Piracy More Serious Than Bank Robbery?

An anonymous reader writes sends us to Ars Technica for a dissertation on how detached and manipulative the discussion about copyright is becoming. "NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing, when it should be doing something about piracy instead. 'Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,' Cotton said. 'If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.'" Ars points out how completely specious that "hundreds of billions" is.

I've been on IRC. I've seen rampant trading.

[eightball01]

I don't doubt his claim of hundreds of billions. In fact, there's probably a hundred billion per month. That being said, I don't remember taking any mp3s or the odd copy of photoshop at gunpoint. Just because the owner of respective rights may be out of money doesn't mean they would get that money if the medium wasn't free. These people don't seem to remember that odd quirk about piracy. You get what you want to take at your leisure. You're not pressured by your bottom line. You're not pressured to think if it is a good purchase. You get it because you want it, and only because you want it. I've got many mp3s that I wouldn't be caught dead buying the album (or even the iTunes track) for purely because I don't think it is even worth the .99 per track. I didn't get that copy of photoshop because I thought it was an industry standard image manipulation software. I got it because it cost me an hour in download time. The exact same could be said if the company receives $100 or $500 in profit on that piece of software. There are different rules to piracy than those which piracy is measured.

Re:Pirates disgust me

[Admiral Ag]

"People will make all kinds of rationalisation to justify taking other peoples work for free."

That's true, but they may in some cases be correct. In this case, technology is in the process of rendering barriers to the free flow of information obsolete. DRM and all other forms of copy protection are just feeble attempts to stop it. The power is now in the hands of the users. You can complain all you like about it, but that is a fact. All the lawmaking in the world won't be able to stop people either, and nor will technology.

Rationalisations either way are futile in cases like this. People can come up with rationalisations as to why masturbation should be prevented, but it's idle talk, since people will continue to do it because there is no efficient way of stopping them.

In any case, there is no a priori reason why content should not be provided free to end users, as long as some method of promoting its creation is in place. Lots of things in our society are provided by means of non market mechanisms. Scholarly research is the obvious one. Health care (in most modern societies) is another. There's no reason why entertainers who supply music cannot be paid from general taxation based on the measured popularity of their products. The technology exists to make such a scheme workable. Additionally, there are obvious benefits in having such content available for free to the end user.

Apart from the Libertarians, who seem to object to taxation even when it demonstrably makes life easier, there's not much to complain about in such a proposal. Sometimes new technology makes new markets possible, sometimes it renders old ones impossible. That's just life in the modern world.

"The problem is, their philosophy never scales up to the whole of society. Why the fuck should I pay to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, it was made anyway, and I probably wouldn't have paid for it right? so what's the harm?"

If you already paid for it through general taxation, why would you care? Why not agitate for a workable solution, instead of acting like King Canute? There's very little you can do about piracy by appealing to the pirates or by trying to use the law against them. Might as well take a stand on firm ground instead.

Re:Pirates disgust me

[Jessta]

indeed not.
But the US Supreme Court has ruled that ilegally copying digital media isn't stealing.