[jiggy2011]

I think these demands are reasonable, especially the geographical one since you can't buy something if it's not available for you to buy.

The issue is that sometimes when you pay for something you end up with an inferior product, for example being required to install additional software that you either don't like or may not even be available for your platform.

I think you can mitigate piracy a lot by simply providing a slightly better service. For example I know plenty of people who used to pirate most of their games but now they buy them on steam as soon as the price is reasonable to them.

[cobrausn]

I can always add one more reasonable demand to my previous list of reasonable demands to hide behind. The final one will be 'accept bitcoin payment' and then I'll never need to pay for anything again! Let's face it, they could charge 0.01 USD over the face of the globe and the only requirement would be paypal or credit card, and that would be too much for some people. Piracy would still run rampant, because piracy is easier than paying (to some people).

Cynicism aside, the geographical requirement is reasonable. I still won't pirate even if it's not available here unless there is some way to pay for it (damn my parents and their persistent morals) but I do see the argument for 'There absolutely is no other way for me to get it.' It's nearly impossible to argue against that one, especially considering any geographical restrictions are likely arbitrary. Though I fail to see why anyone would restrict themselves from a potential market, especially if your content is digital.

[jiggy2011]

Sure, there will always be people with unreasonable expectations but I think that the more of peoples requirements you can satisfy the less appealing piracy becomes.

There are also network effects at work, I remember when Napster first became popular (I was quite young at the time) and literally overnight everyone at school had gone from owning a handful of CDs and cassettes to having huge music collections.

People spent a lot of their time discussing the various artists they had discovered through Napster and you would have been considered pretty odd if you didn't have at least a couple of gigabytes of music. Not to mention that everybody suddenly had more disposable income to spend on other things. So whilst you could take a moral stance on it, you would most likely become an outcast to a certain extent. Besides, people tend to decide their morals based on what they see others do.

This can also work the other way though, as with my Steam example. As well as selling games in a convenient way they also provide tools you can use to find out what your friends are playing and join games with them. This means that adoption can spread around a peer group pretty quickly.

[cobrausn]

Discussing an artist whose music you've heard is in no way guaranteed to compensate that artist. At best, someone, somewhere, will hear the word of mouth and spend some money that goes back in the direction of the artist. There is no guarantee though - you end up hand-waving in a benefit when it cannot be proven that your piracy helped anything, though it can be proven that you didn't pay for what they are asking you to pay for as, currently, the means of profit is mostly tied to the distribution channels, not the production. Saying 'they should have done things differently' and then pirating their music is a lot like blaming the victim.

Now, hearing their music and then going out and buying a CD / paying for a legal download / picking up some show tickets or t-shirts is a different story, and is the best possible outcome of piracy. I'm not arguing against these people - these people are cool people, and are trying to affect a change in the system. If more people did this, show and swag revenue would increase and reduce the dependency on the digital content distribution as a source of income, which might have a very meaningful impact on new artists when they see the example.

I'm not really going to address the 'social pariah' argument, because I've never been one nor do I know what it is like to be have friends that would 'shun' for the crime of not pirating music (not committing a crime?). I will say that using the 'everyone is doing it argument' is not particularly constructive.

Games, IMHO, are a completely different animal in many respects, and since the only way to actually compensate the developer (currently) is to pay for the game, then I am actually about as hard-lined on this as it is possible to be - you shouldn't be playing the game if you haven't paid for it. Steam is a great example of offering services in exchange for content restrictions, and is (IMHO) the reason PC gaming is still alive as anything other than an indie-playground.

My personal opinion is that PC games (in particular) are actually headed in the direction of always-on MMO-like behavior that requires an internet connection in order to be part of the game world, and this is by design. I'm not necessarily talking Ubisoft's reprehensible always-on-even-during-singleplayer DRM, i'm talking about games that will act like MMOs in order to ensure the playerbase needs to be online in order to get most of the game. Sure, you can play a gimped pirated version, but why would you? All the good stuff is on their servers, which require authentication.

I will point out that despite the ease with which one could pirate a game like Skyrim, it still sold 2.8 million units in November alone. Mostly, I'm sure, because people want to pay for the game, not because of anti-piracy measures... other than Steam, which I suppose counts as that.

So I guess what I am saying is that despite the fact that I will argue for the moral necessity of funding development of digital content by paying for it until such a time as the means of distribution is no longer the primary income source, I am unconvinced that piracy is such a huge problem that it requires anything more than prosecution of the most blatant violators and those that profit from it.

[jarek]

Just wondering, do you have any guidelines as to what it takes to become a cool guy? Does buying a $20 tshirt justify my previous pirating of a band's three albums? How about paying $25 for tshirt+CD after pirating two albums? Is there an equation for this? I'd like to make sure I'm a cool guy here.

[cobrausn]

Pretty simple actually. Two albums cost, what, around 20 ~ 40 depending upon the band? Buy enough swag to make up the cost. More of the profits will go to the band than would have before.

[jiggy2011]

Problem is I don't necessarily want a T shirt (if the band even sell them in the first place) not to mention that buying the T shirt might bring up other moral issues (overseas child labour etc).

It would make more sense for the artist to sell me the tracks I want in a convenient way (direct download, no DRM, standard format, easy payment) rather than for them to distribute their music in a DRM format that I don't want and to have it pirated and then buying T shirts to somehow make up for it.

[jarek]

What if I had bought the CDs used for $8 or $5 each? Do I have to go by the full retail price, and if so, is this price at introduction, or is retail price a couple of years later okay?

Oh yeah, I forgot - how much is buying a ticket to seeing them live worth? Full ticket retail price, or less?