4 ms·

The semantic details are a distraction. Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome. Revenue

The semantic details are a distraction. Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome. Revenue go down? You can't pay your bills. You make less stuff even though people want what you are making. Everyone is worse off. Bad outcome. In the end, we want more good outcomes and less bad. There is a lot of conversation around piracy's relationship to the bad outcome. But, a lot of it is armchair-CFO arguments and based on looking for excuses. People directly affected by piracy report that the relationship is either quite clear or that they have given up and don't bother fighting or even measuring it. Should piracy be legal? Maybe? Doesn't really matter at the consumer level. There is it de-facto unenforced 99.9% of the time anyway. What matters for producers and consumers in practice is the practice of DRM. In practice, the vast majority of software work these days is on server-side products and a huge component of that is the implicit DRM aspect. Desktop software has relatively been in a terrible lull since the consumerization of the internet. A lot of it is due to the awesome features of the interwebs. But, a whole lot of it is that it's a lot harder to actually get paid for desktop software vs server-based. It's a damn shame. But, no one knows what to do about it.

pdimitar 6y ago
I am not pirating games (not since 2012 and then back in 2008 anyway). I am also a programmer, not quite the gray neckbeard but I've seen my fair share of Windows MFC and Java Swing back in the day (since we're talking about desktop GUI programs as well as games). And we all want to be paid for our work. But apparently people think software must be free. And I've known people making $30,000+ a month who pirated games. I've known lawyers and high-profile accountants begging on forums for a $150 program (paid once for a lifetime license) to be cracked. Those people made at least $10,000 a month in a third-world country. Basically one level below the millionaires. WTF, right? I've read enough history to notice that the vested interests are always fighting a losing battle (only long-term and in retrospect anyway). So maybe we need another approach because rebelling against reality gets us nowhere IMO. Sorry if this is too philosophical but I thought I should offer you a point of view that doesn't involve a work life which is comprised of a constant game of tug of war. At one point we all should accept the world as it is and try to work around its flaws. One example: there are games that can detect that you are running a pirated version and they deliberately hide part of the in-game content from you (I think Witcher 3?). That alone was enough for a guy I knew to begrudgingly buy the game (he wasn't poor either). As said in another comment also in reply to you: if piracy ushers in inconvenience then they'll buy. We can never get rid of piracy. There's a ton of extremely sharp reverse engineers out there. But we can make it hard enough for the users of our pirated products so they just give up. I've seen it applied successfully but I'll admit that it's a hard thing to pull off. Or ultimately, if that constant arms race tires us, we should branch out to other (sub-)careers. I myself am seriously considering exiting web programming, I am sick of it already, for many reasons.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  I actually see the vested interests slowly winning, for better or worse. Web services & cloud gaming are as close as you get to the end-game for piracy. Remotely delivering apps and games like that effectively hides your code and fundamentally closes the analog hole. Even in the video space, the analog hole is slowly being patched with hardware attested DRM and HDCP, so pervasive now that they're baked into web standards. Dolby Vision has yet to be cracked IIRC, which means pirated movies/TV can be worse than the legitimate one. There'll probably always be insider leaks though (ie. someone with inside access to a master copy leaks it).
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    >I actually see the vested interests slowly winning, for better or worse. That's why I said they lose eventually and only in retrospect. In the meantime (decades or centuries) they dominate indeed. But entropy is always at work. The last 3 years we've seen a torrent of "X site has been breached" and I have no doubt that 80% of all breaches never make it to the news. Which means the vested interests' techniques (SaaS / hosted services like games) aren't fault-proof either. The pendulum is still swinging. As for stuff like HDCP and Dolby Vision, yeah, those are worrisome. :|
dirkt 6y ago
> The semantic details are a distraction. But it's a distraction gladly used by those who want to promote more copyright restrictions - everyone learns as a small child "what's yours is not what's mine", and everyone learns that theft is bad. So calling piracy theft means everyone has the gut reaction that it's bad. Calling piracy an infringement of a monopoly has a very different flavour to it. Copyright monopolies do serve a purpose. But one shouldn't try to distract from this purpose by calling piracy theft. Before "copying" music or books was cheap, the situation was quite different (tunes and books were copied left and right, nobody cared, but you had to pay the musicians to perform a tune, and the scribes to copy a book), but theft still existed, and was punished.
account42 6y ago
> Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome. > > Revenue go down? You can't pay your bills. You make less stuff even though people want what you are making. Everyone is worse off. Bad outcome. This is a very limited view of the of the effect of copyright. The goal is not to make sure any one specific person or organization has the funds to create but to encoourage the total sum of creations by anyone. As such, any analysis of the effectiveness of copyright will have to also consider the detrimental effects copyright has on other people creating things. And these detrimental effects are not at all theoretical. There is lots of imaginarity "property" that people are sitting on and doing nothing with the monopoly they have been granted as an incentive to produce more while still preventing anyone else from building on those works. Licensing something or heck, even figuring out who owns the rights, is prohibitive enough to outright kill many endeavours that would have enriched society. And that is before come to the hyper-inflated copyright lengths we have today where creators are incentivized to keep milking something they have made decades ago instead of being required to make something new if they want more profit. I agree that DRM sucks, but that is not an argument for stronger copyright enforcement. DRM very much relies on copyright laws that make breaking it illegal in order to remain effective. And even then, it has only ever been effective in preventing the average user from circumventing it. If you could freely distribute DRM-defeating measures then publishers would be incentivized to remove it for everyone.

pdimitar 6y ago

I am not pirating games (not since 2012 and then back in 2008 anyway). I am also a programmer, not quite the gray neckbeard but I've seen my fair share of Windows MFC and Java Swing back in the day (since we're talking about desktop GUI programs as well as games). And we all want to be paid for our work. But apparently people think software must be free. And I've known people making $30,000+ a month who pirated games. I've known lawyers and high-profile accountants begging on forums for a $150 program (paid once for a lifetime license) to be cracked. Those people made at least $10,000 a month in a third-world country. Basically one level below the millionaires. WTF, right? I've read enough history to notice that the vested interests are always fighting a losing battle (only long-term and in retrospect anyway). So maybe we need another approach because rebelling against reality gets us nowhere IMO. Sorry if this is too philosophical but I thought I should offer you a point of view that doesn't involve a work life which is comprised of a constant game of tug of war. At one point we all should accept the world as it is and try to work around its flaws. One example: there are games that can detect that you are running a pirated version and they deliberately hide part of the in-game content from you (I think Witcher 3?). That alone was enough for a guy I knew to begrudgingly buy the game (he wasn't poor either). As said in another comment also in reply to you: if piracy ushers in inconvenience then they'll buy. We can never get rid of piracy. There's a ton of extremely sharp reverse engineers out there. But we can make it hard enough for the users of our pirated products so they just give up. I've seen it applied successfully but I'll admit that it's a hard thing to pull off. Or ultimately, if that constant arms race tires us, we should branch out to other (sub-)careers. I myself am seriously considering exiting web programming, I am sick of it already, for many reasons.

themacguffinman 6y ago
I actually see the vested interests slowly winning, for better or worse. Web services & cloud gaming are as close as you get to the end-game for piracy. Remotely delivering apps and games like that effectively hides your code and fundamentally closes the analog hole. Even in the video space, the analog hole is slowly being patched with hardware attested DRM and HDCP, so pervasive now that they're baked into web standards. Dolby Vision has yet to be cracked IIRC, which means pirated movies/TV can be worse than the legitimate one. There'll probably always be insider leaks though (ie. someone with inside access to a master copy leaks it).
- pdimitar 6y ago
  >I actually see the vested interests slowly winning, for better or worse. That's why I said they lose eventually and only in retrospect. In the meantime (decades or centuries) they dominate indeed. But entropy is always at work. The last 3 years we've seen a torrent of "X site has been breached" and I have no doubt that 80% of all breaches never make it to the news. Which means the vested interests' techniques (SaaS / hosted services like games) aren't fault-proof either. The pendulum is still swinging. As for stuff like HDCP and Dolby Vision, yeah, those are worrisome. :|

dirkt 6y ago

> The semantic details are a distraction. But it's a distraction gladly used by those who want to promote more copyright restrictions - everyone learns as a small child "what's yours is not what's mine", and everyone learns that theft is bad. So calling piracy theft means everyone has the gut reaction that it's bad. Calling piracy an infringement of a monopoly has a very different flavour to it. Copyright monopolies do serve a purpose. But one shouldn't try to distract from this purpose by calling piracy theft. Before "copying" music or books was cheap, the situation was quite different (tunes and books were copied left and right, nobody cared, but you had to pay the musicians to perform a tune, and the scribes to copy a book), but theft still existed, and was punished.

account42 6y ago

> Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome. > > Revenue go down? You can't pay your bills. You make less stuff even though people want what you are making. Everyone is worse off. Bad outcome. This is a very limited view of the of the effect of copyright. The goal is not to make sure any one specific person or organization has the funds to create but to encoourage the total sum of creations by anyone. As such, any analysis of the effectiveness of copyright will have to also consider the detrimental effects copyright has on other people creating things. And these detrimental effects are not at all theoretical. There is lots of imaginarity "property" that people are sitting on and doing nothing with the monopoly they have been granted as an incentive to produce more while still preventing anyone else from building on those works. Licensing something or heck, even figuring out who owns the rights, is prohibitive enough to outright kill many endeavours that would have enriched society. And that is before come to the hyper-inflated copyright lengths we have today where creators are incentivized to keep milking something they have made decades ago instead of being required to make something new if they want more profit. I agree that DRM sucks, but that is not an argument for stronger copyright enforcement. DRM very much relies on copyright laws that make breaking it illegal in order to remain effective. And even then, it has only ever been effective in preventing the average user from circumventing it. If you could freely distribute DRM-defeating measures then publishers would be incentivized to remove it for everyone.