Cav's Place

Considering the verdict of the Pirate Bay trial, I think a boycott is in order. It’s not an isolated case, it’s a matter of principle, and that’s why we all need to make a stand and hit them where it hurts the most. If they’re so worried about reduced sales, let’s see how they’d feel about no sales.
I won’t get into it all again, but they really need to understand that file-sharing is not stealing. It doesn’t cost them anything, they are still able to sell the product to those who wish to buy it, nobody removes the information regarding the real author and nobody is making any money out of it. Those who are really hurt by file-sharing are the “old school” pirates, those who used to burn movies, music or software to CDs or DVDs and then sell them, sometimes even tricking their customers into thinking that they were buying legitimate copies. Getting rid of those people seems like a good thing to me, because they actually used to make money off others’ work.

This does need to be a very specific boycott, however, and everyone who takes part needs to know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing and why. Having people scream about their rights and how they don’t care about those greedy copyright holders isn’t going to help anyone. Or, actually, it will help them and not us. If something like this is going to happen, we’ll have to be reasonable and speak very calmly and clearly.
But if we want them to understand the facts we first have to show that we understand them ourselves, and a fact about file-sharing is that people wouldn’t buy the tremendous majority of the things they download even if there’d be no other way to enjoy them, simply because they couldn’t afford them. That means we need to show the industry that they will face a truly significant loss of sales if they don’t leave file-sharing be. That said, while each person’s promise not to buy such things from now on does carry some weight, it should be obvious that those who have bought software, music or movies legally before are more important to the movement than those who haven’t, and those who buy regularly are more important than those who buy rarely. We can’t say that file-sharing is hardly causing any real losses and then claim that people who pledge to take part in the boycott without ever having legally bought such things do cause copyright holders any losses, because frankly they’re not.
On the other hand, if such a movement is to have any meaning it’ll have to be fair. That means the boycott should only apply to software, music or movies downloaded strictly for personal use and out of choice instead of need. This excludes content such as movies or music intended to be played at for-profit events or broadcasted by for-profit TV or radio stations. Another exclusion would involve productivity software used by companies or individuals in order to earn money or other goods, since it seems only fair to have to pay for something which is earning you a profit. Operating systems could also be excluded, seeing as computers would be unusable without them. The boycott also shouldn’t apply to software which requires constant maintenance from the developer in order to be useful, such as antivirus products or on-line games, because each user of such software does cost the developer money and it’s therefore only fair not to use it unless you’re willing to pay for it.

I recently read a report which said that 95% of the music which is in use today has not been legally purchased and that sales have dropped 20% since the start of the file-sharing “era”. I’m willing to accept those numbers, though I’d also argue that not all of that 20% drop is caused by file-sharing. Still, one has to look at those numbers carefully and see that they don’t represent what the industry would like people to think they represent. Yes, it does mean that 95 out of every 100 songs have not been paid for, but it also means that only one of those 95 had been paid for before the advent of file-sharing. The other 94 weren’t being legally purchased before either! Some of them were not listened to at all, while the others were being purchased from those “old school” pirates I mentioned before.
That means the copyright holders’ losses are limited to that one song and not all 95 of them. But that one song is still 20% of the current sales, which is still significant, so we need to look at that number for a moment. Once we do so, it becomes apparent that file-sharing is not fully responsible for it. This report analyzed last year’s data and that’s when the current global economic crisis started, so a part of the drop is a direct result of that. On top of that, another part is likely to be a direct result of the flawed marketing policies and high prices imposed by the distributors. So it is possible that file-sharing is responsible for some of that drop, but certainly not for all of it and likely not even for most of it. People who desire to buy such products and can afford doing so will generally still buy them, with or without file-sharing. In the end, reducing prices and protections and increasing the number of ways in which such products can be legally bought would be the real ways to improve sales.

I have been known to ask people if they have actually purchased their operating system or antivirus, or wonder if all the music broadcasted during a radio show which includes advertising has been paid for. I generally push for supporting the content creators by paying for their work when you can afford it, so I think I’m being quite reasonable. But the distributors, who generally tend to launch most of the attacks against file-sharing, are going too far and they need to be taught a lesson. I admit that such a boycott is going to negatively affect the content creators as well, but perhaps it’s time for them to make a stand as well and take back what’s theirs from the distributors. If we are careful and work together, we might still win this!