4 ms·

At the same time, popular copies - paid or otherwise - become more well known and potentially much more profitable. One may not be voting with money, but one is

At the same time, popular copies - paid or otherwise - become more well known and potentially much more profitable. One may not be voting with money, but one is voting with time (and "time is money") by accepting it, using it, and sharing/promoting it to others. Microsoft used this strategy in China (Gates said something like: if they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours...). They have done less well recently.

jiggy2011 13y ago
If you are a game developer, the fact that several hundred thousand hours have been spent playing your game isn't helpful to eating or financing your next game if you have no way to monetize those hours. There are of course business models that are aided by copying (such as those based on open source software). The difficulty is how the video games industry can adapt to this. The route they seem to be increasingly taking is to sell games as a service rather than a product but then this is decried as "always on DRM".
- vy8vWJlco 13y ago
  A college degree is also not guaranteed to lead to a job immediately either, particularly if there are alternative sources of the expertise. (There is no equivalent to copyright, in that sense, guaranteeing a student the right to be the sole provider of their expertise because they paid to receive it...) Every sale is still a negotiation. I've said in the past that I think the economics of copies boils down to begging, but that seems a much harder sell when I say it first, so I like to argue a bit first... :) FWIW, I think people are also decrying the service-model appearing in games (similar to the Kindle model, where Amazon can delete your books) - recall the recent Microsoftie who was fired after some bad PR - so it looks to me like people are moving towards the same limiting equilibrium, with or without copyright: easy copying, and paying only when they feel an obligation. IMHO, we can get there the hard way (increasingly jack-booted copyright) or the easy way (accepting human nature and negotiating differently in light of it). (Note: I have edited the first paragraph a few times trying to be clearer, for lack of a perfect analogy.)
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Getting a college degree will likely get you a job if there is demand in the area in which you did your degree. Imagine the situation where you get your CS degree but find that few people are willing to pay for programmers or software and the people who are willing to pay will still not pay very much yet the demand for software is still very high. Such a situation doesn't make sense in a rational market. Problem with piracy is that it isn't a "negotiation", a negotiation would imply that there are 2 sides attempting to reach a compromise. With piracy you can simply hit up TPB and download whatever you like without the consent of the author.
    - vy8vWJlco 13y ago
      "Such a situation doesn't make sense in a rational market." Tell that to philosophy majors. :) I can also turn on the radio and receive music for free, with ads. TPB has plenty of those (but isn't distributing anything themselves, so arguably isn't infringing... Perhaps they are facilitating, but if so they are largely facilitating non-commercial infringement; I can't imagine anyone downloading a movie and selling it would be common). Radio stations usually pay royalties, otherwise they would be commercially infringing copyright. I mention elsewhere that I can sympathize with commercial copyright enforcement. Non-commercial copyright infringement is harder to value IMHO. In the case of commercial copyright infringement, there is positive income, and the profit can be fought over. Now that we have dropped boxed distribution media and gone digital only for most types of content (and, importantly, I pay for my ISP), the "profit" to the infringer, and the cost to the originator, from any given copy is at best very ambiguous. The profit to argue over could be positive, non-existent, or negative (heck, they might be wasting their life, watching Game of Thrones, when they could be creating value). There is nothing obvious to fight over in the case of non-commercial copyright infringement, except the copy itself (whether the copier had the right to copy). But preventing copies needs a system similar to a cable TV network, not an amoebae-like Internet. I like the Internet and the ability to speak freely, and to mix what I find, too much to enforce copyright (even my own) anymore. It's taken a long time for me to get here, and I used to want to be a professional artist.
      - 13y ago

jiggy2011 13y ago

If you are a game developer, the fact that several hundred thousand hours have been spent playing your game isn't helpful to eating or financing your next game if you have no way to monetize those hours. There are of course business models that are aided by copying (such as those based on open source software). The difficulty is how the video games industry can adapt to this. The route they seem to be increasingly taking is to sell games as a service rather than a product but then this is decried as "always on DRM".

vy8vWJlco 13y ago
A college degree is also not guaranteed to lead to a job immediately either, particularly if there are alternative sources of the expertise. (There is no equivalent to copyright, in that sense, guaranteeing a student the right to be the sole provider of their expertise because they paid to receive it...) Every sale is still a negotiation. I've said in the past that I think the economics of copies boils down to begging, but that seems a much harder sell when I say it first, so I like to argue a bit first... :) FWIW, I think people are also decrying the service-model appearing in games (similar to the Kindle model, where Amazon can delete your books) - recall the recent Microsoftie who was fired after some bad PR - so it looks to me like people are moving towards the same limiting equilibrium, with or without copyright: easy copying, and paying only when they feel an obligation. IMHO, we can get there the hard way (increasingly jack-booted copyright) or the easy way (accepting human nature and negotiating differently in light of it). (Note: I have edited the first paragraph a few times trying to be clearer, for lack of a perfect analogy.)
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Getting a college degree will likely get you a job if there is demand in the area in which you did your degree. Imagine the situation where you get your CS degree but find that few people are willing to pay for programmers or software and the people who are willing to pay will still not pay very much yet the demand for software is still very high. Such a situation doesn't make sense in a rational market. Problem with piracy is that it isn't a "negotiation", a negotiation would imply that there are 2 sides attempting to reach a compromise. With piracy you can simply hit up TPB and download whatever you like without the consent of the author.
  - vy8vWJlco 13y ago
    "Such a situation doesn't make sense in a rational market." Tell that to philosophy majors. :) I can also turn on the radio and receive music for free, with ads. TPB has plenty of those (but isn't distributing anything themselves, so arguably isn't infringing... Perhaps they are facilitating, but if so they are largely facilitating non-commercial infringement; I can't imagine anyone downloading a movie and selling it would be common). Radio stations usually pay royalties, otherwise they would be commercially infringing copyright. I mention elsewhere that I can sympathize with commercial copyright enforcement. Non-commercial copyright infringement is harder to value IMHO. In the case of commercial copyright infringement, there is positive income, and the profit can be fought over. Now that we have dropped boxed distribution media and gone digital only for most types of content (and, importantly, I pay for my ISP), the "profit" to the infringer, and the cost to the originator, from any given copy is at best very ambiguous. The profit to argue over could be positive, non-existent, or negative (heck, they might be wasting their life, watching Game of Thrones, when they could be creating value). There is nothing obvious to fight over in the case of non-commercial copyright infringement, except the copy itself (whether the copier had the right to copy). But preventing copies needs a system similar to a cable TV network, not an amoebae-like Internet. I like the Internet and the ability to speak freely, and to mix what I find, too much to enforce copyright (even my own) anymore. It's taken a long time for me to get here, and I used to want to be a professional artist.
    - 13y ago