[enoptix]

I wish it were possible to have some sort of multi-channel funnel view of people who pirate content. Did they pirate a song and then proceed to buy the album? Did they pirate a the first movie of a series and then later legally purchase the rest of the series? Do they just pirate content and never purchase anything?

I think these are interesting questions. Who wants to build something to answer them?

[pavel_lishin]

Wouldn't that basically require everyone who pirates to take a questionnaire to truthfully answer?

For the record, I've been watching X-Files on Hulu on my laptop. I've made it through season two, but will probably just download AVI's of the rest of the seasons, because my Wifi barely works in the kitchen, and the video quality goes down.

Am I ethically in the clear if I stream the Hulu episodes on my desktop, while watching pirated AVI's in the kitchen?

[msg]

One interesting thing you can do with such a questionnaire is a coin flip survey (sorry, I don't know the real name). Give the survey participants a list of sensitive true/false questions and a coin. Instruct them to flip the coin twice, concealing the results from the survey-giver. Then have them follow this algorithm:

  if (first flip == heads):
    return second flip == heads
  else:
    return truthful T/F answer to sensitive question

When results are aggregated, roughly half the participants will have answered truthfully, and the other half are uniformly distributed. None of the individual participants have tipped off whether they did something bad, but in aggregate they have truthfully answered the survey.

[delinka]

While this operation may be statistically sound, it requires work. Humans are notoriously lazy when it comes to anything other than what they want to do. You'd be hard pressed to get each respondent to actually do this repetitively for an entire survey. Even if it had only three questions.

[msg]

For $50? College students have done much weirder and stupider stuff for less money than flipping a coin twice and answering a straightforward T/F question, even if it were twenty questions. The technique has been around for a long time. You should consider it a solved problem.

Finally googled the names. I also discovered the original formulations do it with only one coin flip (or one roll of a die).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_response

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmatched_count

[delinka]

If you're offering $50 in cash to answer some questions and flip some coins, sure you'd get people to answer loads of them. But you're not offering an incentive to answer the questions.

[reginaldo]

The general question is interesting... I think about it in the lines of:

Is it ok if I take a shortcut to get something that I am entitled to have access to because the rules by which my access is should abide by are basically bullshit?

I tend to think it is ok. I'm also indebted to Grace Hopper [1], who came up with the gem It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission, a behavior that I often find useful. Also, I tend to give the highest level of access to people working under my supervision so they can do their jobs without any avoidable hassle. It's important to be consistent, after all.

But (there's always a but) some content creators don't have the same pragmatic thinking I pride myself in having, and will tell you convoluted stories like "we don't sell the music/video, we sell the physical disc with the thing inside, and you can only access such thing trough the disc". And sometimes these convoluted stories do stick. Except that when you have a network as the distribution channel they don't work anymore and become plain bizarre "we sell you only the nontransferable right of watching/listening to this only up to 3 times in the next 24 hours and will not refund you if our network goes down and you're unable to watch".

So, my answer to you, and to the general question is: IMHO, you're ethically in the clear, but legally your situation might raise some concerns. Obligatory disclaimer: this is not legal advice. I would love to see what other people think about all this, though.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

[bo1024]

If we were to achieve open and free-as-in-software standards, you wouldn't have this moral dilemma.

When you pay for the right to use copyrighted content, you should get to use it on your terms -- in the kitchen or in the family room or wherever you want. You should be allowed to back up your content in case your computer crashes and you should be allowed to watch it when you want, even if your Internet is out.

If content isn't offered on those terms, don't take it.

[b1daly]

Your kind of begging the question here. When media was mostly physical, you did have many if those rights you describe. The problem is networked digital devices make large scale (unauthorized) copying and distribution cheap, trivial, and unavoidable. Selling popular (and expensive to make) media content without DRM and legal (and enforceable ) anti-pirating laws is simply not viable IMO.

At least I've never heard a scheme floated that seemed remotely plausible as in industry business structure to do this. I'm music producer and in arguments where I've explained how expensive it is to produce music and how hard it is to recoup an investment, when people have understood my argument, they've thrown up their hands, saying if the music industry is that bad why would anyone even do it? And I think it points to a general devaluing of creative work afoot in the culture. That might not seem like a big deal to some, I think a lot of really don't care about what kinds of media get made or how: it's just hard tu take the same peoples cries of injustice on the part of the MPAA as a serious threat to human progress because they can't watch what they want, whenever they want, for a super low price (or free). It might be that some awesome new business model exists to support an industry that creates digital IP products that doesn't rely on artificial scarcity and IP but I haven't heard any proposed

[enoptix]

I wasn't looking to answer any questions with regard to ethics. For your situation, I would want to know if you went on to purchase other X-Files episodes (or other works starring the cast members from X-Files). This would tell us whether or not your piracy was a net gain or loss for the studios.

That being said, I dont think there is a realistic way to build what I was suggesting.

[powerslave12r]

You might be if you go back to your desktop to watch proportionate amount of ads.

Same argument for adblock.

[pavel_lishin]

I've never seen an ad come up during an X-Files episode, neither on my machine nor on the XBox. (Which is odd, now that I think of it.)