Software piracy is GOOD
p2pnet.net News Feature:- Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has an intriguing post from a diarist in his KOS blog here.
It kicks off with a quote from the much-splashed BSA report that Software Piracy Is Ruining The World.
“Some 36 percent of the software installed on computers worldwide in 2003 was pirated, representing a loss of about 29 billion dollars to companies, a survey showed Wednesday,” says a quote from the report.
But, “Something about that word ‘loss’ bothers the piss out of me,” says beedee.
Now read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>
Piracy is GOOD for the economy
By beedee
I just read this article regarding a recent survey that 36% of software installed across the globe is [shudder] pirated! It goes on to state that tens of billions of dollars are lost each year, which of course impacts state tax revenue, stock prices, jobs, blah… blah… blah. Well I’m sick of this litany and it’s time to lay down my belief that [another shudder] piracy is good for business.
My case is based entirely on anecdotal evidence and personal opinion, but I believe there is an aspect to this topic that has been grossly overlooked by the media. So, to start off with, let’s look at this quote from the aforementioned article:
Some 36 percent of the software installed on computers worldwide in 2003 was pirated, representing a loss of about 29 billion dollars to companies, a survey showed Wednesday.
Something about that word “loss” bothers the piss out of me when I read stories like these, the same way that word bothers me when I hear the big music labels use it when they rail against downloading music, or the MPAA with movies. I think what bothers me is that they all immediately assume that I would fork over cash for every single thing I download illegally. If that were true, then yes, these industries are incurring massive losses due to piracy & P2P technologies. Of course, that turns out not to be true in what I believe to be a vast majority of cases.
For instance, let’s say I’m killing time on LimeWire looking for something to download. I search for something generic like “80s”, and casually download a few old school tracks like General Public’s “Tenderness”, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, and “One” by Metallica. I toss them into a playlist, listen to them a few times, and forget that I ever got them. Now here’s what the music industry needs to understand: I would have NEVER forked out the cash for those songs! So how are they “losing” money? All that’s actually happening is that they’re just getting screwed out of their “cut”, but they didn’t go thru the trouble to rip, share, and burn those songs, I did.
The other point that seems to be lost on all the music & movie execs is that if I like an artist, even just moderately, I’ll buy the album, or go see the movie in the theater the first chance I get. This is especially true with movies. Sure I was able to download “Spiderman 2″ the day after it opened in theaters, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t go see it at my local monsterplex as soon as I could (and am gonna see it in the theater at least one more time). Why? Because it was a quality piece of cinema, worth the time and cost of a theater experience. Conversely, following a private screening of a pirated copy of “The Hulk”, I chose not to waste my money on it since I was bored to tears by the pace of the film and its mediocre special effects. If Hollywood has a right to make crap films, then I have a right to save my $7 whenever possible by screening pirated copies.
And finally, we come to the issue of pirated software and the title of this diary entry. How is pirated software good for the economy? Let me tell you a story…
About eight years ago, a freshman theater major was just starting to discover something new and exciting called “The InterNet”. It would consume hours upon hours of his time, night after night. On one of those nights he discovered something called “Warez”. Soon he had downloaded illegal copies of Adobe Photoshop and HomeSite, and used these tools to create several useless “hey look at me!” web sites. Those web sites came in handy when this college student saw a classified ad posted by a local web shop looking for “HTML Developers”. He quickly landed the position and fell into the world of graphic design. He pirated more software over the years, using them to learn new technologies and become a more valuable asset to his employers.
No surprise, that college student was me. I was on the cliched “fast track to nowhere” until I discovered pirated software. So now, instead of trying to make a living as some struggling actor, or settling for some minimum-wage retail career, I’m making a very comfortable wage as a full-time graphic designer. I’m a reckless GenX consumer whore so I don’t save shit, and spend every dime I can on stupid shit like GameCubes, DVD Players, cameras, etc. And finally, the income taxes I pay on my fatty paychecks far outweigh what the state would have garnered from the sales taxes they would have received if I had purchased three copies of every piece of pirated software that I’ve ever used.
I’m not an isolated case, either. Nearly every technophile I know that downloads and uses pirated software does so in order to hone their particular skills and get better jobs. And, like me, once they can afford to shell out the cash for the applications they use the most, they, for the most part, do.
As for companies that pirate software, well, that can be a little more of a grey area. However, I’d rather see 20 people employed at a small web shop using pirated software than the same 20 people standing in line at the unemployment office.
July 8th, 2004 at 11:02 pm
I too was once a software pirate. Back in high school, almost all the software on our home PC was take-home-and-return-next-morning stuff from the office or from CD-ROMs borrowed from others. I had friends with warez worth the equivalent of a Honda on their machines. Software piracy, I figured, was just another part of regular life.
Then I went to college and took a programming class just to see what this whole “coding” thing was all about. After witnessing firsthand the misery and effort that goes into writing GOOD code, my attitude towards software piracy changed. Sleepless nights and agonizing hours staring at a workstation – and watching my buddies do the same – gave me new respect for programmers and software engineers. Now, every piece of software on my PCs is legally paid for, registered and supported.
So before you install that “gratis” copy of Photoshop 7 or some other warez, just remember that some poor dude in a cubicle shed much sweat and tears making that thing work. Hotshots of IT though they may be, most programmers don’t roll around in Bentleys or jet to Vegas, loose 100K on stupid bets and laugh it off. They’re regular persons like you and me. Neither does programming occur as portrayed in the media, where someone sits at a PC and simply churns out line after line of stuff that works on the first or second try. They work hard to hammer out smart code that can take weeks or months to get right. And now you’re just jacking it. How fair is that?
Now, before you make a effigy of me to burn in the streets, consider that I am also aware that there is a flip side to the coin.
The first point of this is that many of the pirates couldn’t afford to buy the software in the first place, so it’s hard to argue that any legitimate revenue is being pilfered. An example of this would be a college student using an illegal copy of Photoshop to edit a picture. Most such students could never afford the $600+ cost of the package, and even if they did use the version available on the school’s network machines – if it is installed there – Adobe still wouldn’t see any extra revenue, so there’s no sense in complaining about that.
A good deal of the pirated material is also being used for non-commercial purposes. Real harm, I think, is done when commercial firms engage in privacy, not when a few guys use an illegal copy of Visual C++ to write useful code that has no business objective. This is harder to justify, however. Taken to its fullest extent, it could mean that it may be proper to jack just about anything – software and other – for a hobby. Just try walking out of Hobby Lobby with model epoxy because you’re using it for a “non-commercial purpose”. You’ll be needing a lawyer.
We must also remember that while most software purchases are practically an impulse buy in the US, the same can be crushing to users in other lands where per capita income is lower. I recently read a comment by a software industry official saying that IT in such places in unlikely to advance if piracy continues at the current rate. Huh? That’s like saying that we’re unlikely to win the war against AIDS or malaria if we continue to make low cost drugs available in the Third World: it doesn’t make sense.
Piracy in these places reduces the obstacles to viability for small outfits. Maybe such activity allowed the participating firm to employ an extra person, whose income goes to another family and helps to improve their standard of living. That might sound sappy, so I’ll put it this way: if the firm couldn’t afford to pay for it in the first place, then squawking about piracy makes no sense. It’s like the aformentioned case of the kid with Photoshop. If the firm becomes able to pay for the software but continues to use it illegitimately, then we have a problem.
The point of my post is that we must be reasonable. Of course, in the good US of A, “reasonable” is anything that a team of well-paid lawyers can ram through court or legislators can be cajoled into enacting. I guess the best advice I can give is to take a programming class. You’ll see what I mean. If you don’t take the class, just think about the guy in the cubicle, working, working, working….
July 9th, 2004 at 12:45 am
I don’t necessarily agree with the tactics used by the RIAA and their ilk, but I’m a single person business and I try to put myself in the shoes of those whose products are being pirated.
If someone told me “I can’t afford your services but I’m going to steal what you created and you should be happy because I’m able to use your stolen product to make money and buy stuff like GameCubes and DVD players” – well, I’m sorry but that’s not cool.
There are free operating systems. There are free word processors. There are free graphics programs. Use those if you can’t afford Windows XP, Microsoft Word or Photoshop.
There is no moral high ground if the foundation of your argument is built on theft.
July 9th, 2004 at 2:57 pm
An interesting analysis.
You can put make up on it all you want, but the bottom line is – stealing is stealing.
I wonder if you’d have the same attitude if someone pirated or stole one of your graphic designs and you didn’t see a cent for all the work you put into – intellectual property has a value.
July 10th, 2004 at 8:01 am
For readers browsing p2pnet archived articles, I shall respond to the ignorance demonstrated by the author of the above comment:
You fail to see another glaringly obvious point about intellectual property – there are different varieties of it. Software, DVDs, and CDs are products, created once and traded millions of times to millions of consumers and users. This is the first variety.
“Graphic designs,” as the comment’s author put it, are of another variety and cannot be compared to the first. Artwork and visual communication pieces are created once and are only intended for one customer – not as many as possible.
As the comment’s author said, stealing is stealing. Yet piracy is not always stealing. Theft, defined in a legal sense according to U.S. laws, is depriving someone of something that properly belongs to them. Stealing someone’s car prevents its registered owner from driving it. Robbing a bank keeps those who had money on deposit there from spending it. Copying exactly the design of someone’s website prevents the original owner from having a unique and therefore effective promotional/informative tool. Downloading a movie or an installer for a cracked version of Photoshop from someone’s computer, however, doesn’t prevent the owner of that computer from watching that movie or using that version of Photoshop. No deprivation has taken place, no legal injury – and thus, no theft – has occured.
Now, you might be one to argue that the software company/movie studio/record label has been injured because they weren’t paid for the copies you hypothetically made of that movie or cracked version of Photoshop, but you should understand that as soon as money changes hands for the originally purchased product, that product has a new owner. Of course, companies today would like to modify this fundamental law of economics by imposing license agreements on end-users, but such attempts are futile in the end.
If the studios and labels want to generate sales, they will have to give buyers something that can’t be encoded or compressed in a zip or rar file. Something tangible, something that makes the buyer happy to have laid out her hard-earned cash. Filing lawsuits and enacting law is not a replacement for aging business models. Until the transition to new business modes is made, companies will have to grapple with what they consider “theft.”
July 11th, 2004 at 9:17 pm
“Just try walking out of Hobby Lobby with model epoxy because you’re using it for a ‘non-commercial purpose’. You’ll be needing a lawyer.”
There is a big difference between potentially endlessly iterative virtual goods and real material goods.
There is no limit to the amount of times that one can copy a program or a piece of music…the ability to create endless copies of the good is a basic quality of its existence. And it is not a zero sum game…I could have one thousand copies of a program or a song, and it has no influence on another persons ability to acquire a copy of the program or song.
From a strict supply demand ratio, the cost of programs or songs should be extremely low because the supply is endless.
It is only by artificially limiting the supply through copyright law and all the enforcement mechanisims of the state behind it, that what is at base a form of monopolization can take place.
This is the only way, going against everything in classical liberal economic theory, that supply can become dear and corporations could demand (and get) people to pay high sums for these goods.
And given the fact, in this globalized world, that I could be downloading or uploading these programs/ songs from anywhere on the planet, the only way to really enforce these copyright laws is through draconian international survelliance and police measures.
On the other hand, a material supply like epoxy, autos and especially land, have an upper limit and to at least some degree are a zero sum game.
If I horde the good, I potentially limit others from having access to the good and by taking the good, I am removing a sellers ability to sell that good elsewhere.
With material goods, though supply/demand can be artifically repressed or stimulated, there is a definite relation between an upper supply limit and changes in cost over time.
One of the ways that the media and programming corporations are able to gain any support for their ’cause’ is by obfuscating this very difference between virtual and material goods.
July 13th, 2004 at 6:16 am
“Intellectual property”… just listen to the name. How is owning an idea in any way moral in the first place?
We should put our efforts towards clear, cheap world wide communications and the free distribution and access of virtually any form of information.
Random idea – What would actually happen if there were no such thing as copyright law and any form of information (music, movies, software, books, instructions for building things, scientific data, history, or whatever…) was freely available to anyone who could find it, and focus was placed on making as much information as possible available to as many people as possible? The internet is today’s starting point for this with peer to peer technology as a prime example.
Without star trek-like technology and the ability to synthesize food and clothes people will need money. In most places that means they need a job. The jobs that copyright law created won’t exist, so everyone in those jobs will eventually do something else, even if it does take a generation. New ideas, art, technology, would be formed for the benefit of man instead of for personal profit. The sudden collapse of so many industries would seem devastating and slow down technological development for years, but after the dust cleared and information was finally available to anyone, wouldn’t technological development and the creation of art soar in unprecedented world wide collaboration?
Would this not spring-board us toward star trek-like technology, the end of poverty, communication with no boundaries…down with copyright law.
July 17th, 2004 at 10:06 am
“just remember that some poor dude in a cubicle shed much sweat and tears making that thing work.”
-That poor dude in a cubicle gets paid very well and probably can afford any music and sofware he wants.
August 5th, 2004 at 2:16 am
Think about this. If everybody downloaded say, Britney’s songs, she would lose money from the albums she would have sold.
But if more people downloaded her songs, more people (statistically) would enjoy listening to her singing, attracting more fans to her lucrative concerts.
At the end, she would gain more.
Piracy does make artists lose money, but it also helps them gain more notoriety and fame. Money can’t buy those things!
August 21st, 2004 at 11:08 pm
Stealing is, as you say stealing. That’s a tautology. What is stealing, though?
*the act of taking something from someone unlawfully
*take without the owner’s consent
*take by force, etc.
Take has a twofold implication:
1. to take into ones possession
Obviously, this is the case with piracy.
2. to REMOVE from another place (or another’s possession)
[He took the glass from the table.] The glass is certainly not still sitting there.
[He stole the priceless diamond necklace.] The next morning, the curator knows that it was stolen. Why? Because the necklace is GONE. So yes, stealing is stealing. Software piracy is not stealing. It is, however, illegal.
What I believe, however, is that Software is also overpriced. If only one in a hundred can buy Photoshop for $600, but 75 of those could pay $50 for it, y’know the cost of packaging and the CD can be kept under $5 a piece. C’mon, the companies would even make more money!