There’s no justification for piracy, but there are obvious reasons why it happens
Back in January, I complained about the user experience of shiny disks and also the manner in which the TV and movie industries continue to be dicks. It wasn’t a particularly unique piece of writing, and yet it struck a nerve, rapidly becoming one of the most-read articles I’ve ever written for this blog.
Since then, we’ve seen Matt Gemmell write a piece called The Piracy Threshold, where he blames piracy on the “incredibly short-sighted, greedy and stupid” media industries, and The Oatmeal’s amusing take, I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened. Both articles summed up my earlier thoughts on the piracy debate:
If your studio isn’t making content legally available, affordably, and on a worldwide basis, shortly after broadcast, you’ve only yourselves to blame when people hit torrent websites and download it for free.
Note that this isn’t advocacy of piracy—it’s the reality of the market we find ourselves in, with industries desperate to cling to old business models. Some people, though, have a different take. Harry Marks, notably, has strongly reacted against people he terms ‘entitletards’. On the Oatmeal comic, he responded:
I tried to watch Game of Thrones and realized downloading it illegally was doing fuck-all to help the situation.
I tried to watch Game of Thrones and decided to wait two weeks until it came out on DVD because I don’t have the patience of a toddler.
He also responded to Gemmell’s piece with a retort that blames the users and not the studios for piracy, arguing that people are now too used to instant gratification, and that there are plenty of services you can use to access legal content. However, the majority of these remain US-only, and it’s perhaps easy for someone in that country to have a skewed viewpoint when it comes to the availability of legal media. Again, Marks and similar thinkers might consider anyone complaining about that whiners or ‘the entitled’, but the fact remains we now live in a connected world. If I can now chat to people all over the planet in an instant, it’s rather absurd that I can’t legally watch a US TV show—even a topical one—for many months (or longer) after its original broadcast date, by which point I’d probably know what happens in it anyway through spoilers being found accidentally. This, of course, helps no-one: I don’t get to watch the show, and the studio doesn’t get my money.
On Twitter, Marks, I and others also got into a row over another key argument in the current debate over piracy and rights: format shifting. Fair-use/fair-dealing laws vary by country, but it’s currently illegal in the UK to format-shift pretty much anything, including CDs to your computer (as MP3 or some other digital format). The law on this might soon change in the UK, providing a personal-use exception, but studios will almost certainly fight hard against such changes in any country; recently, for example, the MPAA attacked a proposal in the USA to provide a legal exception for DVD ripping, because the studios make a lot of money reselling content.
Part of the aforementioned Twitter discussion turned into one about constant rebuying. If you own a CD or DVD, should you rebuy that content digitally, or should it be legal to rip to digital for personal use? Some will argue, morally, they’ve already paid for the content, so why can’t they do what they want with it? Others will equate the same action to effectively grabbing a free digital copy when you merely already own a copy of something on vinyl or VHS. And yet what if the content you want access to simply isn’t available digitally? Should a favourite album or TV show remain out of reach, because the studios no longer care about it? In part, the solution in the future might be massive services along the lines of iTunes Match and Netflix, but there will always be gaps in the catalogues, even if you’re signed up to all of those available.
I’d also argue that the problem in any forced-rebuy model is that such notions have historically led to planned obsolescence and restrictions—a lack of flexibility in media specifically designed to keep having you buy the same material again and again. For the studios, this can be great, and it’s one of the things that caused the media sales spike during the shiny disc era. But for users, it always comes back to the same thing: the user experience is weaker than it should be. With shiny discs, there are all kinds of problems that I mentioned in my earlier piece; with digital, the main issues are ease-of-playback across owned devices (in this often not being possible) and availability, with studios semi-randomly pulling content from services and often ignoring any country that doesn’t happen to have a ‘U’, an ’S’ and an ‘A’ in its name.
Marks concludes his piece with the following:
I don’t care what your reason is. I don’t care that you don’t like how things are. Bottom line: there is no justification for piracy.
I happen to agree with the last bit of that. But I also happen to think there are reasons for piracy that can relatively easily be fixed by studios, if they have the will and the foresight. There is, of course, a chunk of the market forever lost—those that will never pay for anything. But as Apple and others have proved, it’s possible to ‘train’ people back into buying media, as shown with music; that industry was once thought doomed, but Apple rose to prominence through offering a strong user experience and making content readily available and affordable. And if any service is good enough, we’ve seen how technology creates a halo effect, with a small number of advocates having the potential to drive a disproportionate number of sales. I just hope the studios are listening, watching and reacting accordingly.
Update: Gary Marshall points to a piece talking about both sides of the argument by Andy Ihnatko. Within, he also mentions the sense of entitlement angle, and I should note that I see the Oatmeal comment more as a general statement about the industry rather than a scathing criticism of a specific show. Ihnatko does also say “If a distributor shows up […] with a product we want, we’ll buy it,” which is rather my point.
Did you see Andy Ihnatko’s piece on this?
http://ihnatko.com/2012/02/20/heavy-hangs-the-bandwidth-that-torrents-the-crown/
I’d love to believe that everyone who torrents Game of Thrones or whatever will then pay for it digitally, or on DVD. But most of them won’t. They’re not pirating for ideological reasons, unless the ideology is “I want free stuff”.
One of the problems with this debate IMO is that it’s become completely polarised. I think the entitlement argument is a fair one: there are some people for whom any price tag is too expensive, and there is a rather nasty undercurrent to some of the anti-copyright stuff. It’s interesting when you compare the outrage among journalists about CEO-enriching, writer-shafting content farms – “good stuff costs money! You are STARVING OUR CHILDREN!” – to the “hey, the market says it’ll only pay 2p for a box set” argument used to damn the studios.
I worry that we’ve got to the point where it’s unfixable. Both sides are too entrenched to even see each other’s point of view.
@Gary: There’s definitely an element of entitlement and expecting much for a little. I’m also sure pretty much everyone has their ‘favoured’ price-point. I, for one, look at HD shows on iTunes at £2.49 each and think it’s taking the piss, but I’m sure even if the price dropped to, say, £1.49 for HD and 99p for SD, other people would still consider that too much. However, there does appear to be a very clear message from the shiny disc crowd that THIS is what they still want. Shows are regularly cheaper on shiny disc than digital, even when released at the same time, and items are often yoinked from iTunes rental and even the own-forever store, in order to shore up shiny disc sales.
Like you, I’m not sure if it can be fixed, but the studios could certainly do more to try. Increase the UX of shiny discs, so they match pirated downloads; additionally, make a much greater effort to make content widely available as soon as possible and also affordable. Despite the RIAA’s bleating, it seems to be working with music, because many people now don’t think twice about downloading affordable and DRM-free music they can do what they want with. Movies and TV should follow suit.
When Harry Marks says people are now used to instant gratification, and the industry doesn’t meet with that demand, why is that the consumers fault?
@heikkipekka: His argument is (more or less) that if something isn’t legally available, that’s just tough, and you should wait or go without. This, he and others argue, is the consumer’s fault, because they don’t have to act illegally. They aren’t entitled to content. I do generally agree with this, but it avoids the central argument, in my mind, that the industry is prolonging this line of thinking, rather than more rapidly transitioning to widely accessible and affordable digital content and also improving the UX of shiny discs.
Last month, I was out in the market to buy a game digitally rather than order DVD and wait for it. Wasn’t avaialble on Mac App Store nor on their website. Hence, I rushed to torrents and downloaded. In 30 mins the game was on. I seriously wanted to pay and download but had no choice. Sorry, piracy is due to publishers. If users don’t have a choice to pay and download, then they will steal and download.
I have to also admit, since the launch of Mac App Store, I have bought a lot more Mac apps than I have in the past. Proof – digital distribution works and it makes people buy rather than steal. Ofcourse, if priced reasonably.
> the studios could certainly do more to try.
No argument there. If it’s quicker and more convenient to find a DVDrip than to legally stream, the studios are helping to make the stick they’re being beaten with. I’ve torrented films *I own* because until I upgraded my mac, it was faster to d/l a rip than it was to actually rip.
> I seriously wanted to pay and download but had no choice.
Sorry, but that just isn’t true. You did have a choice: you had the choice to do without the game. These are entertainment products, not things that are essential to life itself. It’s not as if you’re shoplifting food because you’re broke and you’re feeding your family; you wanted an entertainment product in a format that the publisher was not willing to provide.
When I was young, a truck full of chocolate bars crashed just around the corner from where I lived. In the gap between the crash and the police arriving, the truck was stripped. People didn’t do it because they had no choice; they did it because they fancied some chocolate and knew that they’d probably get away with grabbing some. Torrenting TV programmes or games or whatever is exactly the same thing.
> digital distribution works and it makes people buy rather than steal.
Yes. Studios can’t eradicate piracy, but they can and should make the legal alternatives so good that for most people, piracy isn’t worth the hassle. There needs to be a carrot as well as the stick.
I don’t think people somehow feel “entitled” to anything. They just don’t think it’s wrong to download stuff illegally, if getting it legally is much harder, or impossible.
There’s something else at play here: I buy the content I consume, but I’m not feeling good about it. I feel like I’m giving money to entities who will use it to buy laws that *hurt* me. As a result, I feel quite the opposite of what Marks says: there’s pretty much no justification for giving money to content companies. It’s like paying people to beat you up.
Hence, in recent times, I’ve often found myself simply not watching newer movies at all.
BTW, I’m not coming at this from the perspective of someone who’s never torrented a TV show. I just don’t have an excuse beyond “I was broke and I wanted it”.
LKM: Yes, I get that too. I’m trying to go to a lot more gigs these days and buy band merchandise so I’m supporting the artists I enjoy rather than the corporations they signed to, but there’s not really a film equivalent of that. There’s a horrible faustian bargain in entertainment where the good stuff often comes from the bad organisations.
[…] was just reading Craig Grannell’s new blog post, There’s no justification for piracy, but there are obvious reasons why it happens, and I found myself once again agreeing exactly with what he says. The post was prompted both by […]
@LKM: Great point about Marks’ argument that piracy is taking money from the creators of the content. In most cases of major studio content, very little if any of the “lost” sale would go to the creators. They get a very small sliver of that pie. This argument is fallacious and disingenuous, and it appeals at a base emotional level (like pro-life billboards). When your argument is shaky, you resort to methods that stop people from thinking critically.
[…] responses have come from Andy Ihnatko and Craig Grannell who both make a similar point – that difficulty in buying something doesn’t mean we are […]
Let me add my opinion. I believe it’s fair to buy original, legal CDs or DVDs or Blu-rays: you get the best quality product plus – if you think about it – there are people working hard who deserve their part of the pie. iTunes Store has helped a lot.
For some, “free stuff” is the one argument to justify piracy. For me, I’d say availability, prices and choice are. The TV & music industry isn’t making it easy. Their will to over-control everything and to make things complicated outside the USA is bothering me. DVDs and Blue-rays are split into zones, digital content outside the USA cannot be accessed and even on YouTube many videos are restricted. Even the iTunes Store, which I love, isn’t a pangea: some contents are available only in some Countries.
If I truly like a movie, I buy the Blue-ray or the DVD. If I truly like an album, I buy it on CD or from iTunes. But if it’s not available, say for rent on iTunes, what should I do? What if I am stopped by some crazy industry from watching a video on on YouTube?
Hi
My little take on this concerns software, as a designer I use 5 packages,:1 all the time my primary CAD package, the second is a rendering package I use very frequently, but could survive without. the other 3 – Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign are incidental to my work – resizing artwork and logos from clients to drop into renders etc, but are damn hard to find reliable alternatives to.
What gets my goat is living in Australia to buy my CAD software here costs 2x what it does in the UK or US because the local distributor has an exclusive contract and adds value with local content – I kid you not it’s laughable stuff and probably worth an extra $100. So I didn’t pirate the software as I don’t agree with stealing something that makes you money, but I did violate my EULA by buying it in the UK.
As far as the other software goes -the rendering software C4D used to be modular – core package + add what you need, very sensible now I am limited to 4 distinct levels of which I’d have to by the most expensive in order to have access to one or two key features.
The Adobe products situation is the really tricky one – massively expensive but probably worth every penny to graphics pros, why can’t people like me who need a fraction of it’s tools for a fraction of the time not have a subscription cloud based service where I can access the software on a per use basis, if my usage ramps up enough I’ll by the whole thing as it will make more economical sense.
Every package I use is readily available for ilegal download and use, if I was an amateur I probably would play with pirate versions, as a professional who gets payed for my services which make money for other people, I don’t agree with not paying for tools that help me earn a living, however I also believe in charging fairly for the services I provide and not putting off potential customers by overcharging or charging for things they didn’t ask for or need.
Simplistic I know, but maybe the way forward is a more useage based approach not a traditional ownership model.
@Matt: On Adobe, there are now cloud-based subs for CS, on a month-by-month basis. Depending on platform and requirements, you may also find there are good enough alternatives for relatively basic usage. For example, Acorn on the Mac is perfectly good for basic UI, resizing, and so on, and it costs $51.99 in Australia (via the MAS).
Thanks Craig, I was totally unaware that CS had this solution I will look into it. I have looked at Acorn, GIMP etc best one I’ve found is Pixelmator whch looks fantastic, unfortunately their initial release of version 2.0 to run under Lion seems to have some big issues, once they’re cleared up it’s shaping up to be an extremely capable and cheap photoshop replacement.
Any way massively off topic for this thread so apologies all and thanks again Craig.