Piracy
Entry posted by Thundery wintry showers
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Here's one topic that often gets up my backside, in particular the way we only ever hear one side of the argument ("piracy is killing our industries") and rather poor counterarguments from downloaders which can generally be refuted in two seconds flat. There is a middle ground to be charted, and as is my nature, I'm one of those to chart it.
It's far from clear that copying in moderation actually erodes sales (such as the "casual copying" that dominated in the 1990s, when people made copies for friends and 'shared' copies around a household). The potential lost sales, which arise if someone gets a copy of something they would otherwise buy, may be outweighed by the increased brand awareness and exposure that the industries receive. On the other hand, mass copying/distribution probably does erode sales, for if copies are very widely available, many people just snap them up instead of buying anything.
The biggest problem is counterfeiting- people creating copies of products and selling them, which is essentially a form of theft, as the money goes to the pirate and not the creator of the product.
However, the main focus on anti-piracy measures has been to crack down on the "casual copying" using intrusive copy-protection measures, and only recently has the efforts expanded significantly to address the organised piracy. The definition of what constitutes "piracy" has expanded with time. So, legitimate users have been punished, criminalised and treated like thieves, so many turned to the stuff the organised pirates were using (hacks, peer-2-peer downloads etc) to reclaim their previous activities and by-pass the copy protection. This will have contributed to the current culture of downloading copyrighted material which is distributed on a wide scale.
The notion that "piracy is killing the industry" is backed up by statistics. But why aren't there any statistics on the contrary? Answer, because they made it illegal to conduct research that questions the correctness of copyright law. It doesn't suggest they're very confident in the correctness of the law if they defend it by making it illegal to provide evidence against it! Computer gaming forums are littered with arguments like "All forms of piracy should be lumped together under one brush, because it's all illegal, all illegal activity is bad, therefore it should all be illegal", which is essentially a circular argument.
With systems like Valve Software's Steam in operation (requiring online authentication to play computer games), we may well cut piracy to very low levels in the near future. But, if the industries continue to follow the mantra of zero-tolerance and punishing the many because of the few all the time, we're only ever going to eliminate piracy by eliminating 90% of liberty- which may mean customers being cheesed off, and thus, ironically, lost sales.
In conclusion, while piracy is a genuine issue, the industries' anti-piracy measures have probably been harming their sales more than piracy itself.
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