Why I Pirate - An Open Letter To Content Creators

The computer geek in me agrees with this guy, but the business major in me just laughed. Not because of his arguments -- they are sound, in my opinion -- but because of his attitude. I fail to see how this 'petulant child' attitude that we geeks like to adopt re: DRM does us any good. Yes, shit be expensive, yo. But taking an uncompromising attitude, especially when we are nothing more than a vocal minority... it's like we <i>want</i> the larger world to not take geeks seriously.<p>And World of Goo for $20? Please. It's so easy to find games at a discount that buying software online at full price is borderline idiotic. WOG, like many games (esp. indie titles), is regularly discounted through the myriad different channels it is sold in. (Humble Indie Bundle is one.) All you need is patience. On another note: World of Goo is not worth $20? Really?<p>There seems to be this growing attitude of petulant, childish snobbery among us geeks. "We're ADD, broke, impatient, and really, really lazy, and because we're your customers you do what we say or we pirate your shit." That's the vibe I got from Why I Pirate, and it's a vibe that smells like extortion. Giving the media companies a taste of their own medicine, perhaps? I can see the suits reading this little piece and instantly binning it. You catch more flies with honey, not vinegar.<p>I really like YC's stance on Hollywood (re: funding more startups that attack hollywood directly)... we all agree that Big Content needs to die, and they're putting money down to help. Writing longwinded, rambling TL;DR diatribes (hint: the 20,000 character limit is there for a REASON) does not.<p>Remember that we're nothing more than a vocal minority. Act as such.

I don't disagree with his desires, however, these points make him appear as an avaricious 10 year old who deserves anything he wants.<p>&#62;Now, I don't care when, where or how you release it. If I want it, I'll get it.<p>I really like the new 911 Turbo S Cabriolet, but I know Porsche has a huge markup on it and I'm only willing to pay for the cost of materials. So, I'll just go to a Porsche factory, steal the car and place a pile of cash in it's place totaling the cost of materials. That's essentially what you're doing when you pirate music, software, movies, etc... You're not "stealing" it because the original copy is there. Well, I'm offsetting the cost of materials and they still have all of the original designs, manufacturing processes, etc... that they worked on. I don't think the hours they put in to design and manufacture the car is worth it's price. Same goes for that movie you downloaded. You clearly don't think the time the actors, directors, technicians, editors, etc... put in was worth the price of the final outcome.<p>Obviously it's not something that you could get away with as easily as downloading files, but do you see my point?<p>Try doing the same thing with a consulting company. If I get their advice and dislike it, does that mean I don't have to pay them? Better yet, what if I really like what they have to say but I still think it's too expensive? "I'm only going to implement half of what you told us, so we'll only pay you 50% of your fee."

Whatever the legitimacy of the OP arguments he sounds like a real creep!<p>I get that he's trying to make a hard nosed, here's how it is in the real world. But he comes off a variation of an abuser who believes his victim leaves him no choice to abuse.<p>I would hazard a guess that most file "pirates" are not like him. They either don't think much about the consequences to others of there actions or if they do they feel at least a little bad,just not enough to stop doing it.<p>I think at core his argument is that he doesn't want to pay for the content he consumes. He justifies it on the grounds that the prices are too high. This a nonsensical assertion supported by the flimsy justification that the marginal cost of a digital good is so low. Well the total costs of production remain quite high,especially considering the cost of marketing.<p>I remain amazed at the anti big content additudes found on HN given that the tech industry is just as dependent on legal enforcement of intellectual property protections as hollywood is. (Think trademark,patent and copyright) IP law is just as important to open source software.<p>The problem is that digital goods without articily created scarcity and property like "properties"'will suffer a major free rider problem.<p>Would any of the coders here be cool with others appropriating their work without compensation or choice in the matter?<p>I've seen people get quite huffy in these parts for lifting a stupid graphic graphic from a website.<p>For any VC types here: how would you feel if your companies had deal with heavy appropriation of the the product you put up money for? I'm really asking!

The problem with these arguments is they boil down to "I will never pay more than $x for product type y" when these prices should really be dictated by the market itself.<p>If you're unwilling to pay more than $6 for a book, how can you support niche works that may take great time and difficulty to produce?<p>I agree however that when it's far easier and faster to get a product from a torrent website than it is to buy due to the number of hoops that you have to go through then the distributor has a problem.<p>An example of this is netflix who use silverlight DRM on all of their streams so I cannot play them on my Linux HTPC. This is of course despite the fact that people ripping their streams is <i>not</i> the problem, I'm sure all of their content is available at better quality on torrent websites. All this does is put barriers up to potential customers.<p>In many ways it seems like going into a shop and finding some goods that you want to buy but that the checkout line is an hour long and they only cash in certain denominations and you need 2 forms of ID to make a purchase. So many people just end up shop lifting out of exasperation.

Interesting article, and there's a lot to think about here for people involved in media creation (like me).<p>Two minor but related points, however:<p>1) It's important to realise that when you say "here's how you get me to give you money: do X, Y and Z thing and sell at price P", you are in fact offering the content industries a choice.<p>You are not saying "if you don't, no-one will buy your product." You're saying "If you don't, people like me won't buy your product - so do you want to make movies/books/games for people like me?"<p>Speaking as a content creator in both text and video, one of the major aspects I consider when planning a project is the target audience, and how much money they feel comfortable spending. An audience that is willing to spend a lot of money (say, partner-level accountants) is, all else being equal, a lot more likely to get the green light than an audience that isn't (free culture anarchists).<p>That means if you're not willing to pay much money for a product, and no-one else like you is either, stuff that's of interest to you is less likely to get made. Making a product for an audience that might love it, but won't pay, is a rookie mistake, and most producers learn from it the first time and don't do it again.<p>So if you want stuff that speaks to you, features characters like you in sympathetic roles, and talks about how you experience the world, being willing to spend more money on it actively increases the chances it'll get made.<p>(Why do you think there are so many "family-friendly" movies made every year? Because that's a demographic that buys.)<p>2) When you say "A DVD / game / book should cost X", you either a:<p>a) are able to describe in detail the target audience, including demographic information, likely points of contact and awareness routes, and of course size, purchasing budget and likely penetration for the media product in question, and also produce a line-item budget for creating the entire piece of work, including marketing budget, professional fees, and so on, that an expert in the field would find plausible,<p>or<p>b) Are talking out of your arse.<p>Media pricing is more complicated than "Well, I'm only willing to pay $5 for a game, so game developers should just make them cheaper." or even "Well, paperback books cost $7 and most of that must be printing and distribution costs."

Long read but good work.<p>I think this is more of an open letter to content publishers; content creators haven't had any trouble solving the problems that you explained.<p>Content has been moving copyleft (or at the very least, to more liberal licensing) every day because of the competitive advantages in emerging markets, but where copyright still holds a strong presence, the debate will not center around the consumer's point of view (unfortunately).<p>It is better to frame this debate around "content creators" and whether they are truly benefiting from the artificial scarcity which supports Hollywood's business model. And thus it is important to mention that this is not the content creators doing, but the backwards thinking of very powerful copyright holders, who pass very little of their economic benefits to artists compared to other mediums.

In the traditional case, if you are not willing to pay the producer's price, then you don't buy it. People stole, but it was a lot harder. If the producer's price was not profitable, they changed the price or went out of business.<p>Now, stealing(1) is easier and the chances of getting caught are slim. I get the feeling we are going to end-up in DRM hell (only works when connected to server streams) to get back to a model where producer / consumer dynamics work again.<p>I am also not very comfortable with the entitlement or the constant saying that the cost of production of a good has gone down sharply in the digital age. DVD's are cheap and an HD production chain isn't.<p>(1) my def: action that obtains something that is supposed to be paid for without paying

<a href="http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/story_type/site_trail_story/interview-gabe-newell/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/story_type/site_trail_story/intervi...</a> "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."<p>Gabe said it much more succint and he has the money to prove it.

Another overly wordy rationalization of an easily satisfied (and risk free) sense of entitlement.<p>The author's points can be boiled down to a few sentences:<p>Roman Polanski and Chris Brown are assholes, so I'm entitled to their content.<p>Big media companies lie to me which is an offense to my vast intellect so I'm entitled to their content as well.<p>Basically all content producers are on notice that if they deign to displease his majesty the author all their content becomes free. "I can't believe Bon Iver wore a tweed jacket at the Grammys. Your content is mine now bitch!"

While i agree with most of this, including having an online option, the big thing that stands out for me is this paragraph which basically said "Online pricing does not make sense":<p><i>B. Get a handle on your pricing for digital media. Look, we understand why a paperback costs $7. You have to buy paper, glue and ink. It has to be written, edited, printed, shipped and stocked. And each of those people wants to cover their costs and make a profit. But when you write an ebook, and all you have to do is hit 'copy' to make another sale, you have no business charging $7 each. Remember before when I said I'm not downloading to try and stick it to you? In a situation like this, I'm downloading because you're trying to stick it to me.</i>

Use any argument, take any emotional stand you want, but you'll be smacked down again and again by the guy who wrote that post.<p>Fact: Alcohol prohibition failed.<p>Fact: The War on Drugs has failed.<p>Objections against the "pirates" are nothing more than a repeat of that history.<p>The customer -- and <i>potential</i> customer -- is talking. Start listening!

there must be a time when you can walk into a farmer's field, and rip anything and still claim that the product given by god and belong to all human being.<p>when the farmer complains, you can get away with this: you should grow things in your backyard!<p>i still have no idea why people want these things so badly. Will they die without these movies and musics?

Over the last decade, I see that both 'sides' in the piracy debate are becoming increasingly radicalized.<p>This isn't going to end well.

Why people pirate? Because what people get from this, be it entertainment, information or whatever is more important to them than to follow a law or whatever could be the reason for not doing so. It's <i>usually</i> not like you need to pirate to survive or are doing anything good to the world if you do.<p>Usually it all boils down to egoism and I am using that term in a neutral way. Like it is egoism to drink coke, have an iPhone or have sex.<p>Of course some people have a philosophical view on these things, that morally tries to justify it or even make it a virtue (sharing and resharing information is a good thing to do to me), but this hardly ever is the real, primary reason.

So I didn't want to read his 20K+ characters and jumped to the conclusion<p><i>I didn't try to convince you copying is not theft, I didn't try to convince you I'm too poor to buy products and I didn't try to convince you file-sharing is akin to advertising. I just tried to tell it like it is.</i><p>Pretty good, and then the reason you pirate?<p><i>Didn't Warner Bros. just set a company record for quarterly profits? I'm confused. My guess is that these industries really aren't losing money, but they are losing control. And maybe to them, control is more valuable than profits? I don't know, that's why I'm asking.</i><p>So he didn't answer the question (or may be I missed the answer?)

I'm kind of sick of all these discussions. Sure, everyone who pirates has some at-least-quasi-principaled (or even, actually principaled) decision or rationale for why they pirate. Everyone seems to have an opinion on content quality, the efficacy of current copyright laws, and most people come to similar conclusions about the companies that control content and the groups of lawyers they employ to 'protect' those assets.<p>But as I said, I'm kind of sick of these discussions avoiding one central point: Why do you pirate? Because you don't want to pay for it. It's that simple.

Here's some related issues:<p>- I can download a videogame from a private torrent tracker faster than I can download it from most download services even like steam.<p>- I usually know what movie I want to watch from the overhyped commercials. Given that I can find and download it, transfer it to my PS3 and watch it faster than I can find it, purchase it, download it, figure out how to play it on my TV via copyright protection which entails either some sort of encryption or inability to copy the file. Basically the pirate way is EASIER, more convenient, and no-risk. God help me if I buy a movie (for a ton of cash mind you) and don't like it. Return? HA!<p>- My TV is huge, ok I had it for 5 years now, and with all that I don't think 13/person going to the movies + popcorn and BS is worth it. I get the same experience at home, but FASTER and more convenient via piracy. Takeaway: Movies are ridiculously overpriced at this point.<p>- Using piracy, I am able to play games with ZERO DRM HEADACHES. No CDs in my drive. I don't have to be online to play. I don't have to install security holes into my computer. Piracy is safer than legitimate purchases.<p>- On the video game note: Video games are now going for 60 bucks!!! That's a commitment. If the game sucks, I'm out 60 f-ing bucks. Oh and downloading a demo takes as much time as pirating the whole damn game, more time actually. Worse are the freaken' sales. I feel like the game was hyped up to me, I want to play it, but in 10 days the price will drop by 20 bucks, ugh dilemma... piracy is easier.

I feel I am feeding a very energetic troll by even commenting again but there is something nagging at me. The points around the pricing of digital goods are mainly related to the particular nature of them: high fixed costs of production and extremely low cost of marginal production. Churlish arguments like the OP's lend emotional creedence to the attempts by business and govt to enforce existing IP law.<p>I think these attempts are going to succeed. Witness the uptick in aggressive IP enforcement actions: high stakes patent battles, domain seizures, arrests.<p>This, coupled with improved legal digital delivery methods, are going to make typical pirating actions more like regular crimes. It will still exist but will be the province of actual anti-social criminal types.<p>Then his arguments will come to be more along the lines of: I pirate because I can get away with it. Like saying, hey, the locks on your car suck so I can take your shit.<p>So as the car owner (imperfect analogy I know) does he expect you to give up and just leave the keys in the ignition? Instead we will see the vigorous attempts to create locks that are good enough to keep most people out and increased efforts at enforcement to arrest the rest.<p>The problem with this is that since it is inherently harder to lock a digital product, increased resources are being put towards enforcement.<p>This is dovetailing with law enforcement actions against hackers. It represents an increase in the power of the govt against citizens, whistle blowers, and activist who actually do care about helping their fellow humans.

&#62; The question isn't whether I'll get your content in the format I want, the question is will you get my money in exchange for it?

Big Content will never get on board with this, but independent content creators are beginning to figure it out (Louis C.K., Jim Gaffigan). As it becomes cheaper and cheaper to self-distribute, more artists will be able to cut out the corporate middle men and make more money while lowering prices.

The real reason anyone pirates is because they can get away with it. I'm sure if there was a digital way to steal a bottle of grey goose from a liquor store a lot more people would pirate grey goose and start making claims that the price is too high and it's too hard to get.<p>If you would go to jail for downloading Herbie Fully Loaded off of the pirate bay (just as surely as you would if you robbed a liquor store and then composed a blog post on "Why I rob liquor stores.") Piracy would be a moot point and would be confined to the fringes of society that are willing to commit theft.<p>In conclusion this is like saying it would be faster and easier to roofie a girl at a bar to get laid than it would be to take the time and money to buy her a drink and talk to her.

There seems to be a lot of articles by pirates saying, "I want to pay, but..." and then they proceed to have a long list of excuses why they pirate things.<p>Let me tell you why I pirate things (and I suspect this is true for most people):<p>It's not because I can't afford it. I can. But I only have a limited amount of money, and if I spend it on music, I can't spend it on something else.<p>Pirating content is simply a way for me to save money. I would argue that downloading a torrent is more inconvenient than buying the content off iTunes or Amazon.<p>And honestly, I don't care too much about the moral implications of downloading. Sure, it might be 'stealing', but it's become socially acceptable, and I know I have a low chance of getting caught anyways.

I only read the in closing, and while I probably am on his side the major point, his closing points are sophomoric. Essentially they are: media is like any other business, if it's doing so badly why are there more numbers of media in volume being released every year, and why do large media houses continue to exist? The answer to the first question is that a huge number of people have entered these markets due to falling barrier to entry so overall volume is up, and answer to the second one is that it takes a long time to kill giant companies. 10 years is not that long.

I consider myself pro-piracy and anti-copyright. Yet, this article still hits a nerve.<p>First off, and perhaps most unforgivably, the author makes no distinction between content creators and content distributors. All of their arguments seem to be based around creators charging too much--that isn't so! It's the distributors that saddle us with DRM, shitty prices, and ads.<p>A great example of this is the line:<p><pre><code> "The artists who wake up and realize they can sell me their newest physical CD for $20." </code></pre> That's usually not the artist, unless you buy the album at a show or something! That's Sony! That's BMG! It's those bastards, not the artist!<p>This misdirected anger does not help their case.<p>Second, there is far too much of an entitled tone. Statements like<p><pre><code> "You can offer me a pdf file or simply link me to a webpage, but stop ignoring this valuable info. And make sure you have a website that details everything you've released and what you're working on. There's nothing more frustrating than finding a new obscure artist you like who only has a dormant Myspace music page.There's nothing more frustrating than finding a new obscure artist you like who only has a dormant Myspace music page." </code></pre> and<p><pre><code> "At the very least, I should get a discount on your older stuff for being a current customer." </code></pre> These do not read well, to put it mildly. When the Man comes around to point out those damn freeloading kids it is exactly these sorts of quotes he points to. Wah wah wah I want a pdf and a web page and a pony--yes, these are all sound business and advertising moves, but asking for it this way is unpalatable.<p>There is a third issue with the stance taken by the author. Observe:<p><pre><code> "I heard from a friend that Mafia was an enjoyable game. I downloaded it, played it and enjoyed it. Did I immediately go rush out and buy it? No, of course not. But when I heard Mafia II was coming out and it was made by the same company as the first one, I pre-ordered it." </code></pre> In theory, in a world where developers can make multiple titles, this is a not-entirely-invalid approach. Let the devs prove themselves, then reward them with your future patronage.<p>The problem--and perhaps the author isn't familiar enough with the industry enough to know this--is that publishers, who are the ones hurt by piracy, are the ones who nowadays make-or-break most studios. When you don't buy the first game, the publisher doesn't see a sale, and so is likely to shutter the studio and give the IP to somebody else.<p>It's not merely enough to buy the <i>next</i> game--you must also fund the developer so that there <i>can be</i> a next game!<p>(As an aside, it would seem that maybe this is why piracy seems not to affect indies so much...a lot of them take donations or have pay-as-dev-happens models. It's when studios are held under the power of a publisher that these alternate funding mechanisms seem to fail, and thus studios can't survive to make a reputation when their first game is pirated.)<p>There's some other good stuff in there, but those are three things the author really needs to get straight in their argument.

It's a bit long, why not just write "I pirate because I can get away with it"? Why the intro about car rentals - did you start joyriding their cars instead of taking your business elsewhere? I highly doubt this. You would not do this because there is a chance you'll get caught and punished.

As one of the people who intrinsically disagree with your stance and so skipped to the Closing section, it appears that your only argument for me is "Piracy is OK because these companies are still profitable"<p>?

So if the distributors had rules like 'the scene' and ran paid file sharing sites, we'd all move over there?<p>I'm buying a 3D printer -- anyone got a Porsche I can borrow for a few weeks?

"A $200 per month entertainment habit that is unequivocally fueled by file-sharing."<p>"unequivocally," huh?

You really think they don't know all that?<p>But they are still having lots of profit. Enough to ignore all that it seems.<p>But very well written nonetheless.

the Internet &#62; $