Protesting the Pirate Bay Protests

[Blue Lemma]

As someone who creates software for a living and as a hobby, I am always interested in what's going on in the intellectual property world. As many of you probably heard, the people behind The Pirate Bay, a Swedish BitTorrent tracker site, were recently convicted for helping people infringe upon copyrights. (Article here: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... AD97KVRAO1 )

What gets me is the protest that followed and the attitude of the protesters (as well as many I see in the online community) that electronic content should be free. They say it should be "free for non-commercial use", but for things like movies and games, aren't you generally using them in private in your home? The whole economic model is that people who wish to enjoy the media PAY for it. It takes money, time, effort, and economic risk to create worthwhile content, and a lot of people have no respect for this. Do people think plumbers should fix toilets for free? Farmers should give their food away for free? Landlords should let people rent for free? Usually not. So why do people expect electronic content for free, like it's some moral right?

Now, I know the classic argument: "Yes, Blue Lemma, but if a farmer gave food away, the farmer doesn't have that food anymore, and plumbers have to spend time on each person who gets their services. With files on the computer, whether I get a copy or not doesn't affect the creator!" Sure, but if everyone thought this way and acted accordingly, no one would ever pay for content in the first place and all we'd have is generally lower-quality freeware games made by hobbyists. (Not to put down hobbyists - I am one ^^ ) But we all know nobody's going to make Final Fantasy X if they can't make money doing it. As I said, it's an investment. Also, what about the Golden Rule? Would these protesters like it if they created something that took a long time and expense, and then people not only spread it around against their wishes, but furthermore insisted it is their moral right to do so? I doubt it.

"Hey, plumber! Why don't you support your business with ad revenue? You can advertise other businesses on your uniform and plumb for free!" I don't hear anyone saying that.

It's sad, because if this sort of thing continues and people cannot recoup investments from their game-making, movie-making, etc., people will not spend so much to make them, and fewer people will make them. Okay, this might not be terrible at first glance since we have a glut of content on the net, but the point is that many of the professional GOOD people who make the best content will stop making it. We'd still have a ton of mediocre and crappy things.

This turned into a rant, but seriously, this pisses me off. If you don't want to pay for something, don't use it. Or at least do it knowing it's unfair to the creators. Maybe even feel bad about it a little. Or something. DO NOT try to blame the content creators for expecting to be compensated for their investment of time, money, and energy. It makes me sick. If someone wants to give their content away for free, that should be the creator's call.

Yeah, there are cases like abandonware or things you just can't obtain in certain locations very easily at all, etc. I'm guessing most of us have at least dabbled in that stuff (I'll admit myself included). I'm talking pirating (er, "file-sharing") readily-available content that's in less of a gray area.

Okay, that felt good to get off my chest... so now that I'm opening up the floodgates of controversy, can anyone contribute anything to this? Explain the thinking behind this sense of entitlement (a biased word choice there, I know)? Explain why I'm oh so wrong?

Post away please

[Samu-kun]

*hides all of his downloaded animes*
Uh, me? Yes, I am a good law abiding Internet citizen and I would never engage in piracy!

[papillon]

As someone who creates software for a living AND someone who's been poor, I have no desire to track down every person who's ever pirated a single thing and scold them for it. There are a lot of reasons for it, not all are evil.

I *do* want to track down and scold everyone who thinks they have a moral right to take everything they want without paying for it, or who claim to be 'big fans' of something without ever giving anything back to it, or who openly scoff that you're 'behind the times' if you think you should be paid for creating popular content.

If you like stuff, pay for it. If you can't afford to pay for everything, pay for some things that you can afford and worry about giving back more when you have more to give back. If you want something to succeed, support it. If you have the time and the knowledge, try to find out how best to get your support to the people who need and deserve it - if you can only afford to buy one thing, then it's probably more helpful of you to buy the obscure thing from the struggling small company than the popular thing that lots of people are buying, but do your research yourself. If you seriously can't pay for anything at all, promote it to people who CAN pay for it. Give back how you can.

[Taroku]

I wont neglect that i, too, am guilty of doing illegal downloading, not that i'm doing it much anymore (Mostly because it's boring me now. Yeah i know, bad excuse)

I've actualy been thinking about this earlier today, and i completely agree with what you are saying.


I don't have anything to add besides what you've already said, so allow me to put my point of view like this:

Imagine that you are someone who has just finished your big project, and then makes it available comercialy somehow (I'm a little blank in this area, but i hope you get the idea) then after a while someone decides to put it on the internet and make it available for free. Not only will you not earn nearly as much money for something you have spendt days, maybe even weeks, to complete, but you may also feel dicouraged to make a new project that you might even have made plans for in advance.


I hope this came out in a understanderble manner.


Damn i'm tired... =_=

[Jake]

Or at least do it knowing it's unfair to the creators. Maybe even feel bad about it a little. Or something. DO NOT try to blame the content creators for expecting to be compensated for their investment of time, money, and energy. It makes me sick.

To be honest, I kind of suspect that many of the people who protest that it's OK to download because of X and Y and how Z is 'forcing' them to do so are often doing so because they recognise at heart that it's wrong and they're trying to come up with excuses to convince themselves more than anyone else.

Okay, that felt good to get off my chest... so now that I'm opening up the floodgates of controversy, can anyone contribute anything to this? Explain the thinking behind this sense of entitlement (a biased word choice there, I know)? Explain why I'm oh so wrong?

Speaking from the point of view of a programmer who thus relies on IP law to have a job, and an artist who produces creative works on a regular basis, and thus also has a vested interest in copyrights and copyright law:

I would suggest that the same "does it hurt anyone?" metric is reasonably applied to downloading things, as well. A guy torrenting a copy of Photoshop to make humourous images to post on 4chan is never going to buy the thing at the ever-increasing gigantic price Adobe charges for what is essentially a professional package that this guy is only using a tiny fraction of, so arguably there's no lost sale and it's not a huge problem. (It's a bad example, because Adobe provides Photoshop Elements for a reasonable price which does everything the guy needs, but pretend that doesn't exist for the moment.) I can't go out and legally pay anyone to watch Anime Series X, so nobody really loses out if I download the fansub. And speaking personally, if I watch a series through and it later becomes licensed and gets a DVD release, then I'll generally buy those DVDs. (Although thanks for reminding me to check, I'd missed the release of Baccano! on DVD; the first two volumes are now in the post. )

I also have some sympathy with the "your thing is too expensive to buy without a demo, and you don't provide a demo" excuse. You know, because a lot of things are seriously expensive and there's no realistic way of telling whether they do what you want, how you want without buying it. And software sellers are remarkably reluctant to give people refunds on opened packages/activated serial numbers/etc., so it's a lot less hassle to just download it illegally to see if it's suitable for your needs.



...and lastly, the content-providing industry has kind of shot themselves in the feet repeatedly on consumer relations, for this one. I mean - if I buy a game these days, odds are even it comes with SecuROM or some equally-obnoxious/dangerous/disgusting piece of 'copy-protection' software which blatantly works about as well as a chocolate teapot. If I went to Honda and they told me that I could only buy a car from them if I agreed to give them a copy of my house keys so they could send a guy around at random to go through all my things and make sure I wasn't using cheap non-Honda aftermarket parts or trying to fiddle with the ECU, and to confiscate any tools I might have in case I tried to do any work on the car myself instead of bringing it to an authorised dealership, I'd never buy a car from Honda and neither would anybody else. But SecuROM does basically exactly this with your computer! It's actually in my best interest to buy the game and then torrent a copy anyway and play that, because the illegally-obtained copy won't have this disgusting crap.

(And one wonders how many people have been told they're a criminal for ripping a copy of a CD that they own so that they can listen to it on their MP3 player and then shrugged and thought "if I'm already a criminal, I might as well go and torrent some music, after all"...? I doubt anyone thinks it through quite so consciously, but I expect that the more groups like the RIAA tell people that they're not allowed to do things that everyone thinks are totally reasonable, the more people start to conflate things they're not allowed to do which are reasonable with things they're not allowed to do which aren't.)




To be honest, the only reason I have to particularly care about the owners of The Pirate Bay getting thrown in prison is the continuous assertion that what they were doing is legal under Swedish law, and I find the all-too-believable suggestion that Big Media throws about enough political weight to get people to ignore the law and prosecute on political grounds rather disturbing. Really, if they wanted to create a generic Useful Torrent Site which encouraged legal use and happened to have some illegal use because they can't reasonably police such a service I would have a lot more sympathy with them than if they set up a service which basically says "use our servers to facilitate copyright infringement" from the name onwards.

[papillon]

...and lastly, the content-providing industry has kind of shot themselves in the feet repeatedly on consumer relations, for this one. I mean - if I buy a game these days, odds are even it comes with SecuROM or some equally-obnoxious/dangerous/disgusting piece of 'copy-protection' software which blatantly works about as well as a chocolate teapot.

It's endlessly frustrating to hear this stuff when you're a game developer who sells games without DRM and know several other people who sell games without DRM and they get just as pirated, though.

I *agree* that it's ridiculous to sometimes end up needing to crack things you legally paid for in order to get them to work right, but it's not impossible to just choose to go with games that aren't evil. There are plenty of games out there to pick from, after all.

(This is also probably a good time to promote Good Old Games - slightly older titles, cheap, DRM-free.)

[Jake]

I *agree* that it's ridiculous to sometimes end up needing to crack things you legally paid for in order to get them to work right, but it's not impossible to just choose to go with games that aren't evil. There are plenty of games out there to pick from, after all.

Oh, I know. And these days, I pretty much exclusively buy either console games - where I don't care so much about MS' total control over my XBox 360 so long as it still plays games - or indie games for the PC. Including at least one of yours.

But crap like SecuROM is still disgusting, and frankly I find it more of an affront to my moral sensibilities than casual copyright infringement, most of the time.

[PyTom]

File-sharing is here to stay. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing... but now that it exists, something like bittorrent is dead easy to re-create. Writing a (perhaps lousy) implementation of bittorrent is roughly a semester project for a 500-level CS course... perhaps even a 300-level one. Like it or not, this technology isn't going away.

People expect that once content is published, anywhere in the world, it will be available to them within hours, in a language of their choice, at a negligible cost. Now, maybe I'm biased here... but the stuff I download tends either not to be available in the US at the time, or something that is not available in English.

When something is available to me, at a reasonable cost, I tend to buy it. (For example, I have a Crunchyroll membership.)

When a law makes a large fraction of the population into criminals, there's something wrong with the law, not the population. This is fundamental. Government originates with the consent of the governed. When a law is widely flouted, like copyright is, there is something wrong with that law, and it needs to be changed. What's more, it _should_ be changed lest a large fraction of the population turn into scofflaws... which is bad, because the rule of law should generally hold.

I'll also point out that the current copyright law is horribly broken. I mean, large portions of Google are seemingly against the law. Ignoring the basic search functionality (for which one could arguably claim fair use), there is the cache, language tools, and of course YouTube.... on which copyright violations comprise an important part of the ongoing political discourse.


I suspect that the solution is some kind of mandatory/mechanical license. In exchange for a monthly fee, a person will have the right to view and share anything he wants, provided it has been published at least once. Software of some sort will monitor what a person is watching, send it (perhaps anonymized somehow) to a clearinghouse, and the creators of the content will get paid from the clearinghouse.

Unlike the television licenses common in Europe (which I think are terribly unfair), this puts the decision as to which media gets supported by the license fee into the hands of the consumer of the media, rather making it the purview of government, bureaucrats, or executives.

The downside is that this is a big government solution to the problem, and big government solutions tend to be bad ones. It's basically asking government to value how much media is worth to a person, and that number will certainly vary greatly from person to person. (As well as having to decide the relative worth of a second of movies, VNs, books, manga, TV, YouTube, etc...)

On the other hand, copyright itself is a government thing, and so maybe it's fair to ask the government to clean up its own mess. I don't know 100% what the solution is, but I do know that the current situation, which makes a huge number of people into petty criminals, doesn't seem to be sustainable.

[Blue Lemma]

All this over-the-top DRM stuff needs to go. I'd feel flat-out guilty pushing that stuff on paying customers.

People expect that once content is published, anywhere in the world, it will be available to them within hours, in a language of their choice, at a negligible cost.

But is that right? This example is more extreme, but in some countries, men expect women to submit themselves to them in pretty much all aspects... but I don't think most people would say that's right. It's just the dominant paradigm in those places.

I agree file-sharing is here to stay, but unless someone comes up with a viable business model for the creators to be compensated, high-quality content will not be here to stay. A lot of pro-file-sharing people would be elated if copyright laws were abolished tomorrow, but it would be a short-term gain. They'd have a lot of free content immediately, but people would be out of work, and the future content would tank in quality.

(And one wonders how many people have been told they're a criminal for ripping a copy of a CD that they own so that they can listen to it on their MP3 player and then shrugged and thought "if I'm already a criminal, I might as well go and torrent some music, after all"...? I doubt anyone thinks it through quite so consciously, but I expect that the more groups like the RIAA tell people that they're not allowed to do things that everyone thinks are totally reasonable, the more people start to conflate things they're not allowed to do which are reasonable with things they're not allowed to do which aren't.)

I very much agree. Just like how it's illegal to make backups of protected CD-ROMs under the DMCA, it becomes more easily justified to break the law when the law makes no moral sense.

[PyTom]

People expect that once content is published, anywhere in the world, it will be available to them within hours, in a language of their choice, at a negligible cost.

But is that right?

It doesn't matter. As long as people believe this, and there is the technical means to do so, an there is no legal alternative, people will pursue illegal means to accomplish the goal. And the technical means will always be available, at least in an open society.

I'd also point out that Copyright is a very different kind of right compared to the sort of natural rights people have to things like life and freedom. Indeed, Copyright isn't really a right at all, but a set of limitations we put on people for a specific purpose. In the US, that purpose is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts".

I would argue that the expectation I laid out above is consistent with this purpose, and since it's not violating any sort of natural right (does anyone here thing copyright is a natural right?), it's a valid position to have. And I'd argue that it's a position that an increasing number of people take, to one extent or another.

There's nothing particularly natural about the rights the current copyright system conveys, IMO.

I agree file-sharing is here to stay, but unless someone comes up with a viable business model for the creators to be compensated, high-quality content will not be here to stay. A lot of pro-file-sharing people would be elated if copyright laws were abolished tomorrow, but it would be a short-term gain. They'd have a lot of free content immediately, but people would be out of work, and the future content would tank in quality.

I'm not sure this is true. I mean, look at the EVN community. We have people who are making quality content for the commercial motive. And we have people making quality content for free, in a lot of cases. (Some of which have yet to be released.) And we have high quality (for some value of high quality) content that is illegal under the current system. (I, for one, find the abridged version of Yu-Gi-Oh to be of higher quality than the original.)

Right now, we give the content creator a monopoly on deciding how much to charge for their work, with the consumer's only recourse to choose if he's willing to pay that much for that work. I'm not sure this is sustainable.

[Blue Lemma]

How many great free VN works are there compared to great professional works, though? As much as I like some of the free works, I wouldn't put them in the same league as Ever17 and Yume Miru Kusuri. I don't know of any free games I would put up against Final Fantasy X and the Disgaea series.

[Counter Arts]

I would say that it would be a lot more easier to limit how the people make money off stuff. Less people to deal with.

[Wintermoon]

But is that right? This example is more extreme, but in some countries, men expect women to submit themselves to them in pretty much all aspects... but I don't think most people would say that's right. It's just the dominant paradigm in those places.

You're saying that the (local) majority can be wrong, but your only argument is that the (global) majority agrees with you? Not much of an argument.

I think the majority (local or global) is wrong quite often. However, the purpose of a democratic government is still to carry out the will of the people. Even if the majority is wrong (i.e. I disagree with the majority), a democratic government has no right to oppose the majority.

[DaFool]

Right now, we give the content creator a monopoly on deciding how much to charge for their work, with the consumer's only recourse to choose if he's willing to pay that much for that work. I'm not sure this is sustainable.

The alternative would be for the portal or the engine developer to have a say in pricing, which is not always good...

http://www.visionaire2d.net/cms/front_c ... t=3&lang=3
license option 2

With this license, you can develop and distribute both freeware and commercial games with limited distribution rights. The games are only to be sold for a maximum price of 15 Euro (or the according value in another currency). This license does not allow for unlimited distribution and selling rights of developed games, which includes advertisement games etc.!

another example would be how recently casual game portals engaged in a price war mentioned before where previous $19.99 titles were being sold sub $10. The reduced perception of value is a lose-lose situation for everyone.

Let's say the floodgates were opened, and everything was free to pirate. You'd have the exact situation in Asia: First-person games are dead -- no company is developing them anymore. You'd have a gazillion clone MMORPGs with a pay-per-cool-item commercial system. The epitome of gaming won't be the immersive cinematic experience of first-person-experiences... akin to reading a good novel... but going "LOLZ... PWNED!" with your online friends. Not too bad, except it'd be like playing with a party-only machine such as the Nintendo Wii... it'd be a initially bestseller since everyone has one, but they're mostly gathering dust now. Since no one but Nintendo is capable of making immersive experiences on the damn thing.

Then you'd have shops selling figma at astronomical imported prices, and OSTs as well. Now tell me, why the hell should a piece of plastic cost near 100 bucks, or an OST cost near 20 bucks, when the $100,000+ per episode animated series is being given away for free? Tell that to my production coordinator, who spends 14 hours a day in her office, or my animator colleagues who spend entire weekends catching up on deadlines. I already have the cushiest position, and that's still upwards of 12 hours on graveyard shift.

If there is a chance for me to pay for original content at a reasonable price, I do so. I even supported the only R1 DVD distributor in Greenhills before they went belly up.
(although I don't really care for Crunchyroll )

And I still prefer the PC platform even with all the DRM and stuff, it's still an 'open' platform. Companies are also willing to give out their several-years-old content as ad-supported freeware as well:
http://www.gameplayer.com.au/gp_documen ... Games.aspx
I can't think of any console title that has a faster depreciation rate than a PC game

[JQuartz]

The Pirate Bay, a Swedish BitTorrent tracker site, were recently convicted for helping people infringe upon copyrights.

Maybe they shouldn't throw them to jail. Instead they should just use their money(The Pirate Bay's not the taxpayer's) to produce and sell commercial quality music(the profit would go to Pirate Bay) and then ask everyone to just bit torrent it instead of buying it. Who knows, maybe the Pirate Bay people can come up with a viable business plan to combat piracy.