same time loving it. It may be bizarre to you, but a huge number of people will happily break the law if it's to their benefit, without feeling bad over lost sales. Most likely, these people wouldn't have paid even if they couldn't have had the game. They would just have gone without the game.

I'd even go so far as to say that generally acting in their own self interest with little regard to people outside their closest circle is a fundamental human behavioral constant, and it's shocking to me that this is so shocking to other people. You do know that children are starving to death in poor areas of the world? You certainly have the means to save at least one of them. Yet you don't, why? Because their plight is too remotely removed from you. You have no emotional connection to them.

Closing the emotional gap is key to exploiting the modern economy: see the success of pay-what-you-want schemes, where people end up paying more than they would have with a set price. I'd argue that this demonstrates another interesting detail: the humble bundle, which was available as pay-what-you-want, was heavily pirated! Why? It was essentially free already! Perhaps because people like to share, and the distribution model and the economic profit margins of the creator are both lesser forces than the innate emotional desires to have and to share.

[bluebridge]

I wouldn't equate a pirated copy with a lost sale, but that is an approach that the businesses behind SOPA/PIPA are doing and they are pursuing censorship as an end result. Whatever a pirate may say or intend, they are supporting their opponents argument for censorship in the form of, "lost sales."

Censorship is as morally baseless as piracy, but I do not like it either, and like piracy it has a negative effect on everyone.

Maybe sales would increase if something prevented piracy, maybe they wouldn't. I expect that they would increase a significant percentage, but probably not even close to 100%.

People everywhere act out of self interest all the time, not just some of the time, all the time. It's just that for some people self interest involves having the perception to see beyond the immediate benefit of an act. Others do not, and eat donuts until they have diabetes, sleep with their best friend's spouse, steal cars, and act on each impulse as soon as it arises.

That people act in ways that are short sighted and then try to explain away their shortsightedness is only human, but it's not admirable, and it does no public service.

I have nothing against anyone saying, "I breach the contract between provider and consumer. I'm a leech off of others labor. I inhibit growth that would otherwise occur. I take and give nothing back and then lie and say I would do otherwise if only X business did Y. I will only act fairly when forced to by a parent figure, which will probably be the government if I can get others to take on this attitude."

The same as I would have no problem with someone saying, "I'm a habitual liar and a cheat," versus someone saying, "I help people to be more careful and to investigate what it is told to them. I help people to be more cautious. I'm a Highwayman, a Bandit!"

I have long addressed the question of whether I'm going to live my life righting every wrong and looking for people to save. That I do not save kids in Africa, does not mean I haven't considered it. I live my life with integrity to what I value and I don't have to make elaborate arguments as to why, I just do the part that is mine.

The reason I'm shocked that Minecraft was pirated as you say, is that I see "pirates" complain that they would buy this product if it didn't have DRM or that product if the cost was reasonable. Here we have a project in its early stages that is valuable and made easy to attain. Will they support it. Will they help make it better? No, the lousy excuse is now exposure. And then, "Why isn't this thing finished yet!?" Ha, ha.

[krig]

I don't disagree with your viewpoint, but I think there are more ways of looking at it. Taking a systemic view instead of focusing on the specific transaction in question - that is, look at the pirate, not the piracy - might shed some light on why I think that ultimately, piracy is not a destructive force:

There is research showing that pirates, on average, spend more money on the things they pirate than non-pirates. While this may sound counter-intuitive, on reflection it makes sense. There are those who pirate for the sake of pirating, lets call them hoarders. They download everything they can, with no intention to ever pay for any of it. These are not potential customers. The other category of pirates are people who, lets take music for example, who really love music. They spend a lot of money on music each month, but they also have an active network trading music with other enthusiasts. In fact, this trading network is what provides feedback and drives their interest in music to begin with. So the piracy, the downloading of music that they engage in, is the fuel that drives their consumption up beyond that of a regular, law-abiding consumer.

I'm not saying that this is the only truth, but the statistical evidence from several studies done on musical piracy (I recall one in particular done in Holland) supports this view.

So in this case, your characterisation of the pirate as a leech is not an accurate account. In fact, this pirate is the perfect customer, and it is the piracy that made him.