Even though I knew this was common, I was astonished to learn that 70 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds and nearly half of those older have illegally copied movies and music. The older ones who haven’t are likely mostly people who just don’t know how.
Whatever your moral stance on such things, it should be abundantly clear from such a staggering number that the efforts to “combat piracy” are not working very well and that high moral dudgeon, which we’ve seen people use against piracy for decades, doesn’t work either. I would argue that this is because most people do -not- believe that making a free copy of something is the same as outright theft, no matter how hard you try to convince them otherwise (or how much you’re convinced otherwise). Most people don’t see it that way and aren’t going to. As someone who’s made money off of intellectual property and has copyrighted materials himself, I have a hard time arguing: not-paying is simply not the same as outright taking something away, no matter how hard you try to make that jump.
My general take is that the IP industry needs to take a hard look at what it’s doing and realize that fighting this technology is long-term counterproductive; it just makes people fight harder to evade them. How much smarter would it be to openly work with these “pirate” distribution channels in a way that makes it easy and convenient for people to pay for content, or view or hear commercials before being granted access if they don’t want to pay? And to just plain ask for voluntary payments? Some scoff, but plenty of people do all of those.
As geeky as it sounds, that old line about “the tighter you clench your fist, the more systems slip through your fingers” comes to mind. In the right context, much piracy winds up being excellent word-of-mouth advertising. It would seem that the enlightened self-interest of IP owners, at least when it comes to things like movies and music and so on, is to frown on piracy and make it more difficult to pirate things than it is to just pay a reasonable price or put up with a few commercials. Anything else seems to only invite resentment and require laws that make people fear for their fundamental freedoms.
UPDATE (J. A. Eddy): This article very succinctly puts this problem into perspective. The Piracy Threshold Graph is particularly telling. WARNING: Frequent use of sailor-type language.
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I used to work for Cygnus and then later Red Hat. The vast majority of our users never gave us a dime and we didn’t care. Neither Red Hat nor Cygnus had any problem making money, tho, on the value that they actually add.
The entire time I worked for Napster, our argument to the music industry was that our users are your best customers and buy way more music because of us. They decided they’d rather hold on tight than sell more music.
Even today, with a lot of options to download, there are so many stupid restrictions and hoops to jump through that it is often just simpler to go pirate something. Many people will happily pay you something for content that they want. They will not pay you huge sums of money and jump through a lot of hoops for it, however. Why would you bother to pirate something when I can easily stream your content from Hulu or Netflix to my Roku or Apple TV?
Louie Ck is experimenting with just producing his own content and putting it out for simple download for $5: https://buy.louisck.net/ . I presume we’ll see more of this kind of things, since he generated $1mil in the first 12 days.
I must be a clueless middle aged guy because every time I’ve wanted a song for myself, I go buy the MP3 from Amazon. Recently, I bought an MP3 from Amazon because I wanted it now, and couldn’t figure out where we put the CD. Buying from Amazon is fast and cheap enough that I wouldn’t think of putting in the effort to find a pirated copy.
Music is a lot simpler these days than it was 10 years ago, since that battle has largely been won.
However, we still have stupidities like when I go to the UK, I can’t listen to Pandora.
Movies and TV shows right now are a frickin’ nightmare. The Oatmeal is annoyingly accurate on the state of things: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
The Oatmeal brings this to mind:
Your customers don’t need your sales process.
They don’t want to be sold. They want to buy.
Dishman: A-freakin-men! As an IT Director, I could rant on at significant length about sales processes and how they get in my way.
OMG I’ve never seen it so well-nailed.
Music has gotten reasonable. Video is so behind the times. I know the main reason too: the TV and movie distribution channels are scared because it requires completely turning their entire business models upside-down. But failure to do so is costing them big time in the long run.
What would a world look like when you realized your file sharers are your best word of mouth advertisers and when you make it super easy for people to get the content they want? Yeah, there are some middlemen cut out there, but smart middlemen can often become content aggregators and even creators of their own. (Here’s a hint: all those local TV stations? Guys, 50-70 years ago you produced a lot of your own local content. You really could start doing that again you know.)
Yeah, music has reached an equilibrium. Thanks mostly to Apple, IMO. But they have competition now too.
Non-movie/non-serial TV video is getting close, thanks mostly to youtube, (again IMO)
Books are getting close too, thanks mostly to Amazon.
Movies and TV are still bastions of the old guard, much to the disappointment of those of us not in the industry (i.e. the customers/ consumers).
But I have faith the market will eventually prevail there to.
The article J.A. Eddy linked notes the belief that RIAA/MPAA holders hate their customers.
I was reaching the same conclusion myself.
If you hate your customers, it will show. The results will not be pretty.
have to agree with jaymaster that content is getting easier and easier to buy, and the trend will likely accelerate in the future. however, permit me to offer this dissent:
for all of the words spilled about riaa, etc., as jaymaster notes, music has for a long time been as easy (if not easier) to digitally buy as pirate. i can buy an mp3 off of amazon today and use it with no restrictions whatsoever. yet somehow illegal downloaders maintain a righteous anger at the enemies of progress.
people point to louis c.k. as an example of “how it should be done,” but louis has the luxury of being both a big name and an “indie” name (i.e. untainted by his success), he needs only himself (and possibly a few cameramen) to make a stand-up comedy product he can sell, and therefore he can offer $5 downloads, be sainted by the internet chattering class, and still make a huge profit due to low production costs. stand-up comedy allows this business model. music and books do as well. the “production company” middleman in these cases is rapidly becoming superfluous.
the extension of this model to film and television, which have orders of magnitude higher production costs, is not immediately evident to me.
the oatmeal comic which has been making the rounds here and elsewhere is, besides being soberingly unfunny, indicative of the engrained entitlement evident in today’s society. viz this article from badass digest:
http://badassdigest.com/2012/02/21/the-devins-advocate-pirates-are-huge-entitled-babies/
maybe pandora’s box can’t be re-closed, but the idea that having to wait two weeks for a product morally justifies denying a creator payment for services rendered does not strike me as a virtue we should be advancing in our society.
Dean already dealt with the notion that having to wait makes it morally justifiable in that no one is saying that it does. Their customers don’t see anything immoral at all about ‘stealing’ content.
This is a case of HBO’s sales process getting in the way. They need to be better than ‘download it for free’ or else people will do that, since we all don’t consider it immoral at all.
Like the music side, people will either adjust or flail around until they go out of business. We’ll see how many more SOPA/ACTA fiascoes we have to go through first.
Fruitylips,
It pretty clearly is about waiting two weeks for some people. That was the whole point of the oatmeal comic. If he had tried any of the myriad things (amazon, itunes, etc) two weeks later he’d find it available for digital download as easy as you please.
Being better than “download for free” is an impossible bar to meet, how could any “pay and X” beat “download for free”? That can’t be the end of the discussion.
The ‘two week’ issue is about what the consumer wants. It is not a moral issue. The moral issue is lost and over with. Consumers do not see content piracy as immoral. End of story. Done.
Beating ‘free’ is relatively easy, as has been mentioned in this thread a few times. Reasonable price plus convenience of access.
For instance, Netflix costs me $7.99 and I don’t have to go out, find what I’m looking for on the net, download it and then watch it on my laptop. It wouldn’t even occur to me to squawk about that until about $20/mo or so.
Instead, the streaming cost is low enough and it was trivial enough to hook up my Apple TV to my big screen that I’ll do that. Not to mention that when I’m traveling, I can stream to my phone/iPad/kindle.
The entire experience is well worth a few bucks per month. Rather than the effort to pirate it. Heck, my mom figured out how to get her Apple TV working in about 20 min. My 4yo boy knows for to get to his Caillou and Phineas and Ferb. The odds of them pirating anything are quite low.
This is only going to make things worse from the POV of content control. Allie’s grown up in a world where what he wants to watch is available right now and where he wants it. If you think they’re fighting an uphill battle now I have trouble even convincing him that I can’t just pull up TV recordings at a whim when we’re in a hotel.
Having never lived in a house without a DVR and streaming, on demand video, he’s going to be far less interested in some random claim of ‘but we get to control distribution and you will watch things when we decide you can’.
One of the odd things about being “centrist” on any argument is that people presume you’re trying to take either a wishy-washy stance or trying to “prove you’re the most reasonable person,” when really it just makes people on both sides hate you. ;-)
In this case: I have considerable sympathies for the dissenting view, inasmuch as telling people they have to wait a bit longer than subscribers is OK by me–although I would make a big production out of saying “AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY FROM THESE SOURCES UNTIL X DATE, AVAILABLE LATER FROM Y” in bold letters splattered all over all kinds of stuff. In the particular case of Game of Thrones, did they have stuff like that plastered all over all the places a person normally would go looking–Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, or HBO’s web site? It appears to me that they did not, which is a point that seems to have been missed.
There’s also a fail in the dissenting argument (as referenced here) in that stealing the Xbox is physically taking something and causes a direct, tangible loss for whoever you stole it from, whereas making a digital copy causes an intangible and debatable loss. (And if you cannot admit the debatable part, you’ve got a big problem because it honestly is debatable.)
If I pirate your book, I did not take money from your wallet. I didn’t give money to you and I arguably cheated you, but you do not have less money than you had if I simply didn’t read it.
Ditto the case of someone who -cannot afford- what you’re asking; the moral stance is arguably “well then too bad suck it up you just can’t have it.” But the practical approach is, “well, can we make it cheaper and more convenient for people with things like advertising, slightly reduced quality, extra bonuses for the premium buyers, etc.?”
And furthermore, it is practical to acknowledge that if I don’t but your book and don’t read it, you made no money, but if I pirate your book and do read it, you just made no money on me–but you may well make money from my friends and family members to whom I rave about the book and which causes them to buy it because they can afford to do so and it is easier for them than to jump into my crazy convoluted world of book-pirating.
There is a reason most people do not consider libraries competition for book stores, even though what libraries really do is make it possible for hundreds of people to read your book without giving you a dime. Experience shows that library-frequenters are sometimes paupers who can’t afford books, but just as often they are people who wind up buying books they really like and/or telling all their friends who prefer to go to the book store and get it rather than go to the library and hope to find it there.
Whether creators like it or not most people do not and will not ever believe that it is exactly the same to steal as to pirate because you are not taking money away, you are just not-giving money. Failure to acknowledge this difference tends to cause you to lose some people you might otherwise persuade to pay. If your goal is to be morally correct then fine, enjoy being morally correct. But if your goal is to get more money into the hands of creators, you lose. So, did you want to be right, or did you want to get more money into the hands of creators?
The practical, pragmatic approach to piracy to my way of thinking has always been to make it frowned upon and to make it more challenging than just paying. It really isn’t all that easy to torrent, for example, because you really do have to be more computer literate than your average person and if you’re just-literate-enough you can also screw your own system up (malware infections are an almost guaranteed result eventually), and you can also experience all sorts of frustrations (such as, say, finding to your dismay that your download was a crappy copy or in a foreign language). It thus requires well-above-average technical savvy to do these things reliably and safely and with a decent experience, and I do not view that as a bad thing overall; it helps the goal of making it safer and more convenient to just buy what you want.
What doesn’t work, in my 30 or so years of watching the piracy debate (it started mostly with computer software) is high moral dudgeon and sledgehammer approaches. Morality aside, it just doesn’t work. So the question is: what does work to get more money into the hands of creators?
zach,
I don’t condone or engage in piracy.
What gets my attention on this subject is that apparently some people think it would be appropriate to destroy one of the most powerful tools of liberty just to cover a bad business decision.
I would say that hating your customers is pretty much always a bad business decision. If you’re motivated by hate, you’re likely to do something stupid, like blasting away without first checking where your feet are.
Coincidentally, I saw this today.
Thanks, fruitylips, that was a great article.
Ah, I saw this after I just decided to stop in and post after all this time (sorry)… ouch! This is something I write about from time to time — in fact, I spoke it about last spring at a conference of a bunch of copyright lawyers — because it’s what I do for a living. My latest fairly comprehensive take on the subject of the conversion of intellectual property into a rent-seeking, anti-competitive weapon is here — and yes, that’s exactly what it is.
The issues are somewhat more complicated than they are spun, of course. Just consider the role of attorneys in all this nonsense, and the people who knowingly pay them.
Yes, Dishman, I myself spent years as an IP “enforcement” attorney. But at the end of the day, as you say — and others who know even better agree — hating your customers is a bad business model.
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