Cav's Place

A week ago, I was saying that I had another post about “piracy” planned. Once again, had to struggle to get myself to write it, but here it is. Don’t expect anything I haven’t said before, as my views on this are obviously not going to change, but there are a few news pieces that have caught my attention in the last month or so and I had to give my two cents on the issue once again, for what it’s worth. I’m also thinking of putting these posts into their own category, though that may be a little difficult as I didn’t quite intend them to be a separate category so far and therefore some of them don’t focus solely on this issue, but I’ll probably need to write one or two more before there’ll be any point in doing that anyway.
To give you a starting point, here is a news piece which shouldn’t have surprised anyone: Call of Duty: Black Ops was the most “pirated” game of 2010. Still, equally unsurprising, that didn’t stop it from selling copies worth more than one billion dollars! Yes, you read that right: One billion dollars. And it certainly went well over that mark since then, seeing as that article is over a month old.

Electronic goods are bought legally by those who have enough money and the proper means to pay, think the price is, if not necessarily fair, at least acceptable and are interested enough. Everyone else, which includes those who don’t have the money or, even if they would have the money, don’t have the means to pay, those who think the price is unacceptably high, those who don’t particularly care to make use of any of the services that a legal purchase would make available, such as being able to play on official servers, and those who simply aren’t sure if they really are interested and want to try everything out first, rely on “piracy”.
That said, it makes perfect sense for something that sells well to also get “pirated” a lot, because both reveal a high degree of public interest. However, it’s also possible for something to get “pirated” a lot while having poor sales, which means that it’s either too expensive, too difficult to purchase legally or simply not interesting enough to justify buying. This is most noticeable when it comes to games that are rushed to release, ending up on the market in a pretty poor state, as it’s obviously a bad idea to pay money when you’ll end up basically being a beta tester, not even certain that the problems will be fixed through official patches in the near future. And the only ones to blame for such situations are the publishers, who simply shouldn’t allow anything to be released in such a state.

You probably noticed that I keep writing “piracy”. That’s because actual piracy implies stealing something that’s not yours and then using it for your own material gain, mainly by selling it for profit. But anyone who thinks about it for even one moment will realize that none of this can really be considered stealing. Stealing is when someone takes your car: They now have another car and you no longer have one. But when it comes to intellectual property we’re only talking about copies, so nobody takes anything away from the copyright owner, who still retains the original content and the right to keep selling it no matter how many copies others make.
However, something really is wrong when people actually sell illegal copies of software, music, movies or any other such things: While not exactly stealing it, they do make use of others’ work for their own personal gain, which is not acceptable. And it’s equally unacceptable to use “pirated” content in a production environment or in any other way which will earn you money without the copyright owner’s knowledge and consent. These things aren’t exactly what I’d call piracy either, but they’re close enough and shouldn’t be allowed, though people should obviously be allowed to sell software cracks or to charge for modifying hardware in order to accept “pirated” software, as that really is their own work.
Interestingly, file-sharing actually hits just those “pirates” who are selling others’ work for their own personal gain, pretty much throwing them off the market. This means that any efforts to combat file-sharing only result in renewed interest in the services those people offer. As a result, besides harming the end users and not particularly helping the content creators, such efforts actually benefit what could perhaps be called a criminal element. Not that the publishers couldn’t be called a criminal element as well, as they also make money off others’ work and usually only act as a roadblock between the content creators and the end users, but that’s another issue…

Despite all that, the thickheads keep being set in their ways. Or, in fact, some quite smart but extraordinarily selfish individuals keep pressing the issue and the thickheads keep being swayed by their rhetoric. That’s the only possible explanation, since there’s no way that a reasonably intelligent individual who has no direct personal interest in preserving the current copyright laws could possibly support this state of affairs.
But the current situation is still pretty much unchanged, because just those quite smart but extraordinarily selfish individuals are the ones pulling the strings. So you see time and money wasted on official studies about the number of visitors attracted by “piracy” sites, the same old and completely fallacious rants about the losses caused by “piracy”, including the expected pathetic cries of the music industry, and, worst of all, file-sharing sites shut down after being lumped together with those selling counterfeit goods!

While I still plan to someday write a pretty detailed draft for a new copyright law, especially when it comes to electronic goods, that day is probably still far away and I won’t repeat the parts that I have already mentioned before. All I mean to say now is that major changes are in order and they’ll only happen if we, the end users, keep on fighting and pressuring the powers that be, never backing down regardless of what else they’ll throw at us. If we do this, we can hope that, as time passes, more and more content creators will break their alliance with the publishers and join us in creating a new system, one that’ll be better and fairer for both them and us, perhaps culminating with the creation of the Content Creators’ Association, along with the system outlined in that post of mine…