5 ms·

Maybe I am out of touch. There is a different question and that’s if piracy is good. That’s a little harder to answer. Piracy is potentially good for the overa

Maybe I am out of touch. There is a different question and that’s if piracy is good. That’s a little harder to answer. Piracy is potentially good for the overall market (free innovation, etc). Piracy is probably bad for the company/person who produced the good (ie they lose revenue and have to innovate themselves more to stay ahead of free). The second has been debated at length, and I know I honestly don’t know the answer. I used to see a lot of arguments that piracy can be used as a means to get access to free training and lock-in with a specific product, but then when they go legitimate, they then acquire real licenses. But the producing company has to make it clear that if people don’t go legit, then they will get sued. It’s kinda like the SaaS freemium -> enterprise license models some providers use.

dogleash 5y ago
I don't think it's an argument that "piracy is good", but instead piracy serves as a sort of test case to explore the extent to which current boundaries of intellectual property law is "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
- bluejekyll 5y ago
  Right, and that seems to be the ultimate question. Which side of the scale should society fall on some of these questions. Is it better for the majority to progress more quickly without those intellectual property laws, or do we need the profit motive for companies to innovate and therefor be rewarded for that innovation. It doesn’t feel like an either or, but more of a how far in either direction should the laws be. As a question, would software patents be more acceptable to people if they were limited to 2-5 years rather than the 15 (I think) they are now?
silisili 5y ago
I agree with the premise of the second. The big money comes from pros and corporate concracts, who generally (but not always) avoid pirated software. I feel if MS and Adobe weren't so lenient on piracy, they wouldn't have captured/held the worldwide market in their segments at such an astounding rate. For a smaller, non-monopoly, it may be a very different case though.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  At one point, Bill Gates openly admitted that this was part of Microsoft's China strategy [1]: > Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micropiracy9-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...
  - bserge 5y ago
    Don't know about China, but that worked really well in Eastern Europe. After things stabilized and the west "brought law and order", a lot of companies started paying MS licensing fees. Because everyone grew up on Windows and Office. Same for Adobe. Then there's this bullshit: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/peak-design-accuses-amazon-of-blatantly-copying-its-sling-bag https://www.inputmag.com/culture/peak-design-accuses-amazon-...
    - bdowling 5y ago
      > Then there's this bullshit: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/peak-design-accuses-amazon- https://www.inputmag.com/culture/peak-design-accuses-amazon-... I don't see how someone could confuse those two bags. Is the brand company claiming that no one else can make a sling type bag?
jokethrowaway 5y ago
As a complete remorseless pirate (as in, I download stuff but I never uploaded anything I purchase) and as someone whose software was pirated (causing me to go out of business, for that specific venture), I think piracy is bad purely because someone is infringing on a contract. If customer A buys my software and accepts a contract which say not to redistribute, he can't go and break that contract unpunished. I should be able to legally persecute customer A, if I can prove a breach of contract happened. If someone is re-sharing that content or if they're downloading it, they never had a contract with me and they should be able to do what they please. Sure, that's bad for me, but that's part of doing business. Eventually the price of things will go up to account for people pirating. Also, if I'm selling so much of my software that I can't possibly trace and persecute all the users leaking my software, I think we should accept a certain amount of piracy and loss of revenue. Call it, a natural tax on my software being so successful. Still, the government shouldn't be able to intrude on customer A privacy, internet providers shouldn't be compelled to release data on customer A. DMCA is absolute cancer and the proof that the government is not doing the people's interest but the interest of big media corporations.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  This is a strange argument that I've heard repeated often: "repeal copyright and just treat it as an NDA". I personally would consider that worse than the status quo. NDA-based copyright-like ownership has three different problems: - If the group of people with the software is large - like most mass-market works - enforcing the NDA will be absolutely impossible. Someone will leak, and that someone will not have the financial means to remunerate you for your subsequent loss of exclusive ownership. Making an example of them will not work. Once leaked, people will be able to legally republish without repercussion, so such NDAs are far weaker than even the weakest copyright. - If the group of people with the software is small - like most specialized software - enforcing the NDA will be so successful that the software will effectively never enter the public domain (in both the intelligence and copyright lawyer sense of the word). Archival of old works will be impossible purely because the NDA did it's job too well. Such NDAs would be far stronger than even today's life+70 monster terms. - In either case, traditional exceptions to copyright such as fair use, first sale, the merger doctrine, scene a faire, and so on will not apply. The NDA will prevent disclosure of even things that would not be considered copyrightable. Want to benchmark the software? Sorry, you can't, it's all under NDA - just take our performance claims as gospel. The underlying problem is that copyright is supposed to be a bargain: the public agrees to respect a limited monopoly over publication of the work in exchange for creating a market that encourages more works to be made, as well as unlimited access to the work once the monopoly expires. In a sense, this bargain has been broken. Copyright owners lobbied for hilariously long ownership terms, right around the same time that individuals got access to commercial-grade publication tools that made piracy easy and interesting to do. "Just NDA everything" proposes abandoning the bargain entirely in favor of extremely authoritarian yet difficult to enforce controls on all works; something that we should not accept if we want to continue to have a market for works of mass culture.
zepto 5y ago
> Piracy is potentially good for the overall market (free innovation, etc) I haven’t seen any innovation done by software pirates other than what’s necessary to circumvent protections.
- fishtacos 5y ago
  Innovation doesn't have to be done by the software pirates, merely nudge it along: 1. Circumventing anti software piracy measures and learning that performance is gained instead of lost when the DRM is bypassed. -1 for DRM, net gain for users. 2. Pushing for new features alongside the updated DRM, a net gain for users. 3. Finding holes in the initial DRM and plugging them. A net gain for developers/publishers. It's a win/win any way one looks at it.
  - zepto 5y ago
    As I said, the only innovation I am aware of that piracy has produced is circumvention. You seem to be confirming that.
    - fishtacos 5y ago
      If that was the conclusion you drew, I suggest you read what I wrote again.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  I think the typical argument is that piracy makes things accessible to everyone, and the market as a whole benefits from that greater audience. Think of how many photographers got started with a pirated copy of Photoshop or reverse engineers with Ida.
  - zepto 5y ago
    Sure, which is only true if the maker actually gains from the greater market share indirectly. This is almost certainly only going to be true in a tiny number of cases - e.g. photoshop, where commercial users generally don’t use pirate copies, and do get sued if they are found to.

dogleash 5y ago

I don't think it's an argument that "piracy is good", but instead piracy serves as a sort of test case to explore the extent to which current boundaries of intellectual property law is "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

bluejekyll 5y ago
Right, and that seems to be the ultimate question. Which side of the scale should society fall on some of these questions. Is it better for the majority to progress more quickly without those intellectual property laws, or do we need the profit motive for companies to innovate and therefor be rewarded for that innovation. It doesn’t feel like an either or, but more of a how far in either direction should the laws be. As a question, would software patents be more acceptable to people if they were limited to 2-5 years rather than the 15 (I think) they are now?

silisili 5y ago

I agree with the premise of the second. The big money comes from pros and corporate concracts, who generally (but not always) avoid pirated software. I feel if MS and Adobe weren't so lenient on piracy, they wouldn't have captured/held the worldwide market in their segments at such an astounding rate. For a smaller, non-monopoly, it may be a very different case though.

0xcde4c3db 5y ago
At one point, Bill Gates openly admitted that this was part of Microsoft's China strategy [1]: > Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micropiracy9-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...
- bserge 5y ago
  Don't know about China, but that worked really well in Eastern Europe. After things stabilized and the west "brought law and order", a lot of companies started paying MS licensing fees. Because everyone grew up on Windows and Office. Same for Adobe. Then there's this bullshit: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/peak-design-accuses-amazon-of-blatantly-copying-its-sling-bag https://www.inputmag.com/culture/peak-design-accuses-amazon-...
  - bdowling 5y ago
    > Then there's this bullshit: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/peak-design-accuses-amazon- https://www.inputmag.com/culture/peak-design-accuses-amazon-... I don't see how someone could confuse those two bags. Is the brand company claiming that no one else can make a sling type bag?

jokethrowaway 5y ago

As a complete remorseless pirate (as in, I download stuff but I never uploaded anything I purchase) and as someone whose software was pirated (causing me to go out of business, for that specific venture), I think piracy is bad purely because someone is infringing on a contract. If customer A buys my software and accepts a contract which say not to redistribute, he can't go and break that contract unpunished. I should be able to legally persecute customer A, if I can prove a breach of contract happened. If someone is re-sharing that content or if they're downloading it, they never had a contract with me and they should be able to do what they please. Sure, that's bad for me, but that's part of doing business. Eventually the price of things will go up to account for people pirating. Also, if I'm selling so much of my software that I can't possibly trace and persecute all the users leaking my software, I think we should accept a certain amount of piracy and loss of revenue. Call it, a natural tax on my software being so successful. Still, the government shouldn't be able to intrude on customer A privacy, internet providers shouldn't be compelled to release data on customer A. DMCA is absolute cancer and the proof that the government is not doing the people's interest but the interest of big media corporations.

kmeisthax 5y ago
This is a strange argument that I've heard repeated often: "repeal copyright and just treat it as an NDA". I personally would consider that worse than the status quo. NDA-based copyright-like ownership has three different problems: - If the group of people with the software is large - like most mass-market works - enforcing the NDA will be absolutely impossible. Someone will leak, and that someone will not have the financial means to remunerate you for your subsequent loss of exclusive ownership. Making an example of them will not work. Once leaked, people will be able to legally republish without repercussion, so such NDAs are far weaker than even the weakest copyright. - If the group of people with the software is small - like most specialized software - enforcing the NDA will be so successful that the software will effectively never enter the public domain (in both the intelligence and copyright lawyer sense of the word). Archival of old works will be impossible purely because the NDA did it's job too well. Such NDAs would be far stronger than even today's life+70 monster terms. - In either case, traditional exceptions to copyright such as fair use, first sale, the merger doctrine, scene a faire, and so on will not apply. The NDA will prevent disclosure of even things that would not be considered copyrightable. Want to benchmark the software? Sorry, you can't, it's all under NDA - just take our performance claims as gospel. The underlying problem is that copyright is supposed to be a bargain: the public agrees to respect a limited monopoly over publication of the work in exchange for creating a market that encourages more works to be made, as well as unlimited access to the work once the monopoly expires. In a sense, this bargain has been broken. Copyright owners lobbied for hilariously long ownership terms, right around the same time that individuals got access to commercial-grade publication tools that made piracy easy and interesting to do. "Just NDA everything" proposes abandoning the bargain entirely in favor of extremely authoritarian yet difficult to enforce controls on all works; something that we should not accept if we want to continue to have a market for works of mass culture.

zepto 5y ago

> Piracy is potentially good for the overall market (free innovation, etc) I haven’t seen any innovation done by software pirates other than what’s necessary to circumvent protections.

fishtacos 5y ago
Innovation doesn't have to be done by the software pirates, merely nudge it along: 1. Circumventing anti software piracy measures and learning that performance is gained instead of lost when the DRM is bypassed. -1 for DRM, net gain for users. 2. Pushing for new features alongside the updated DRM, a net gain for users. 3. Finding holes in the initial DRM and plugging them. A net gain for developers/publishers. It's a win/win any way one looks at it.
- zepto 5y ago
  As I said, the only innovation I am aware of that piracy has produced is circumvention. You seem to be confirming that.
  - fishtacos 5y ago
    If that was the conclusion you drew, I suggest you read what I wrote again.
AlotOfReading 5y ago
I think the typical argument is that piracy makes things accessible to everyone, and the market as a whole benefits from that greater audience. Think of how many photographers got started with a pirated copy of Photoshop or reverse engineers with Ida.
- zepto 5y ago
  Sure, which is only true if the maker actually gains from the greater market share indirectly. This is almost certainly only going to be true in a tiny number of cases - e.g. photoshop, where commercial users generally don’t use pirate copies, and do get sued if they are found to.