Sunday Symposium: Piracy

[Dog Pants]

Since I'm late with this (but Monday Symposium doesn't appeal to my alliterative tastes) I'll go for something a little less intense. How about piracy? I'm talking about software piracy, but by all means include the old-school kind if you like. It's a free discussion.

There are opposing schools of thought on piracy, and a scattering of opinions between. The hard corporate stance is that it's theft, pure and simple - taking something without paying for it and denying the people who created it their hard earned reward. The opposite is a little harder to pin down. Some people say that a pirate copy doesn't equate to lost sales because that person wouldn't have bought it anyway, others say that they use it as a try-before-you-buy, and some just prefer to spend their money elsewhere.

Personally I think I'm maybe just right of centre. I don't pirate things, but it's more to do with my own perceived value of something rather than any love of the commercial entity that spawned them. It varies by medium too. I would never pirate software because I'd be convinced I'd infected myself with malware. With games I think if it's worth playing it's worth paying for, although I do get the 'try first' thing. Films used to be because I wanted a nice DVD to put on my shelf, but now it's more because I don't have time to watch the ones I own, let alone a bunch of free ones. E-books are a bit of an exception - I see them as being much less valuable than the publishers do, possibly because I'm so used to reading text for free on thee internet. Music I have no need to pirate, I can get it quicker and easier from Spotify.

That last one's significant to me. If companies want to address piracy they would be well served to create a better service than the pirates do. In gaming and films they seem hell bent on making it worse. What do you people think?

[Roman Totale]

For me piracy is about availability. I tend to pirate television shows that would normally require me to buy an incredibly expensive Sky/Cable package just to watch one thing. Similar to you, I never pirate music or books because I have no problem at all getting access to them. I also pirate individual comic releases as they are a pain in the arse getting released.

However, I do then generally buy the thing I've pirated once it is available (comics especially, but only once it's been nicely compiled into a series). I've always been of the opinion that if you like something then you should at least support it so more get made. Look at Firefly - massive cult following, but how many people went to see Serenity at the cinema as opposed to illegally downloading it?

I pirate because I'm impatient, but I purchase because the people who made the things deserve to be paid.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I personally reckon that for most of us, piracy has 2 main factors; Convenience and Price.

At this point, I could go out and pay for a TV license (something over a hundred quid) Sky a fiver or so a month (no freeview here unless you have a 20' aerial), plus the costs of sky on demand for movies etc (or paying £10/mo for a movies package in SD, rather than HD) For *maths* £23 a month, I get strictly come on ice, I'm a celebrity - splash on my talent, a decent enough selection of movies and a fuckload of repeats of utter shit.

Or I can spend an hour or 3 of my evening on setting up a system that downloads any movie I want, when I press a button on my browser, every TV series I want it to, fuck, I can even tell it to look for music for me, if I want. This costs me.... £3 pounds a month for usenet, £10 for a lifetime of dognzb, £10 for a lifetime of better music indexing and as much as a hard drive costs per year (I currently have less than 4TB of media on the gonk, and want for nothing) So that's ~55p a month, if I delete stuff, or £10.55 if I don't. ever.

On the other hand, I pirate games either because ubisoft published them, or because I'm poor as fuck and would rather not drop £40 on something somewhat questionable in lifespan.


Saying all that, If I have the money, content producers get it, I've bought a shitload of books in my life (a lot on kindle these days), countless albums (on CD) and my steam library is large enough to be classed as a small country, even with the downloadernator I pay for netflix because they provide a good service for a reasonable price.

I'd much, much rather be able to pay people directly for producing stuff, than pay hyperglobalmegacorp £13.99 so an artist gets 20p. I've been playing with an idea for years that it'd be fun to pirate music, then post the artist in question a tenner, they'd make far more than the legal way, and wouldn't get violated by all the bullshit between producer and consumer.

[FatherJack]

I think the reason that music providers offer a better service than piracy is that they've been through those tough times when it seemed nobody was bothering to buy music anymore. They started out with lawsuits and draconian countermeasures which ended up punishing mostly legitimate customers who wanted to have their music in more than one place. They've come out the other side having learned that most people are quite happy to buy things if are nice to them, let them have just what they want and don't act like they are all potential thieves.

DVD makers are getting better at providing multiple formats you can use on many devices and indie games make a success of allowing people pay what they want in a number of cases.

But the film, TV and big game makers just don't get it - the worst practice in my view being exclusivity deals. They just serve to limit the audience, surely?
You want the thing everyone's talking about? You have to sign up to this. Everything else on it is probably crap, or least not anything you specifically wanted. What the hell is wrong with being able to pay a commensurate sum in order to have just that one thing (you know, like a single song) and not an entire channel/subscription/device?

[Mr. Johnson]

For me piracy is about availability. I tend to pirate television shows that would normally require me to buy an incredibly expensive Sky/Cable package just to watch one thing. Similar to you, I never pirate music or books because I have no problem at all getting access to them. I also pirate individual comic releases as they are a pain in the arse getting released.

However, I do then generally buy the thing I've pirated once it is available (comics especially, but only once it's been nicely compiled into a series). I've always been of the opinion that if you like something then you should at least support it so more get made. Look at Firefly - massive cult following, but how many people went to see Serenity at the cinema as opposed to illegally downloading it?

I pirate because I'm impatient, but I purchase because the people who made the things deserve to be paid.

That's pretty much my opinion, with the only difference being that I can no longer afford to buy the products afterwards, sadly enough.

[Joose]

Piracy really seems like one of those issues where most people think that the situation is a lot simpler than it really is.

Is piracy theft? No, it definitely isnt. What really gets me about this is that insisting that it is hurts the anti-piracy side of the argument just as much as the pro-piracy side. Theft is taking something that doesn't belong to you. Piracy is *copying* something that doesn't belong to you. Its not theft because its not depriving the original owner of that thing. Whether or not it deprives them of a sale isn't the point. Because the argument often turns into "is piracy theft" people often forget that the more important question is "is piracy OK". Thats what we should be arguing. The theft debate is pointless semantic bollocks.

The other thing that people often oversimplify is the idea that the anti-piracy lot contains all the content creators/providers and all content creators/providers are anti-piracy. This is also untrue. A famous author once said (I want to say it was Neil Gaiman but I might be remembering that wrong) that he believes he owes a lot of book sales to piracy. People hear about him, pirate a couple of his books and like them, becoming True Fans. True Fans spend much more money on the object of their fandom than regular people, and the author believed that this by far offset any lost sales through people who pirate his stuff and then do not go on to buy any of his books.

Another bit of evidence against people getting your stuff for free automatically meaning lost revenue is Eclipse Phase. Launching a new IP in the RPG world is an extremely hard thing to do, as your target market tend to not have a lot of spending money and your products tend to be expensive. This means that when an RPG player is deciding on what to spend his money on, he is faced with the following dilemma: Do I buy some new, unproved game that could end up being rubbish, or do I just spend my money on the latest book for the system I am already playing and know I like? Eclipse Phase got around this problem by giving all their stuff away for free. All of it. There isnt a single EP book that you cant download from somewhere, without paying for it, and the EP publishers are totally OK with that. In fact, they encourage it. This approach led to EP being one of the most financially successful IP launches in recent RPG history. Why? Because giving their stuff away for free meant a ton of exposure. Lots and lots of people played their game without paying for it. No doubt a large number of those people continued to not pay for it, but a lot of people enjoyed the quality of the thing so much that they then paid for it. Even though they already had the thing and were under no obligation to do so. I know I did.

OK, so technically that isn't piracy, but only because the EP guys said so. Theres no reason to believe it would have happened any differently if they were not OK with it, but their stuff was still super easy to pirate. In fact, not, thats not true. If they were not OK with it some people wouldn't have pirated it for ethical reasons. The result of that would have been less exposure, and therefore less fans. Its obviously impossible to say with absolute certainty that this would have resulted in less sales, but the fact that every other new IP launch of recent times went the "no to piracy" route and subsequently died on there arse hints at an answer.

I would also (strange as this might appear at first glance) point to games like DOTA as an indicator that maybe piracy isn't really that big an issue. The vast majority of DOTA players, I would guess, have paid nothing or near to nothing for the game. I havent bought any in game items. Im pretty sure that most 5punkers havent either, and for those that have its probably just a quid or two for a funny voice pack or something. Yet despite a huge amount of the people playing DOTA not paying for it, it still provides Valve a bumload of cash. How? Because so very many people are playing it. So many, that even if only a small percentage of those people were to ever pay for it that would still be a bumload of cash. How many of us would have bothered with the game if there was a £40 barrier to entry on it? I wouldnt have.

Which is all a bit of a longwinded way of saying this: I don't think the argument about whether piracy is illegal (it clearly is), or morally acceptable (that i'm a bit less certain of) is what should be the focus of the discussion. Its whether piracy is something that should be fought against, or something that should be embraced.

There's another element to this that publishers of various media seem unbelievably slow to realise: You can't fight piracy by making piracy hard. Its just never going to work. Its a simple numbers thing: You may have a crack team of skilled programmers developing your cunning DRM solutions, but you are pitting their skills against the skill of the rest of the god damn planet. There are more pirates than there are DRM programmers, and some of those pirates are extremely good at what they do. It kind of puts me in mind of that silly question, What would you rather fight, one horse sized duck or a hundred duck sized horses. The DRM guys are the horse sized duck, the pirates are the duck sized horses. Except if you look closely, some of those horses are actually horse sized, and there isnt a hundred of them, theres several hundred thousand of them. Its not a fight you can win.

People often say that the best DRM is DRM you don't notice is there. I dont think thats true. I think that kind of DRM is just the least actively bad for the publishers. I dont think it actually helps in any way for one simple reason: Pick any new game you can think of and I bet I can find you a pirate version of it with the DRM cracked. The only exception to this is with entirely online games and even then its not a hard and fast rule: theres a bunch of "online only" games with patches that make the game think its online when it isn't. DRM can be definitively shown to not stop piracy. At best its reducing it slightly. Maybe. *At best*.

This is especially evident if you move away from games and onto films: Films are regularly available to pirate, in high quality, before they are available to buy. It's trivially easy to get hold of them, and with modern tellies playing them can be as easy as sticking a USB stick in the side and selecting play. The only films i've ever had any trouble finding to download illicitly are old and obscure ones. If I illegally download a film I can get it in any quality and file format I want, with subtitles in any language I want, whenever I want it and I can then do with it whatever I please. If I buy it on DVD I have to wait longer for it to be available, then wait for it to actually arrive, then I will only be able to play it on my DVD player in the languages they thought fit to supply it with and, in the most bizarre part of all of this, I will probably be forced to watch a short advert about how piracy is bad first. How have they not realised that the only people watching the don't pirate advert are the people who are not fucking pirating!?

If you really want something that will effectively reduce piracy of your product, the only way supported by evidence that it actually works is to make not pirating your product easier than pirating. Steam is an excellent example of this. I could pirate the latest game, but if I buy them from steam I get them in a couple of mouse clicks, they will be kept up to date without me even thinking about it, they will be available to play on my main gaming PC, my laptop and my media PC with no additional effort and there are a bunch of social features thrown in for good measure. When 5punk first started, games piracy was rife amongst us. I would be very surprised if that were still the case. I put that down entirely to Steam.

Speaking of Steam, here is an interesting fact: games are ranked on steams best selling list by the amount of money they are making, not the number of individual transactions that are happening. In other words, if Game X is at number 1 priced at £5 and game Y is at number 2 priced £10, then Game X must have sold *more than* twice as many copies as game Y. You look how often games that cost a couple of quid are ranked higher than games that cost full price. I think the fact that most games are still priced high despite clear evidence that pricing a game lower will often net you more profit is down to people struggling to get out of the mindset of selling physical objects, which is also why they are so hung up over piracy. When you are selling physical things, each physical thing has a cost associated to make it. Therefore there is a minimum amount of money you need to get back per sale just in order to break even. With digital goods, the number of units you shift doesn't mean shit. You could sell a thousand, a million or just one, the only thing that matters is how much money you got back, total. Because of this, if reducing the price increases the number of units you sell at a more than equal rate, you should keep lowering your price until that is no longer true. Equally, it doesn't matter if ten people pirated your game, or a hundred, or millions and millions. As long as a large enough amount of people paid you that you got a good profit, thats all that matters.

To be fair, I can sort of understand why the business suits find this a difficult concept: Its difficult to put hard numbers against. If you have an unknown number of people pirating your product, and an unknown number of those people become fans who then buy your product and another unknown number of those people would have bought your product if piracy wasn't possible, then it is impossible to be sure that you couldn't have made more money if you could have reduced the total number of pirates. Its possible that you might. Its also possible that reducing the number of pirates would actually reduce your profits. Its a complete unknown, and I can tell you from bitter personal experience that Important Business Executive Types really fucking hate the unknown. Some will just plain refuse to accept the idea that something cannot be bound by cold hard stats.

In a similar way to Steam, I can see the same starting to happen in film/tv land. More and more of the Joose households telly watching comes from Netflix, because its reasonably priced and has a decent selection of stuff to watch. Interestingly, I think if we had access to all the services that exist in the states, we would probably not feel the need to pirate any telly, as everything we watch is available on various catch up services. All the telly we do get through illicit sources we only do so because that is literally the only way we can get access to it.

Which brings me on to my final point on the subject: I don't think the main factor in whether or not people pirate stuff comes down to money. Not exactly. It comes down to effort. People will get the things they want in the easiest way they can. If piracy is the easiest way to get a thing, then it will be pirated. If buying it is easier (even if you factor in the effort it takes to earn the money) then it will be bought. I don't pirate the Game of Thrones because its the cheap option, I pirate it because its the only non-DVD option available to me and I can't be arsed with swapping DVDs over and having to sit through someone shouting at me about whether I would download a car. (Apparently this is no longer the case. A quick googling shows that I can now get it to download from a number of sources, but I will stick with this as my example because I know when season 2 was airing and I suggested to my parents that they get hold of season 1, the absurdly expensive box set DVD was the only way I could find to get it to them)

The TL;DR version: I want content and content creators want money. The argument about piracy should be about how we best get to a stage where I am happy with the content i'm getting and the content creators are happy with the money they receive. Ethics, morality and legality are not something that any party should give the smallest of shits about.

[Dog Pants]

Jesus Joose*, that is the longest post I've seen here in a long time. I approve, and off the top of my head I can't think of anything I read there that I disagree with.



*Isn't that what Michael Jackson made?

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Joose: continuing to share the same basic principles as me, and as such pissing me off.

Dammit pants, I want an argument!

[buzzmong]

I doubt there's going to be that many arguments on 5punk about these sorts of topics considering our shared interests, hobbies and general history probably correlate to a similar outlook between us all.

For what it's worth, Joose's massive long post is my view on the subject as well.

I will hang something off the "piracy argument isn't understood by big corporations" idea:
Youtube/American TV channel Websites + Social media: Why on earth does region locked content for things like behind the scenes or outtakes exist? I had the HIMYM* page liked on FB for a while and eveytime they'd send a "click here to watch a small informative clip on the actors commenting on last week's ep" I'd get a "NO. YOU ARE NOT FROM USA. BEGONE FROM HERE" type message. It's like anti-advertising and served to actually turn me away from the extra value they're trying to tack on to their product.

This is tangibly piracy related because I cannot figure out why people don't understand that there's no oceans on the internet, trying to pretend there are oceans only serves to throw up another barrier in my face and push me away from easy use of the legitimate product.


*Don't judge me, started in Uni with some friends, was damn well going to see it out 'til the end.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Also, it's worth adding that the vast majority of american TV we pirate as englishes is paid for by advertising or cable subscriptions.

There's no legitimate argument for them making an actual loss (shows that don't make enough money get cancelled, Ones that lose money die faster than a granny hit by a bus

Point being, we're a secondary market anyway, it doesn't make any significant difference if we steal the telly we want or watch it 6 months later on TV proper.

I also seem to remember when the remaining python's posted their stuff on youtube, free, their dvd sales went up by over 1000% (Sauce) over 16000%

DVD sales are another matter, they can (and do) make a shitload on them, but I'm pretty sure all evidence points to avid media consumers (like 5punkers) being some of the more regular purchasers of legit, full price media.


Also, just out of curiosity, how many of us own the same book a few times over? I certainly have a couple of copies of h2g2 in paperback for reading/lending and hardbacks because I like to hold them sometimes.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

... And another thing!

In the UK we're pretty blessed in that the 4 Main channels realised reasonably early on that the only way to beat piracy was to be a better option, There was a slide from an early BBC iplayer briefing that had "Be fast (beat uknova)" as one of the key aims, I'm pretty sure they succeeded around 2005/6, when they were about 20 minutes behind uknova on Doctor Who episodes, so it was faster to wait and watch the stream.

Then there's channel 4, who let you watch spaced, black books, teachers, grand designs, and god knows what else, dating back to the beginning of time, sure, there's a few ads, but it's actually more convenient (even with welsh potato-web) to stream than it is for me to find a DVD and then find something to put it in.

So yeah, that's a thing, which is good.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

And, while I'm at it (yay insomnia!)

There's a whole other side to the piracy thing, There's stuff like This and This, that are arguably piracy, or something loosely approaching fair use, but are improvements over the original items.

Should such things be considered fair use, or is it still just piracy with a nice hat on?

[Joose]

Heh, didn't realise how much I had word vomited until I looked at it today.

It occurs to me that a solution to the problem of us all having similar views would be for someone to take a Devils advocate role. That's kind of how debate clubs work: you argue the side you are given rather than the one you agree with.

[FatherJack]

Things are getting better, but also in a way I think we've been a bit spoiled as well.

Games have demo versions and a great number of TV series and films are available, sometimes delayed depending on a number of factors. You can either subscribe to a broadcast package like Sky or Virgin (and compulsorarily to BBC), a service such as Netflix or Amazon, or just buy/rent individual films/series/episodes through most or the above, Blinkbox or other services built into TVs, set-top boxes and games consoles.

It is far from perfect, and you can't just pick anything you want from any one provider (not just the fault of the providers, but of licensing issues between program makers and certain providers), some options are subscription-only and some are pay-per-view. Subscriptions seem expensive when you're only interested in one thing, but pay-per-view gets pricey when you want to watch series or shows. Are they really a rip-off though, or have we been spoiled?


At around £12 a month you get the BBC, lots of channels of programming, a commitment to continue to provide a little of something (ie: sport, kids, arts, tech, talent shows) rather than just the lowest common denominator 24-7, and iPlayer/websites which give you at least next-day catch-up as well as full series catch-ups and HD programming across all their channel line-up.

You get the same sort of service to varying degrees from ITV, C4 and 5 for no charge, albeit with less channels and less variety, and at the cost of advertisements.

Netflix and Amazon give you large libraries of films and TV shows from the ancient to modern plus a few exclusives for less than £10 a month.

Sky and Virgin cost quite a bit more, at least £20 a month, offer more programmes and have the technology to enable on-demand services for a number of other channels, still retain adverts, but also come by way of a physical device which handles recording of shows for you. Both offer a large back-catalogue of shows, but films, sports and kids TV cost extra.

Most of the aforementioned as well as outfits like Blinkbox offer films and shows for rental or purchase. Prices vary, but single episodes are bought from under £2, films rented from around £3 and bought from about £6.


Notwithstanding the fact that you might not be able to get the particular content you desire with the payment option of your choice, is it really so bad? The subscriptions are good if there are a number of things you're interested in, the pay-per-view ones not too ruinous if you only want a few episodes. At £2 an episode, a subscription starts to make sense if you want more than four. More than nine and you're in satellite/cable territory - although granted you only get about four new episodes of a any one series each month.

How much is reasonable? If individual songs cost 79p, is £2 too expensive for a 45-minute TV episode? It's still often cheaper than buying the boxset of DVDs. When did we start expecting everything to be free? It wasn't when we had to pay to go to the cinema. It wasn't when we had to drive to the video store and rent movies. It wasn't when we had DVD rental via post and it wasn't when we got Netflix. Things just got better value in the main, we shouldn't be complaining.


It only falls down when you can't get what you want, because no-one at all is selling it. You can't get an HBO subscription, you have to deal with the resellers who trade in this country. I don't know much about series I can't see though, there used to be a few but I've lost touch now. We also can't rent games, you used to able to and you still can in other territories, but not here.

Sadly if you want Game of Thrones then you're stuck with Sky. But Sky do offer a no-contract deal through NOW TV. GoT runs for 10 episodes starting in April, about 2½ months, NOW TV is £7 a month using your PS3 or XBox or £20 for a set-top box including a 3-month subscription. You get all the other regular on-demand and catch-up stuff during that time, too. Or you watch 12 months and buy the DVDs. It's not as if piracy is the only option.

[Joose]

Like I said though, I think assuming that the reason most people pirate is in order to get things for free is a mistake. I think it more often comes down to ease and access.

I dont expect things for free. But I don't get things for free, even when i'm not paying for them legitimately. Like Berk points out, usenet and search subscriptions cost money. If it were all down to cost, no one would use usenet to pirate things, but they do. Loads of people do.

Its all about making things accessible and simple to get. If it were simple and quick to get at I would happily pay for the ability to do so. I know this is true, because I *do* pay for things that are simple and easy to get. I have a Netflix subscription for precisely this reason. I would happily pay more if it meant Netflix had more content, or pay for other streaming options, but there are no such options available to me in the UK for the shows that I watch.

Heres what it comes down to: I am happy to pay for a service that provides me with the content I want to watch. It is clearly possible for that to exist, as I am paying for a service that provides me with the content I want to watch. The only problem is that the people providing that service are pirates, not the original content creator.

This is doubly stupid where the only reason I can't get this service from the content creators is because I am in the wrong fucking country. Maybe the industry should look at the batshit region restriction and licensing issues first, then worry about piracy. I reckon the latter would be a much smaller issue if they could sort out the former.

[FatherJack]

The regional thing seems to be the business equivalent of a Mafia turf war, and is the cause of most of our woes: content not available in your country, content only available from Don Murdoch, all content not available easily from any service.

They need to understand that the end customer doesn't give a flying fuck about who gets what slice of the pie, they want to give some monies to a thing and get the content they want. They could work out who gets what percentage in the background without troubling us. But because Don Murdoch won't resell to Don Branson and they squabble about how big each other's pie slices are, Don Usenet gets peoples money instead.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

http://torrentfreak.com/uk-users-need-2 ... ds-141208/

interesting.