De-pirating

One of the reasons I'm not especially critical of music piracy is that for many bands, it actually helps. The argument is simple enough: Dude isn't going to buy album; doesn't know the band. Hears a song. Steals the album. Buys a ticket to a live show. Right there the band is getting a better return than many major-label contracts for the album sale. And if Dude buys a CD at the show, because, well, the band is awesome? Even better.

And it's true, I do attempt to de-pirate from time to time.

Today I de-pirated a television show, buying with a birthday gift card a television series I had previously stolen.

I don't know ... it isn't so much that it feels good to do so, but, rather, I've always intended to. Honest, that's the way it goes. We always justify ourselves by saying so if the question arises, and, well, yeah. Had I known it was available at this price, I might have bought it a while ago.

But given how rarely I can see it on television, I probably wouldn't have bought it had I not previously stolen it, watched it to death, and fallen in love with it.

De-piracy has no real personal merit insofar as one breaks even morally, but it is true that many smaller projects benefit in abstract ways from piracy. The show has become something of a legend, already, and only twelve years later. It's building a long tail for sales from piracy, which is, if nothing else, an interesting process to watch.

Tiassa said:

One of the reasons I'm not especially critical of music piracy is that for many bands, it actually helps. The argument is simple enough: Dude isn't going to buy album; doesn't know the band. Hears a song. Steals the album. Buys a ticket to a live show. Right there the band is getting a better return than many major-label contracts for the album sale. And if Dude buys a CD at the show, because, well, the band is awesome? Even better.

And it's true, I do attempt to de-pirate from time to time.

Today I de-pirated a television show, buying with a birthday gift card a television series I had previously stolen.

I don't know ... it isn't so much that it feels good to do so, but, rather, I've always intended to. Honest, that's the way it goes. We always justify ourselves by saying so if the question arises, and, well, yeah. Had I known it was available at this price, I might have bought it a while ago.

But given how rarely I can see it on television, I probably wouldn't have bought it had I not previously stolen it, watched it to death, and fallen in love with it.

De-piracy has no real personal merit insofar as one breaks even morally, but it is true that many smaller projects benefit in abstract ways from piracy. The show has become something of a legend, already, and only twelve years later. It's building a long tail for sales from piracy, which is, if nothing else, an interesting process to watch.

Click to expand...

Quite true. Game of thrones is obvious as a topic for discussion here - http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment...dont-matter-20130226-2f36r.html#ixzz2LywE7AZ2

Where is a choice, as a simple "no" ?

Tiassa said:

One of the reasons I'm not especially critical of music piracy is that for many bands, it actually helps. The argument is simple enough: Dude isn't going to buy album; doesn't know the band. Hears a song. Steals the album. Buys a ticket to a live show. Right there the band is getting a better return than many major-label contracts for the album sale. And if Dude buys a CD at the show, because, well, the band is awesome? Even better.

Click to expand...

I routinely burn copies of my favorite CDs and give them to people who I think might like them. They say, "But you're a musician! How can you give away music with a clear conscience?"

So I remind them that I gave them free copies of my own bands' CDs, because I wanted them to hear our music at least once. After hearing the CD, several of them came to see us perform live. We're just a bar band (yes bar bands make CDs now, isn't technology wonderful?) but having eight or ten more people show up that night might be the reason the bar decided to put us in regular rotation. We don't really make any money after paying for gas and gear, but we like to play and those CDs got us some gigs.

So here are the various things that can happen after you give somebody a bootleg CD:

• 1. She likes it a lot. So she buys a copy in order to get the liner notes, illustrations, etc. Band makes money. About two dollars per CD if they wrote ALL of the songs, otherwise about one dollar. (For a successful band. The startups are lucky to get a few thousand bucks no matter how well it sells.)
• 2. She likes it, but not enough to spend money on it. Still, she puts it on in her car a couple of times, and now she recognizes the band's name. If they come up on FUSE or the radio or the internet, she'll turn up the volume. They make a new album and she says, "Hmm. I kinda liked that last one that Fraggle gave me. I'll take a chance and buy this one." Or the newspaper says they're coming to town in three months and she says, "Hey a live concert. I wasn't blown away by the CD but they seem like the kinda band that might kick ass on stage. I'll buy two tickets and maybe that hot guy in the cubicle next to mine will want to go with me." Band makes money. A dollar or two for the CD, maybe five bucks each for the concert tickets, depending on the venue.
• 3. She doesn't like it, so she gives it back. No harm done.
• 4. She doesn't like it, but she thinks that guy in the next cubicle might, so she gives it to him. We're now back where we started. If it gets passed around enough times, maybe somebody will eventually like it.
• 5. She likes it, but she has no scruples so she doesn't care about the band making money.

In two of these scenarios, the band makes money. In one, I get the CD back so it doesn't matter. In another, the CD gets passed around so there's still a chance that the band will make some money. In only one scenario out of five does the band actually get cheated out of their money for sure.

As a musician, I'm happy with those odds.

Because it's not exactly simple?

YourEyes said:

Where is a choice, as a simple "no" ?

Click to expand...

In truth, I suspect you've done well enough; I would double-check, but I left the poll anonymous.

The reason I left the poll anonymous is that acknowledging de-piracy can circumstantially demand a tacit acknowledgment of data piracy.

Sciforums does not and cannot endorse data piracy.

A simple "No" in the poll would leave available the possibility of PWC—piracy without conscience—which would, in turn, potentially draw specific scrutiny from the RIAA and other organizations.

It is enough to note that these organizations have taken action before by fraudulently claiming intellectual property rights to the work of independent musicians. Avoiding such an outcome as, say, seeing Fraggle or Parmalee sued for distributing their own music, is sufficient reason to limit the scope of this discussion.

At the same time, de-piracy is one of the arguments in favor of piracy; an early proponent of the point is none other than Janis Ian, who describes the shot in the arm her long career saw as Napster and subsequent filesharing endeavors sent the record companies into fits.

There might actually be some merit in noting de-piracy; sometime between when I first downloaded the television series and yesterday, a new version was released on Blu-Ray, and the price crashed from $160 (minimum, with a high end around $500) to $26.99. I would have bought the series back then if it was available on Blu-Ray at that price.

And I can guarantee that without piracy, the short series would not have become so popular. It's true that with every occasional run on American cable, it picked up new viewers, but the online community is way bigger than it should be, and that owes at least some thanks to piracy. Without that enthusiastic worldwide support for the show, the new edition might not have seen release in the U.S.

And this wasn't some blues album on an old-school slave contract toward which I had no regard for the company's interests; this was a television series. I want this company to make more products; I'm happy to pay them.

Discussions of piracy are a dime a dozen; de-piracy, however, which is a vital component of music and other entertainment media piracy justification, is something that doesn't get enough specific consideration. That is, the point exists in the abstract, but, yes, people really do de-pirate from time to time. And I do wonder, actually, how widespread that action actually is. If we're dealing with a PWC community, that will certainly emerge of its own.
____________________

Notes:

Ian, Janis. "The Internet Debacle: An Alternative View". Performing Songwriter. May, 2002. JanisIan.com. May 29, 2013. http://www.janisian.com/reading/internet.php

Tiassa said:

. . . . seeing Fraggle or Parmalee sued for distributing their own music . . . .

Click to expand...

One of the band members was the owner of the record company. He ran off considerably more copies than he expected anyone to buy. So as his associates we were giving out genuine products legally.

But if someone made a copy of theirs and gave it to somebody else, the result is the same--an increased probability of more people coming to our next gig--so we would not have been upset.

We still have a few hundred of these "three-dollar coasters."

This is why we're going to need an entire new economic model for the Post-Industrial Era. The most important commodity is now information--in all its forms, including articles, stories, movies, recorded music, games, etc. The unique thing about information compared to traditional commodities is: only the very first copy is expensive to create. After that it can be duplicated and shared for almost no cost at all.

We're going to have to develop a new way of paying people for what they create. It could be as simple (and as hippie-trippy) as clicking a one-tenth-of-a-cent icon on PayPal or KickStarter when you hear a song you like. Or just programming the communication software to do it. Or do it the bureaucratic way and charge everybody five dollars for an entire day's consumption of information, whether they use it or not.

We pay so much for the infrastructure of the Post-Industrial Era that Verizon and Comcast could just add the $150 to their monthly bill.

Oh, and BTW... Don't forget that we are each legally permitted to make one backup copy of anything we purchase on digital media. And for obvious and sensible security reasons, there's no rule saying that you can't store that backup copy in someone else's house in case yours burns down. And of course that person has to test it occasionally to make sure it hasn't been physically damaged.

New music survey: P2P users buy the most, no one wants disconnection penalties

An Ars Technica article from early in the year: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/new-music-survey-p2p-users-buy-the-most-no-one-wants-disconnection-penalties/

A new survey from the American Assembly, a research center at Columbia University, provides new insights about public opinion on file sharing and copyright enforcement. With support from Google, researchers Joe Karaganis and Lennart Renkema commissioned a public opinion survey to find out how consumers were getting their media and what their attitudes were toward a variety of copyright enforcement strategies.

Among the most significant findings: Americans overwhelmingly oppose the use of disconnection and rate-limiting as penalties for unauthorized file sharing. Also, the survey suggests users of peer-to-peer file-sharing software buy 30 percent more music than those who do not use peer-to-peer software.

Click to expand...

I've pirated everything. Music, movies, TV shows, video games, you name it. I'm currently catching up on old episodes of Burn Notice which are streaming from one of the hundreds of TV/Movie streaming sites (illegally), and playing downloaded ROMs of out-of-print retro games on emulators running on my PC and tablet.

In some ways - and perhaps this is just wish-thinking and excuse-making - I don't think it's necessarily a moral issue. Music piracy actually tends to help the unknown bands the industry claims are being hit the hardest, box office numbers seem unaffected, ratings don't mean what they used to, and old games are usually only available on the secondary market anyway, meaning the content creator isn't losing any money if I download some old PSOne game. There are exceptions, of course, and that's where it gets tricky. I can't say that when I de-pirate (interesting term, by the way) I'm evening the score, since there's no guarantee my money is going to the people whose property I thieved in the first place, so while I make sure to pay for content as often as I can, I don't necessarily feel that this makes me a better person.

But part of me just doesn't care. We are gouged at retail, we practically have to dip into our savings for a night at the movies, and most half-hour TV shows are hovering around 21 minutes, leaving the rest for annoying commercials. In other words, the market isn't fair. Entertainment companies continually devalue our dollar, so why should I care if they lose a few bucks? That may sound crass, perhaps even juvenile, but I'm not particularly bothered.