Yeah, heard it all before, including all of the lousy analogies. You don't need to waste time with them - I've seen them all. I know two things:
1. The pirates love diverting the real issues with talk about legal definitions and all sorts of other stuff (knowledge needs to be free, CD reproduction only costs a few cents, nothing is removed from inventory, it's only copyright infringement blah blah blah).
Well, it's often a thin line between explanation and excuse. Not every argument that pirates will bring forward is right, just as not every anti-piracy is wrong. Nonetheless I think that from a scientific point of view it makes sense to acknowledge the facts for what they are. And fact is that copyright infringement is legally not the same as theft. The law makes a difference and that's a thing we have to acknowledge. We might not like it, we might not agree, but that's the way it is.
It is also quite obvious that the act of pirating a digital product is simply not the same as stealing a physical product from a store (usually known as theft). If I steal your car, your car is gone. If I copy your software you still have your software. You can say that it does not make a difference, but it is obvious that there is a difference between theft and copyright infringement.
There is another reason why I reject such an equation: If you use the term theft you exclude the problems of modern copyright. There is a difference between physical and immaterial goods - that's also a fact we have to acknowledge. I do not have to sign an EULA each time I use my car... What’s so bad about separating the copyright debate from the piracy problem is that the solution of the later is directly connected to copyright issues.
2. If I were say...Jeff Vogel, and you grabbed Geneforge 5 from a torrent site with a keygen, I'm going to say you stole from me. I don't care about the legal definition (and more to the point, the argument only serves to augment the piracy side. What other benefit does that argument serve?) - I only care that you should have paid me money - but you didn't.
Well, what exactly does your argumentation serve? You call it theft because the term theft has a stronger negative connotation than copyright infringement. Your insistence on theft and copyright infringement being the same (although that is clear not the case – neither legally nor logically) reveals your sole intention: you want to denounce these pirates. You want to express that you don’t like them... and that’s all. It also shows the emotional involvement that you deny. Unfortunately that’s not a very solution-oriented approach. If you got the facts wrong your solution will be inevitably wrong as well.
To solve a problem you have to understand it first. And that's exactly where the difference between theft and copyright infringement comes into play. As you might have realized way more people are prone to online piracy than to theft (or let's say at least a different group of people). People that you'd never expect it from are suddenly committing acts of criminal behaviour. Why don't the same people go out everyday and steal whatever they need from shops and stores? Now, there are a lot of obvious reasons (the anonymity of the internet, the low chance of getting caught, etc.), but there are also more subtle ones. There are quite a few criminal and social theories around which at least partly might explain the mass phenomenon of copyright infringement in online environments...
Let me show you – taking one of your examples – that sometimes it makes sense to listen to what the enemy (in this case the pirates) has to say. You said you heard all the pro-piracy arguments and you also implied that they pretty much all sound like crap to you. Let’s have a look at the “CD reproduction only costs a few cents” argument. Of course you can say that’s all nonsense and in fact the way most pirates use it does not make much sense. But from a scientific point of view the argument is interesting since it reveals a lot of a pirate’s psychology. To understand what’s going on in a pirate’s mind we have to understand that immaterial products like software have a different cost structure than most (not all) physical products. A cost structure consists of fixed costs (upfront costs, e.g. research and development) that usually do not vary with the number of units produced and variable costs ascribed to producing a single unit of the product (e.g. raw materials, manual labour, packaging. etc.). A car for example is a product which has relatively high variable costs and relatively low fixed costs. Developing a new car is fairly easy nowadays, but producing one is still quite expensive since there is a lot of labour involved. Software on the other hand is quite different. It usually takes a few years to develop in which you basically make no money at all, so the fixed costs are relatively high. Producing the software however is extremely cheap – the reproduction costs are indeed just a few cents. J. Nunes, C. Hsee and U. Weber did some empirical research on the cost structure of products and came to the conclusion that very obviously people are so prone to steal digital products because they think they bring less harm when their failure to pay prevents a seller from recovering fixed costs than when it prevents a seller from recouping variable costs (this is one reason, but certainly not the only one). Nunes, Hsee and Weber also speculate about the reasons why this is so, but I won’t go into details here. More important are the implications of their research. The author’s propose that increasing the variable costs of software products might lead to an increased attractiveness (they also give an example which I’ll cut out). And this is basically what we’re seeing nowadays in the form of special editions. Although special editions are usually more expensive than standard editions and although the price-performance ratio (in a strictly commercial sense) of a special edition might be lower than that of a standard edition, they obviously possess an increased attractiveness and might lead to bigger sales.
If we ignore the implications that pro-piracy arguments give us we might miss out on solutions.
I'm not emotional about the subject, so I don't need you carefully managing the terminology so I don't fly off the handle or break down. If you want to cede piracy and just say "they win, we can't do anything about it", that's one thing but I'll happily sit over here and say "we're letting people steal software because we can't find a solution.
This may well be the truth but it doesn't need to be painted over with softer terms.
Well, I think this is a very good point, but also a bit tricky. Because this is not really a piracy question, but much more a copyright question. You’re saying that we’re letting people steal software because we can’t find a solution, but as a German I have to tell you that until 2003 we (the Germans) let people steal software because we thought it might have a positive social effect. What I want to say is: Copyright is not something that is undisputed. You’ll hardly find anyone who will tell you that human rights are bad thing, but you’ll find quite a few people who will tell you that the modern copyright is a bad thing (and I am one of them). Copyright is a pretty young branch of the law and it was/is constantly subject to change. Now, I’m not a complete idiot – I know that an industry cannot exist if everyone steals its product’s. That’s why I’m saying that we have to find alternative forms of compensation for the content industry and its artists. Such solutions exist and a positive side effect would be that they allow for a more liberal copyright as well.
@GhanBuriGhan
Excellent points. Unfortunately I wrote my post before I saw yours.
These threads tend to get too serious for me.
