It was commented in another thread that media piracy has become so common that many people more or less take it for granted- to the point that a Norweigan author foolishly failed to consider the contents of her MP3 player before commenting to an interviewer on the evil scourge of piracy.
I think that most of us, whether we like to admit it or not, are aware that piracy is a problem. I tend to hope that even those who engage in same are aware that things like increasingly draconian DRM, the absorption of many smaller groups into bigger companies (EA, Activision, 2K, etc.) and the unwillingness of those companies to follow artistic risks into financial ones are partly or wholly symptoms of large numbers of people who feel that they can take a commercial product for free. That even if you don't feel loads of affection for these companies or the people who create content for them, the effects of piracy are harmful on levels that affect us as consumers- even, ultimately, consumers who don't pay for the product.
And, as has also been commented, piracy is likely to stay with us. Customers loathe the policies and methods that put hurdles between them and the products they've legitimately purchased, and pirates eventually ignore them. If there's one thing that can travel faster than a blockbuster movie over the Internet, it's the tiny string of bits necessary to bypass Blu-Ray copy protection.
But I wonder (and here I get speculative and possibly horribly naiive) if there's some possibility that things could improve on the other end- from the pirates' side.
Once one takes a hard look in the mirror and admits that yes, one does in fact like the music and movies and games that they've torrented (which means moving past the highly suspect "I only downloaded fifty gigabytes of illegal content because none of it is worth paying for anyway so the makers deserve it"), there's the possibility of recognizing that one has a certain- gasp!- moral obligation not to harm the industry that creates it, or at the least, not to go out of one's way to harm it as though it was somehow righteous.
Right now we have a situation where pirates take new content and especially new DRM as a challenge. How fast can one bypass Ubisoft's obnoxious Assassin's Creed 2 protection? Who can get the hot singer's single before it's available on the radio? Who can get the movie on its preview night? (Who can get the movie in a version that doesn't look like smuggled monaural cameraphone video?) And whatever one thinks of the attitude that obtaining these things is a "challenge", the fruits of that labor then quickly spill down to everyone else on the Internet.
My experience: some time back, I put out a small game, the cumulation of about a year's spare time. I'd made another game previously that had sold a few hundred copies, which wasn't bad for the scale of enterprise we're talking about; it paid enough, at least, to pay for the software that had been used in its creation. But I knew it had been pirated, and even sold illegally. I was aware that this new game would also probably would be pirated, but I genuinely wanted not to put hurdles in the way of customers, so I declined my distributor's offers of copy protection.
User reviews seemed good; I had some positive momentum on my side from my previous title. But not twenty-four hours after its release, my game could be downloaded for free. A week later, a search for the game by title was more likely to come up with an illegal download link than the game's legitimate sales site.
To date, the new game has had less than a quarter of the sales of previous one.
As I say, I knew it was likely my work would be pirated. What I hadn't expected was how quickly and widely. In the pirate culture where respect and praise is garnered for "first to the wire", something similar happens to the major party releases.
I wonder if I'm completely "blue sky" to wonder if the culture has to be that way.
If I had had a single month to sell my game without having to, in effect, compete with my own work offered for free, I have little reason to believe that my sales wouldn't at least have been of a similar level to the previous game- it was a better game, with higher production values, better reviewed by its buyers, in a similar niche, for a similar price. That's as much as I would have preferred. If people three months down the line get wind of this little game and don't have ten bucks, I don't feel a need to shed bitter tears if they turn to the torrents. Heck, they might discuss it online and raise some good press for me.
Likewise, your Mass Effects and Call of Dutys get a large portion of their business in that first week of pre-orders and release excitement; six months down the line you can often get them for anywhere from 25% to 50% less, but it doesn't stop the early adopters. But if some of those early adopters discover they can get what was swiped from a gold master disk before the game even made it to the brick-and-mortar store, the effect on the company's bottom line- that's not just the company of people like Kottick, but the programmers and musicians and texture artists who have to put bread on the table- is devastating.
It would take a significant, even radical, shift of paradigm for things to change. It would take pirates treating people who get media out for free while it's still in its best chance to make a profit with disgust, rather than as conquering heroes. But if such a thing could occur, the pirate community and the commercial media production industry might actually be able to co-exist, rather than on what seems like a current course towards a scorched-earth pyrrhic victory.
Is this impossible?
I think that most of us, whether we like to admit it or not, are aware that piracy is a problem. I tend to hope that even those who engage in same are aware that things like increasingly draconian DRM, the absorption of many smaller groups into bigger companies (EA, Activision, 2K, etc.) and the unwillingness of those companies to follow artistic risks into financial ones are partly or wholly symptoms of large numbers of people who feel that they can take a commercial product for free. That even if you don't feel loads of affection for these companies or the people who create content for them, the effects of piracy are harmful on levels that affect us as consumers- even, ultimately, consumers who don't pay for the product.
And, as has also been commented, piracy is likely to stay with us. Customers loathe the policies and methods that put hurdles between them and the products they've legitimately purchased, and pirates eventually ignore them. If there's one thing that can travel faster than a blockbuster movie over the Internet, it's the tiny string of bits necessary to bypass Blu-Ray copy protection.
But I wonder (and here I get speculative and possibly horribly naiive) if there's some possibility that things could improve on the other end- from the pirates' side.
Once one takes a hard look in the mirror and admits that yes, one does in fact like the music and movies and games that they've torrented (which means moving past the highly suspect "I only downloaded fifty gigabytes of illegal content because none of it is worth paying for anyway so the makers deserve it"), there's the possibility of recognizing that one has a certain- gasp!- moral obligation not to harm the industry that creates it, or at the least, not to go out of one's way to harm it as though it was somehow righteous.
Right now we have a situation where pirates take new content and especially new DRM as a challenge. How fast can one bypass Ubisoft's obnoxious Assassin's Creed 2 protection? Who can get the hot singer's single before it's available on the radio? Who can get the movie on its preview night? (Who can get the movie in a version that doesn't look like smuggled monaural cameraphone video?) And whatever one thinks of the attitude that obtaining these things is a "challenge", the fruits of that labor then quickly spill down to everyone else on the Internet.
My experience: some time back, I put out a small game, the cumulation of about a year's spare time. I'd made another game previously that had sold a few hundred copies, which wasn't bad for the scale of enterprise we're talking about; it paid enough, at least, to pay for the software that had been used in its creation. But I knew it had been pirated, and even sold illegally. I was aware that this new game would also probably would be pirated, but I genuinely wanted not to put hurdles in the way of customers, so I declined my distributor's offers of copy protection.
User reviews seemed good; I had some positive momentum on my side from my previous title. But not twenty-four hours after its release, my game could be downloaded for free. A week later, a search for the game by title was more likely to come up with an illegal download link than the game's legitimate sales site.
To date, the new game has had less than a quarter of the sales of previous one.
As I say, I knew it was likely my work would be pirated. What I hadn't expected was how quickly and widely. In the pirate culture where respect and praise is garnered for "first to the wire", something similar happens to the major party releases.
I wonder if I'm completely "blue sky" to wonder if the culture has to be that way.
If I had had a single month to sell my game without having to, in effect, compete with my own work offered for free, I have little reason to believe that my sales wouldn't at least have been of a similar level to the previous game- it was a better game, with higher production values, better reviewed by its buyers, in a similar niche, for a similar price. That's as much as I would have preferred. If people three months down the line get wind of this little game and don't have ten bucks, I don't feel a need to shed bitter tears if they turn to the torrents. Heck, they might discuss it online and raise some good press for me.
Likewise, your Mass Effects and Call of Dutys get a large portion of their business in that first week of pre-orders and release excitement; six months down the line you can often get them for anywhere from 25% to 50% less, but it doesn't stop the early adopters. But if some of those early adopters discover they can get what was swiped from a gold master disk before the game even made it to the brick-and-mortar store, the effect on the company's bottom line- that's not just the company of people like Kottick, but the programmers and musicians and texture artists who have to put bread on the table- is devastating.
It would take a significant, even radical, shift of paradigm for things to change. It would take pirates treating people who get media out for free while it's still in its best chance to make a profit with disgust, rather than as conquering heroes. But if such a thing could occur, the pirate community and the commercial media production industry might actually be able to co-exist, rather than on what seems like a current course towards a scorched-earth pyrrhic victory.
Is this impossible?
