PIRACY

News & General Discussion
1

As you do now and again I get to thinking and my thoughts led me to
Piracy not the type in my game shamelees plug!
see link below!

But rather the Real one that impacts the Music Industry Games etcetera etcetera.

Now I was thinking for evaluation purposes or for the Hobbiest or those that are in Genuine Dire straights I personally have no problem with Piracy Shock Horror,I come from quite a poor background and when I first started off developing 3d graphics wayback when in the Days of Imagine real 3d and videoscape and Amigas

I had not a penny to rub together so Piracy was the only option for me otherwise I would be window licking and watching other guys create cool products

But i feel piracy was the death of the Amiga and Developers alike nobody was making any money out of that platform so it folded big Style and I guess i was collectively and partly responsible However I personally Think the moment you make a decent amount of Money it is IMPERATIVE in FACT your MORAL DUTY to by lEGIT VERSIONS OF ALL SOFTWARE AND MUSIC ETCETERA

I Hope and feel That Unity3d will get massive in the future and at the moment the threat of Piracy has not reared its ugly head but if the unity team continue to release Great Updates and a PC version it definately will so my point is if you have the money buy all things legitamate

Now regarding the Music industry and Piracy I went to a gyg the other day and saw Portas Head playing and there Artistic Quality and innovation was great part of me was tempted to immiediately download a copy of there Album but Great Art must be rewarded! So I intend at some point to buy there Album

Now some would argue that the music Industry and others have got fat from inflated mark ups on there products and I agree to a degree the Entertainment industy and other sectors in my opinion have to do a little soul searching and evaluate its priceing structure and so do some other Industrys if they wish to stay afloat in this every changing Arena.

2

It can be argued that IP piracy is actually the result of companies who don’t understand the established concepts of supply and demand well enough to keep people buying their products.

Sure, technology has change the playing field a bit now that we have the internet and peer-to-peer file sharing, but the core issues that drive piracy have not changed by much.

First off, we all need to accept the fact that success in anything is not a guaranteed right. You may end up pouring years of your life into development of a product, only to have it fail miserably. This is the nature of the business world in all it’s ugliness.

Americans are among the worst offenders when it comes to understand and accepting these conditions. If something we did fails, it’s immediately someone else’s fault. So, rather than eat our sour grapes, we sue some unsuspecting sap with lots of cash for fresh ones.

Next, if people are pirating your content instead of buying it, you need to accept that there may be a problem with the content itself or the terms for how you sell it. If a product is overhyped, and then released in poor quality at too high a price, piracy is inevitable. (Even more so if the software harasses the user in some manner.)

Supply and demand dictates that if you can’t sell a product at the current price, you need to lower prices. However, content publishers are so convinced that they are absolutely entitled to their full asking price, thst they’re willing to harass the few paying customers with DRM technologies to ensure they don’t turn around and sell off the content to a different user at a price that undercuts the price of a brand new copy from the publisher. (Just look at some of the flaak companies like GameStop are taking over their current business model of reselling used titles…)

Finally, there will always be those who pirate content for the thrill of pirating content. No amount of DRM or persuasive words are ever going to make them buy content that they already have the skills and contacts needed to obtain it for free elsewhere. Content that can’t be obtained will simply be ignored as they move on to the next item of interest. These pirates cannot honestly be considered a sales loss, simply because they do not contribute to the system of supply and demand in the first place… they merely exist with zero effect on average on any content owner’s bottom line. And the funny part is… these pirates probably never even use the majority of the content they obtain. They likely just store it away never to be seen again, except as a short-lived trophy of their meaningless conquest… a digital pack rat.

In short, you can’t simply blame piracy without examining what it is you might be doing wrong yourself. To do so is simply irresponsible.

3

Great Observations
Bones 3d

4

An aside, the Amiga did not fail due to piracy. It was misunderstood and poorly supported by its own company. The reason Apple does so well isn’t just due to their products. Marketing has a major influence on Apple’s growing business. Commodore on the other hand totally dropped the ball when they had a product better than everybody else’s and were unable to drive its sales.

While I don’t have much to say about piracy itself, I did want to reel you in on the assumption that it killed a platform. That just isn’t true. I somewhat agree with Bones’ assessment above. I also believe however that you will always have some level of software piracy because there is no perfect system to combat it. The best way to deal with it, I think, is to market your product successfully. For the most part good marketing will gather plenty of sales. A few will still pirate your software, but you don’t need their money to survive to produce your next product so who cares? Those that do are obsessed with maximizing profits, and that will take attention away from their product.

5

Unity Technologies has a great system in place: they have servers that are able to get you a large download at good speed, a free full-featured trial, and it is fast and easy to buy licenses for their products, which come at very reasonable prices. You also get to install the license on two machines, and do not have to worry about dongles. Plus, the people are friendly. This is the case with some software vendors, but not most. Following this approach is a good shield against piracy.

On the other hand, if you go buy a Portishead CD, solventfactory, the band is going to get very little money from it, and you have to waste your time shopping for it, or wait for it to be delivered to you. Plus, it is a physical object that can be broken unless you waste the time to back it up, which also adds unneeded wear to your optical drive. So, what about downloading the music? That COULD be a good solution, but the standard is to offer compressed music, more often than not, in the antiquated .mp3 format. So you pay for the convenience of near-instantaneous “delivery”, but you get something that sounds worse than a CD. CDs came out 26 years ago. That is NOT acceptable.

Nine Inch Nails offered their last record for free, in various formats, but most importantly, a 24-bit/96 kHz master, which is the best quality even Trent Reznor himself had to listen to. So you can’t tell me the record companies can’t do a better job than they are now, when they would be getting PAID. As it is, the music industry of today is just begging for piracy from any reasonable consumer.

Movies, on the other hand, are a different story. We are not at a point yet where that amount of even losslessly-compressed data can fit on the optical discs of today. I think the only way to deal with this is to keep prices low; if someone wants to own a movie they like, it’s possible they will have owned it on VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray, and will want to have it yet again when the next quality increase happens.

So, trying to lump piracy, for anything you can download, into one heap, is oversimplification.

6

@Jessy – well put.

@aaronparr – indeed. commodore was a spectacularly mismanaged company (once Tramiel quit, anyway). I was an Amiga fan back in the day (in fact, developed Amiga games which never got to market) but when Commodore went bankrupt it turned out they’d never turned a profit during the lifespan of the Amiga, even though it was the world’s best selling computer for several years. It beggars the imagination. It’s like discovering Apple was losing money on every iPod it sold.

@solventfactory – I too pirated everything in sight when I was a student, and later when I was unemployed. These days I pay for everything, and I even went and bought legitimate versions of programs I had pirated when I was younger (WriteNow and Fullpaint, specifically).

That said, it’s really up to individuals to decide what they think is right… the way copyright works right now, the law unfairly advantages vendors to a ridiculous degree. E.g. a lot of software companies sell bug fixes as upgrades as a matter of policy (e.g. Maya, Avid, and SPSS are guaranteed never to run on new versions of a given operating system, forcing users to pay hefty upgrades, or use the old OS.) When software companies go broke, users of the software have no recourse. (Copyright law is designed for books. When a book publisher stops publishing a book or goes out of business it becomes legal to copy the book. If copyright law worked properly, we’d have access to source code once a software publisher went under or stopped supporting a program.)

Similarly, movie studios constantly abuse copyright laws (again, intended for books). A book goes out of copyright some time after it was written (how long it takes varies). Once it’s out of copyright it becomes public domain. Movies also become public domain, but no-one has copies of them (studios don’t sell prints, they lend them to cinemas) so a movie like Snow White or Gone With The Wind is technically out of copyright, but no-one can copy it. The only versions the studios release are either lower quality (e.g. DVDs or even Blurays) and/or have some new material snuck in (e.g. they’re “remastered”) resetting the copyright clock. Note that the original film is out of copyright – if we broke into the studio and remastered it ourselves, we could legally give away the remastered version – we’d just get arrested for breaking and entering.

Book publishers aren’t above pulling similar tricks. You might find an edition of Huckleberry Finn or some other long out-of-copyright classic which has an introduction or annotations that are new. Translations are a goldmine because a new translation resets the copyright clock. Blah blah blah.

The purpose of copyright law is NOT to generate income for authors, but to provide an incentive for new intellectual property to be created and added to the public domain. (To put it in terms John McCain might understand – royalties are a TACTIC employed by copyright law to further the STRATEGY of creating new knowledge and other material for the general good.)

Another good example of DRM is Apple. You buy a song from Apple. You can use it on any number of iPods and up to five different computers at once. You can back it up, and you can burn a slightly lower quality version to CD. (Or you can pay a little extra for some songs and get no DRM.) This only bothers pirates and very anti-DRM folks – most people aren’t really even conscious of the DRM being there.

A classic bad example of DRM is the Commodore Amiga game “Carrier Command” which was protected by several layers of copy protection. You couldn’t back it up, and it had bugs caused by one of the layers of copy protection that stopped saved games from working. Soon after its release the copy protection was cracked, and the cracked version worked better (because the copy protection caused bugs), loaded faster (because the copy protection increased the size of the executable), could be backed up, and could be installed on a hard disk.

Another classic bad example is DVDs. DVDs force you to sit through ads, but cracked versions offer identical image quality and don’t.

7

Hi great reading the views from you guys new i would ruffle a few feathers when i posted

Jessy I agree totally Unity Have a great Infrastructure in place and they deserve to be successfull as long as they never drop the ball and keep there priceing structure realistic I hope all the Team Get to buy houses in Malibu for sure…

but thanks for putting me straight on the Amiga Idea I been peddaling that opinion for years AAron Parr and Podperson!

I always thought it was due to piracy but I stand corrected! and Carrier Command what a top Game anyone remember Hunter?

Hunter was a brilliant game in my view one of the earliest 3d games out there the Guy who developed only made three Grand if my memory serves me correct.

Man that Game was great.

8

There is one further issue that needs to be addressed in regards to piracy of IP content…

In the past, “trade” implied the exchange of goods or services of value for other goods and services of similar value. Under these new digitsl only distribution models though, the concept of trade has become distorted and one-ended.

While consumers may get the immediate benefits of instant gratification by getting their content right this second, the problem is that the content isn’t really “theirs”. instead it’s actually the property of whatever the content is downloaded onto and often times is only accessible to the end user via the machine’s blessings following a phone call to the publisher.

Superficially speaking, this doesn’t sound like that big a deal. You’re merely sacrificing access to a physical version of the content in order to get it now, rather than a few minutes/hours/days later.

The problem though, is that the cost of the content in this form is identical in price to the physical versions. Yet, you are losing the ability to transfer ownership of the content and perhaps even the ability to move the content to a new system later on as your current hardware becomes obsolete or damaged. In the meanwhile, the publish costs involved in producing a physical version (with no ties to the purchaser) and a digital-only version (which is locked down heavily) probably differs by a very significant amount. So, why are these costs not being reflected in both versions of these products when the terms of use for each version are so different?

Now, we’re already seeing a strong trend forming within the various entertainment/software publishing industries that favor digital only distribution of future content. While there is an immediate “cool” factor to technologies like Steam, Xbox Live, Playstation Network, WiiWare, iTunes, Netflix, etc… allowing immediate downloads of the newest content to any system we own. But what happens when we either tire of the content or the system goes obsolete? Suddenly you have hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of content collected over the years that cannot be transferred to a new owner under any circumstances, unlike current console game discs, DVDs and CDs which can still be resold after-market to partially recoup your initial investment into those items.

Unless we want to face some frightening scenarios in the years to come, we need to start considering the consequences of living in a world of digital-only distribution channels for popular content. Unless a solution is discovered (such as allowing publishers to “buy back” licenses to their content), we may soon face a huge backlash from the piracy community, where the pirates will offer digital-only content without the DRM limitations for far cheaper than publisher’s themselves can sustainably provide.

Personally, I believe most people are willing to pay for the content they want, provided that the terms of that content’z use are fair and reasonable. However, if people are only being offered a black-hole of debt and misery as their only option for accessing the content they want, many will simply elect to pirate the content as simply being the “lesser of two evils”.

Let’s take the evil out of the content and let the quality of the content itself be it’s sole selling point.

9

Actually that’s not entirely true. In your statement you say “services”. But your arguments are regarding goods.

For some time now graphics, design, software, has been a SERVICE TRADE. Or what it is commonly called now as: SAAS (Software As A Service).

In the SAAS model you only ever have a “license” you never actually own the software, music, or graphics, etc. You have a license to use it, under certain conditions.

License to use doesn’t mean ownership, never has. This is nothing new. When I did freelance design for 5 years this was one of the hardest concepts to explain to lower budget clients. Higher budget clients had no problem with it, because they understood a licensing model from the beginning.

Heck, even most “money” isn’t really money, it’s just a license to use currency…

Just wanted to point out that Good and Services are two different things, and services can be licensed whereas goods can be owned.

Many think they own something but in reality they have only had a license…

10

Also, just because a software company describes a transaction as a license and not a sale, doesn’t necessarily make it so. The recent ruling against Autodesk is a good example of this.

11

Bones3D – well, ever since ancient times (“the oldest professon”) there were “services” which you could pay for, benefit from, and not resell to other people. I don’t think the nature of “trade” per se has changed, just the goods traded.

The recording industry is a very interesting thing. Before the gramophone was invented, you simply couldn’t sell “copies” of a musical performance. You could buy a ticket and listen to an opera, or maybe stand outside the opera hall and kind of hear it, but that was it. You paid money, you got memories. So technology creates this whole new concept – we can record a performance and sell copies of it. Soon, performers make more money than composers. But this is all predicated on it being hard to COPY recordings. When the tape recorder becomes popular there’s a crisis – who will buy records? Turns out that the generation loss when you recorded a tape was a killer. Next we get CDs… but CD recorders are really expensive (and so are blank CDs – in 1990 a blank CD cost as much as a new pre-recorded CD). Then we get MP3s – there’s a generation loss but you only suffer ONE generation loss, and the difference isn’t noticeable to most non-fanatics.

Basically we’ve reached a point where technology is making the idea of selling copies of recordings kind of idiotic. But 150 years ago it was impossible, so … get over it.

Movies are basically following the same arc but more slowly. It will be a while before making effectively perfect copies of movies is technically trivial. Then it will take a decade or so for the law to catch up.

Dingo – yes, software is sold as a “service” or as “licenses” but it’s actually a legal fiction. If software is a “license” then why do I have to pay sales tax on it? I can’t move it around – it’s an abstract thing. If I buy an Adobe Photoshop “license” in Australia, I pay Australian GST on it. But how can the government prove I “moved” my license from the US to Australia? I claim my license is on the moon. It’s baloney. Similarly, there was a case way back where someone’s house was destroyed by hurricane Andrew. One thing lost was the person’s Quark Xpress install disks. Well, no problem, they’d registered the software and so they still had a LICENSE right? So they asked Quark for replacement disks. No dice. (Quark eventually relented and gave them a whole new copy, but note that it stuck to its guns – the person had bought a good, not a license.)

Software is sold the way a book or DVD or game is sold. You can sell it second hand, but you can’t mass produce copies of it. It’s a “good” but it’s protected by copyright. Just as a gadget might be a “good” that is protected by patent law.

12

The DVD, CD, Media, Disk is a ticket. License is the agreement printed in small print on the back of the ticket(includes things like don’t go onstage during the performance, only roadies allowed backstage). The Software is the concert(Service).

In the scenario you described Quark just gave the person another ticket. The persons license may have still been in effect.(Quark may even have been obligated to send a new disc according to their own license agreement).

A few years ago I worked for Red Hat. We used to have conversations like this all the time:)

Red Hat makes the majority of their money selling the ticket. The license is “open” so anyone could go backstage, onstage, whatever you want.

Pirates, print their own tickets, rush the stage, and tear down the doors of the venue for others. Never having paid the price of admission.

Edit-Almost forgot. Taxes are based on the transaction not just goods or services. (at least in modern times).

13

And that’s how it began. Records were recordings of performances, and movies were recordings of plays. Now, the majority of the work done on almost every record or film is post-production. Very little of what can be heard or seen today, at least the kind of stuff you get from a store and not from amateurs, was possible pre-phonograph.

That’s terrible. Video games were not possible back then either, so I assume none of us on these boards should be getting paid, either?

First, it usually takes people who are not the ones being recorded to get the job done. In the case of music, maybe just one or two people more. In the case of film, it could be a few hundred. If they don’t get paid, it’s not going to happen. I don’t even like the experience of live music much, so the way that most recording artists are able to make ends meet, performing while touring, does not interest me.

I primarily like to make music and sound for games and movies, so I’m more safe for the time being, but I still like music that was made just to be music on a CD. If we all take the “get over it” approach you suggest, digital art in all its forms will die, and we will all have to waste our lives in non-creative professions.

Unity licenses are non-transferable. modo licenses are non-transferable. I’m sure there are a lot more.

14

The point I was making was that we are heading toward a future where the majority of our income is spent on items that have their value restricted or eliminated entirely due to the terms in which they are sold to the consumer.

Let’s say you one day end up so far in debt that your creditors send out people to repossess your purchases to recoup their losses. Short of taking the devices your purchases are stored on, what’s left to repossess? And, even when they do repossess your hardware, what can they possibly do with the content itself? The licensing only allows the content to be destroyed once you no longer own the hardware it’s stored on.

Now, you are not only out potentially thousands of dollars in purchases, you now also face being rendered homeless and having your wages garnished from you for several years to come. All because that thosands in content you wrechlessly purchased online cannot be resold in any form.

It’s one thing to expect people to understand that the cost of one-time live performance of events, theater movie viewing, purchases of perishable goods (or even prostitution) can’t be recovered once the money has been spent on such things. In fact, because of this understanding people won’t normally bankrupt themselves over such things.

However, we’re talking about a new form of intangible goods in which normal people falsely believe they actually “own” upon purchase. Would the iTunes Music Store (and other such services) still be successful if it were made blatantly clear in layman’s terms that the content purchased today may not always be available to the buyer if the terms of the licensing were to suddenly change. How about if the purchaser dies? Do his descendants get to continue accessing the content without having to illegally misrepresent themselves to the IP holders?

The current system prey’s on the fact that the consumers are not legal experts and uses the consumer’s own fear and ignorance as a means of enforcing how the content is used and maintained after purchase. Combined with automated systems of enforcement that continually generate false positives of pirate activity among the innocent, this presents a grim future for those of us wanting to avoid this crap without sacrificing our ability to access the content we want to use.

If a system must be in place, it must be one that allows content to be resold (either to another user or the seller) at a reasonable amount, and, it must not treat the consumer as a potential criminal while letting actual pirates go unpunished.

15

Let’s take this a step further. I’m not sure if everyone here is familiar with rapid prototyping, especially projects like RepRap (http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome), but what will happen when it isn’t just data that can be reproduced with little or no cost? Want a new cellphone, print one out. The way I see it at that point people will only be able to make money off of services rendered, and the creation of new goods.

16

Definitely good points. That’s why some feel the only way to fight against it is to embrace piracy.

In my opinion the only way to truly offset such imbalances is to become a creator rather than a consumer. As a creator you have much more ability to have influence on the new system of economics and IP law that will eventually emerge.

17

The idea of becoming a creator vs a consumer has powerful merit to it. The tools are certainly becoming much easier to use and could eventually reach a point where this is feasible for the common man.

Take a look at some of the recent advancements in technology for creating 3D content from real world sources like the upcoming Video Trace software. Eventually, this could be automated to a point that one only needs to know how to operate a video camera to create complex 3D models.

If such adaptability can be applied to the world of software development, we could one day have programs that can, simply by describing what it is you need (combined with a sampling of data) predict, generate and compile an appropriate piece of software based entirely on the criteria given.

Another possibility is to make the task of software development a drag-and-drop system of commonly-used modules representing various operations, functions and data types in an easily understood format, where each module selection is made available to the user by context and user pattern recognition. (Predicting the user’s current needs by looking for common past behavior.) Basically, the more often a user repeats a series of tasks in a particular order, the more likely these tasks can (and probably should) be automated.

As for music and video, I think we are already making progress in the right direction thanks to items like Apple’s GarageBand and Google’s Youtube video service. However, the next step should be to make the same level of simplicity these technologies offer to end users, but in a way that allows them to seamlessly switch to a distribution model they personally control, rather than depending on the current corporate-owned systems where the terms of use can change at any time.

Is it realistic for us to suddenly demand total freedom from all forms of corporate control? No. At the moment, it would far too costly for the end user and would likely leave them open to additionally frightening exploitations of the law at the hands of other corporate entities. But, it is important that we start loosening our dependency on them as our individual presence in the world becomes increasingly relevant thanks to the internet and its supporting technologies.