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Monday, February 11, 2002
19:27 - Piracy-- a different tactic
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/02/fog0000000307.shtml

(top) link
This one's from USS Clueless; den Beste notes that the software and music industries are starting to rethink their strategies in order to exist in an environment where it is assumed that piracy will happen, rather than to simply try to keep people from doing it.

I just have one question, though: Doesn't that amount to the companies condoning piracy? And if so, why should anyone pay for software? If the companies are effectively giving away their software and music (which is what they'd be doing, if they don't try to enforce IP rights), what incentive is there for anyone to buy the genuine article?

As long as music can be reduced to audio, it can be redigitized and converted into an unprotected MP3 which can be distributed online. No amount of digital protection can prevent that. So far most pirated music is digitally converted mostly because that is still easy. But if it is made impossible technologically, an analog redigitization won't be enough worse in quality to affect this. And any computer with a sound card sold in the last ten years is capable of doing this.

The music industry must go through a psychology change. The problem now is that they see pirated copies as representing lost revenue. They count up each copy as one they were not paid for.

The customers don't view it that way. To the customers when they buy the material, they also think of themselves as buying the ability to make some copies of it. They want to be able to play in on their stereo, but they also want to be able to make compilations of the music in the order they like, and they want to be able to copy their favorite tracks or even whole albums onto portable players. This is not viewed by the customers as being piracy; it's considered a value-add for the product itself. It is part of what they think they are buying.

As long as the industry doesn't see it from that point of view, they will continue to try to fight the future. No industry can ultimately survive if it thinks of its customers as enemies; ultimately the industry has to adopt the point of view of its customers and cater to their desires.

You cannot sell someone what you want them to have. You have to sell them what they want to buy.

This genie first escaped with the first "product" that could be manufactured effectively for free, by the end user: digital data. It plays by different rules than physical objects which have to be manufactured by the company that invented them, for a certain cost, using certain processes. Certainly it's reasonable to suggest that we need entirely new laws to handle this kind of monkey-wrench thrown into Adam Smith's beautiful but second-millennium model of economics. But we're still left without any guidance as to what those new rules might be.

The industry has to start thinking of the glass as half full. The copies stolen are not lost revenue; what they are is copies of ones where were bought. If the pirated copies did not exist then the purchased ones would not have been sold. The pirated copies are actually an indirect source of revenue.

I get the feeling that there's a valuable and important point in here somewhere, but it seems to have gotten garbled somehow. Pity.

There is no technical or technological solution to this, and also no legal one. When 50 million people break a law, it is the law itself which is suspect.

Okay, fair enough. But if the solution is for the music and software industries to 'create its own equivalent of "cable TV"'-- to stop being old-school, ultra-conservative content vendors and become innovators in content delivery to a degree that hackers can't match, then it's effectively suggesting that the music and software industries will have to be completely torn down and replaced with something so different as to be unrecognizable. Pay-for-play (or tip-for-play) Napster? Ads embedded in Word? If the product is free, the only way for the producers to make any money is through the consumers' good will-- and I don't think any consumers will be willing to cough up thousands of dollars to support the development of software like Final Cut Pro or Maya. And can you imagine corporate enterprises with budget line-items looking like this:

"Corporate rollout, Photoshop; 1270 installations; total voluntary donation: $1,000,000"

Maybe the model of paying individually for pieces of software is all wrong. Maybe what we need is a model whereby companies develop software under government contract, provide it ubiquitously, and collect payment from the government in the form of taxes, or public utility bills. That's how we get our freeways and our sewer systems. It's that way because only the government is equipped to provide those things, and because you can't very well steal something that's ubiquitous, can you? It provides the fulfillment of the people's need so that nobody has to build their own roads or dig their own sewage ditches, because it's all handled for them better than they could handle it themselves.

Radio is a "utility" that nobody steals for the same reason. It's ubiquitous, and the costs for it are hidden in advertising. The key to stopping music piracy is to provide the equivalent of radio-- an always-on, at-the-fingertips source of on-demand music and media that can be received anywhere and without any explicit payment. This can be done; things were this weird at the beginning of radio, and they'll have to do the same kind of feverish standardization and technological development that they did back then. The question is whether the companies will be willing-- or able-- to be disbanded or restructured as appropriate to achieve these goals.

Until that's ready, though, the laws are the best they can be according to the current rules. Declaring a New World Order and saying that the old rules don't apply is not an excuse for breaking current laws. Yes, a revolution is coming, but don't go guillotining patricians just yet. You may be glad of the bargaining power you'll retain if the companies don't have to see you as such an enemy.

And for God's sake, let's lose the ludicrous after-the-fact justifications for piracy, huh? If you're going to break current IP laws, at least own up to it and show some good faith that you would pay for the software if you had the means. Don't make up stuff about how piracy is really what makes the world go 'round, and how people are all really entitled to having everything for free, and blah blah blah. "Suffering needlessly"-- Jesus Christ.

At any rate, it'd sure be nice to see WMA and SDMI completely fail and MP3 remain popular, wouldn't it?

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© Brian Tiemann