ZeroPaid has a summary of a series they've been publishing on the findings of peer-reviewed studies on piracy. You can find the post here (links to zeropaid.com). As I'm sure you can tell from the name and from a quick perusal of the site, they seem to be approaching the topic from a rather favorable perspective. The studies they examine seem to be from respectable sources, but a search of Google Scholar for "internet piracy" returns 16,500 hits, so the sample size of their series is not huge. The article does make several great points including: downloading an illegal copy of a piece of digital media does not equal the theft of a physical copy, lower prices increases sales and reduces filesharing, and encouraing a focus on adapting business models rather than a focus on litigation. I haven't done enough research on the site and of the article itself to give it a wholehearted recomendation, but it's not blatantly pro-piracy and is worth reading.
Internet piracy is a fascinating field. It features a vast, active and highly intelligent online community, an oligarchic and frequently litigious industry and a morass of complex, often draconian legislation. I will not try to contend that I have the solution to the whole problem, but I do want to make a couple of comments about the two sides of the argument. For the purpose of this post, I'm going to assume that piracy is wrong and that piracy is defined as downloading or copying copyrighted materials without paying for them (we can deal with holding boats for ransom later).
Obviously there are some pirates who genuinely believe that information and art should be freely distributed all the time to everyone. That's one of the supposed driving ideals behind the founders of the Pirate Bay, though I'll confess I don't necessarily buy their claims. It's hard to assign noble motives to people who don't respect the rights of others, in this case content creators. Sure, big corporations take a significant cut, but if consumers don't buy, then no one get's paid. I think most pirates rationalize their piracy by saying that they're not really hurting people, they're hurting corporations. Again, that position completely misses the point of rewarding artists and authors and creators. And most significantly, they're breaking the law.
The United States has an established method of changing laws you don't like. We have a (mostly) representative form of government that has been responsive to it's population in the past(see SOPA and PIPA). You're not taking a stand for freedom and equality by downloading the latest Lady Gaga track. Go call your Senator.
On the other side of the equation we have the associations like the MPAA and the RIAA and the content distributors and so on that have completely missed the lesson from their economics classes regarding supply and demand and pricing and black markets. The amount of online piracy shows us that there is a demand. People want to watch Game of Thrones and they want to read Harry Potter Incidentally, those are two IPs that are at the opposite spectrum from each other.The Harry Potter books are available from Pottermore DRM-free and compatible with any e-reader for a reasonable price. Game of Thrones is available if you have an HBO subscription. It would cost me $130 a month to watch Game of Thrones by getting cable and signing up for HBO. The end result is that Rowling is raking it in while Game of Thrones is the second-most pirated show on television. If you offer your content at a reasonable rate and make it easily available, the number of people who buy your content will rise. If you create an expensive and difficult to manage system for viewing your content, then the number of people who pirate your content will rise.
So there you have it. Two sides talking past each other; often not realizing that one wants to buy and the other wants to sell. So they waste each other's time with litigation and torrents and new copyright acts and online petitions. I long for the day when we can just go buy something for a reasonable price and I can use it however I want.
Andrew
Completed: Fuzzy Nation, Scalzi 8/10
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