There may be an upside to illegal file sharing: The Institute for Information Law in the Netherlands reports that the average downloader buys more DVDs, music, and games than people who never download. Illegal downloaders represent 45 percent of consumers who purchase content legally, the institute recently reported.
The Institute estimates some 4.7 million Dutch Internet users 15 years and older downloaded hacked and pirated DVDs, games, and music in the last 12 months. This would imply a staggering 25 percent of the Dutch population (from the 2008 figure of 16.5 million) who view illegal downloading and sharing as socially acceptable, even as they're also legally acquiring content in parallel.
The report also said that it appeared many are unclear about the potentially illegal nature of such downloads. Most thought that downloading copyrighted music and movies is okay for personal use, but thought that downloading games was possibly illegal. In the case of the many Dutch operated peer-to-peer (P2P) networks now mostly based on USENET, such rip-offs are often not only downloaded, but the material is then automatically made available to others.
Of course, what the report did not cover is much of the "Warez" are often associated with organized cyber crime. The Netherlands has now become one of major centers for hosting rip-offs, scams, and other cyber crime. The key Dutch host for badness was until recently Ecatel, especially after McColo went down. Several border gateway protocol (BGP) peers have suspended agreements with Ecatel over the high volume of spam bots and malware it was hosting.
Ecatel's been supplanted in bad hosting by LeaseWeb in Amsterdam. In a recent case in an Amsterdam court, LeaseWeb was ordered to take down sites that list Bit Torrent/edonkey files. This followed international pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and The Business Software Alliance (BSA) -- however USENET groups have now proved a useful alternative.
Apart from the Warez (copyrighted works traded in violation of copyright law) and related cybercrime, this whole issue comes down to a personal and ethical decision for all of us. Since the film, music, and software industries are pressuring ISPs to disclose Warez users -- i.e., the illegal downloaders -- many are unsure just how proper (or legally dubious) their online activities really are. To sort this out, see which one of these completely unscientific profiles best describes your personal Warez ethics:
A. All file sharing is wrong. You never know what tracking trojans, viruses, or malware can also be encrypted and hidden within the file, using modern steganography (the art of covered or hidden writing).
B. I download freeware, shareware, and media files where the Website says I can. I never use USENET and, of course, spend a couple of hours reading all the Creative Commons, licenses, copyright, and terms-of-use notices first.
C. I've reformed. Now that many ISPs are reporting such details to MPAA, IFPI, etc., and there's larger possibility of prosecution, it's too risky.
D. I outsmart the online police by using Tor as a personal proxy. However, I did not know many Tor nodes internationally are now actually operated by governmental agencies and anti-piracy organizations, just to monitor my downloading activity.
E. I am Dutch -- it is my constitutional right. There is no chance of personal prosecution, and anyway, all copyrighted property is theft, according to Karl Marx.
So how did you rate? Confused? Well, you can legally download the full 142-page report here from The Institute for Information Law. But it may not help much -- it's only available in Dutch. Maybe there's a pirated translation program somewhere on BitTorrent that can help.
— Jart Armin, Editor of RBNexploit.com, a watch blog on the infamous RBN (Russian Business
Network), and HostExploit.com
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Looking for excuses may not fit well with everyone. A crime is a crime, no matter who it is... although I do understand that a person that can't afford it doesn't represent a revenue loss, since they would not consume that product legally but it's just wrong.
People who pay and pirate the rest are better than tose who pirate all !!! Right ? there are many people that may afford content cost but they won't but , they prefer to pirate it , that's what's ashame , but people who pirate content because they can't afford the cost for me that's not a probleme , but pirate cannot be honest .
I agree, NetFlix' streaming service is pretty nice. The few times I tried it, it worked pretty well. I did it with my laptop but I know they have something with Xbox so I could have tried that as well.
I would expect illegal international sharing to be rising, but even in the US? I think there are a lot of people switching to legal services. Wouldn't iTunes, etc be bankrupt if not?
It has to be on the increase. Bandwidth is cheap, storage is cheap, legitimate media is expensive, and it is in a transitional phase (DVD -> BD). I, for one, have no intention of replacing my thousands of DVDs with BDs. Yet, I don't really want to buy new movies on DVD. And since I only have one BD player in my house, I don't really want to buy new movies in BD, either. uPNP and DLNA are such amazing technologies, and media companies don't sell media in a unit that's appropriate to a media server.
Although I have to give pips to ROKU and NetFlix. They might have come up with the "pirate killer" product. My friend has the setup and I very nearly feel that I've wasted my effort collecting and converting video for a media server.
Arriving a little late to the discussion, I understand how technically, piracy is not theft as you are just making a copy and the original is left intact but really? maybe copyright infringement doesn't scare anyone and they had to use theft (next up: murder).
Are there any numbers about piracy and whether it has reduced or increased, at least in the US?
You're correct about caveat emptor translating literally to "buyer beware." I see it as basically the same expression as a "sucker born every minute." Both sayings are meant to excuse a vendor for any sales tactic, while blaming the buyer when he doesn't get what he paid for.
As for taste, I see your point and agree. Largely, anyway. If a musician is not willing to make music that everyone likes, that musician can hardly expect everyone to pay for that music. Seems that a buyer should have some way of sizing up a thing before the money is spent.
That, of course, ignores the fact that many products are deceptively marketed. I had a conversation with a friend-of-a-friend of mine, who was in a band that signed with a major label. For various reasons, the deal soured, putting him in severe debt. It may have been bitterness, but he claimed that his band had put together almost a full album of great songs. He further claimed that his recording label wouldn't publish them on one CD... They made the group perform some "filler tracks" that they purchased, with the intention of spreading "their good stuff" over several albums -- one song at a time.
I've never accepted this story at face value, but it gnaws at me... the frequently reinforced idea that corporations are actively sabotaging products to milk consumers of more money and less flexibility. Of course, the implication is that you would have to buy all of the CDs and burn your own mix CD to actually get a collection of this group's songs. Perhaps, if I dare say it... buy one of the three CDs, and pirate the other two, in order to get the songs that were meant to be on one CD to begin with.
I forgot about the whole caveat emptor thang: unless my Latin has all escaped me, it roughly translates to let the buyer beware. In the case of product liability, it has been overproven by case law not to be a defense.
But what about matters of taste? I'll only download a pirated copy of a CD or DVD to see if I like it, and then buy a copy if I do is the same as sneaking into a theater to see if a play or movie is good, promising to buy a ticket later if it is. There are other ways to decide if we want to buy a piece of entertainment--like critics, buyer reviews, and the like.
One person's music is another's loud crap also comes to mind. What is my obligation to produce a piece of entertainment that all will enjoy? I recently purchase a double CD of a band I have enjoyed for years. Either they changed a lot, or I changed a lot--I don't really enjoy it at all. Was it worth the money this time? Nope, at least for me; but it had been every other time. Caveat emptor, baby.
I really appreciate your willingness to clarify and make your points in this discussion I ultimately believe that the discussion on topics like this cause new thinking to occur on some long-standing issues like this one.
I shouldn't have been so flip about the amounts "lost" to piracy, without citing at least a few backing facts. With the global market place for "entertainment/media" at about $138B in 2007, and expected to be over $168B in 2012 (according to BusinessWire), even 1% of revenue lost to pirating would be over a billion dollars, and this is before the global software market numbers are brought to bear. Remember that not all piraters (pirates, I suppose) purchase what they like afterwards--they just keep what they have.
As for the legal discussions--quite a bit of thinking has gone into the issues surrounding intellectual property and the licenses and rights associated with it, not the least of which concerns piracy and other theft of IP. Most companies take the same approach with IP that they do with real property and actively pursue any infringements including thefts of all kinds. It is an entire specialty of law, and grows out of defense of all property rights by infringement, encroachment, embezzlement, burglary, and piracy all as taking a property owners exclusive use to the enjoyment of the property. To really cross-tie discussions, have a look at the Wikipedia article on property.
When I look up and interpret and compare the definitions of property, personal property, intellectual property, piracy, and theft--I don't see where you take your point from about piracy of IP and theft. They seem to take their root from the same common law base. There seems to me to be a direct correlation to me, in fact.
Maybe I've spent way too much time with the IP attorneys. But you can count on this: the choices of the words criminal and theft were very intentional by me in these posts.
I have agreed that piracy is a crime. I've also agreed that it is unethical, although I don't think the ethics are intuitive -- they're somewhat artificial. We aren't disagreeing on whether its right or wrong. I'm not arguing over whether money is lost to piracy (although billions is almost certainly a gross exaggeration -- I would never have paid for many of the items that I've pirated. And I DO buy almost every item that I pirate which is worth using).
I am disagreeing with your mis-use of the word "theft." Piracy is not theft. It doesn't fit the definition of theft. Intuitively it's nothing like theft. I'm sure that the RIAA, MPAA, and SIIA are willing to publish a thousand documents saying that they're the same thing. But that's just a Public Relations game; there are no rules against them misusing words, misrepresenting facts, or flat-out lying to the public. The SIIA could just as easily say that Piracy is a form of sabotage or vandalism. They could say that it's rape, or slavery, or murder. Any writer can justify such emotive comparisons with semantics.
I can't imagine that someone has seriously thought about the similarities and dis-similarities between an act of media piracy and an act of theft and concluded that they are the same (or even similar). They're totally unrelated crimes. They should be treated as unrelated crimes.
BTW... "caveat emptor" is hardly an ethical defense for shoddy products. We have the same saying in English: "there's a sucker born every second." Latin makes it a little less vulgar, but the intent is just as nefarious.
What the heck. SIIA, albeit a very interested party has this to say about piracy:
"Theft is an unfortunate problem that every industry confronts in some form, whether burglary, robbery, counterfeiting, shoplifting, embezzlement or others. Businesses that rely on copyright to protect their products and services - such as software companies, publishers and other information providers - are no different. Copyright is a form of property and copyright infringement is theft. "Infringement" means unauthorized use of material protected by copyright, patent or trademark law. Blatant infringement is also often referred to as "piracy". "
"When someone infringes a copyright, the copyright holder effectively is deprived of income-either directly or indirectly-that could be put to use to develop new or better content. Every year the content industries lose millions - if not billions - of dollars to copyright infringement, depriving the public of new creative works, costing industry jobs and hurting the economic growth of this country. These consequences would be substantially limited if users took just a little time to understand and respect the law and the cumulative adverse effect of their actions. "
Indirect income loss doesn't just mean they didn't get the revenue from the filched copy you have on your hard drive--it can also mean the market worth of limited supply of an item as a business tactic.
While a single copy theft is just petty theft, the loss to the industry is huge, estimated in the billions of dollars in the US alone. It isn't just an ethical issue either, it is a criminal act under federal and international law.
If the law is the issue, hire a good firm and build a precedent-setting case. in the mean time, you are a criminal when you copy (fair use restrictions excepted), distribute, sell, or use pirated IP.
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