Market place piracy protection ?

[Luke]

I completely agree with James. Piracy is linked directly to excessively expensive and inconvenient mechanisms of distribution. Once you get to a point where online purchases are smooth, frictionless and affordable relative to the value provided, the problem goes away.

[himmelhorse]

Luke,

I do not really know what you are smoking but it would be great if you could share it with us.  (Tongue in cheek and no offence meant)

However, I would like to say that "smoothness of the buying process and affordability" has VERY little to do with the problem. 

If people and or governments offer something for free (ie Theft/piracy or Government welfare), most people will fall overthemselves to take advantage of it. I have yet to see a Government who offer welfare, being told that this is not necessary. The opposite actually occurs where these schemes are rorted by some but no one says "no thank you"  

People are constantly being caught shoplifting for tiny and or inexpensive items.  I have no idea of the physcology of this nor why people are motivated in this endeavour, but it is happening all the time. Maybe it is the adrenaline rush but it sure is happening.

I also have no idea, why some are calling this "normal behaviour"  It is, in fact, theft and a criminal act, and as such, it is definitely NOT normal and nor should it be accepted. However these and similar comments, simply reinforce the "human nature" factor.

Also making a process to ensure it is harder to steal software may well deter software theft, but is is also going to annoy the >:L()*OT%YUO out of the honest people who simply want to seamlessly buy a product and enjoy it.

I do not want to go into what the solution is, but again, any solution is, and always will be, bypassed by the dishonest people among us.

Regards

Tony

[TravelRunner404]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

Piracy is linked directly to excessively expensive and inconvenient mechanisms of distribution.

My Mom used to buy a dress before Easter, hide the tags and return it after church that Sunday bc we were too poor. I guess she was a criminal by definition.

I used to work for a small music label in 2004 right after college, and oh man, was piracy the topic of the day. In general the label and industry accepted there are 3 types of people. Those who will always bootleg, those who will buy the 99 cent song but rarely don’t have a pirated song somewhere and those who do it right and spend above and beyond (collectors items, apparel, etc.). Everyone was scared of piracy and they spent lots of money on consultants who came in said, let them steal your music, you make more money in the long run.
 

Don’t know if that’s true for Maroon 5 and Nickleback in that day. Of course, pirating and selling mixed CDs would be an issue but “thieves” and “pirates” who stole the music were harmless and generally better for us when you saw the whole picture. A few artists like Jason Marz have even said their careers relied on people downloading their music. It broke up the big labels, no one knew what to do, and it created opportunities.
 

Some people cry about it and pretend they are a saint in life. Cast stones and call them harsh names. Others treat it as a business problem to be solved and do what they can.  Every business gets stiffed.  Bad checks, bad credit cards, returns, knock offs, IP theft, unpaid invoices, plagiarism, etc. It’s the way it goes. My company has over $100k of unpaid bills since 2012, and yeah, suing a bunch of people just makes me a jerk so we don’t. Besides only lawyers make money when you do that. I do what I can to protect AR and make more money.

 

 

Edited July 23, 2020 by TravelRunner404

[Luke]

7 minutes ago, himmelhorse said:

I do not really know what you are smoking but it would be great if you could share it with us.  (Tongue in cheek and no offence meant)

Nothing but the sweet smoke of my own research and observations.

I have quite the collection of MP3 songs. The percentage that was paid for started at 100% (ripping my CDs) then declined precipitously around 2000 and now is inching back up. In the late 1990s I contemplated what it would take to put together a compilation of 30 or so songs from my youth; it would have been several hundred dollars and collecting compilation albums, then ripping them and encoding them. In short, there wasn't a distribution model that was affordable and gave me what I wanted at a fair price, so AudioGalaxy was fired up and two hours later I had everything.

Nowadays, when my kids want music they wouldn't dream of asking me to download it (or doing it themselves) even when I do make them pay for the music they buy. The convenience, quality control (proper volume levels) and the ability to purchase and download just what they want, selectively add and remove it from their devices make it worth the price and they insist on it, for entirely practical (not moral reasons).

Same thing with movies. Why would I spend hours tracking down and downloading something with no guarantee of the results (the audio track is in Russian....? !@#*&!@*#&) when I can simply pay $2.99 or $3.99 to Apple to rent the movie for 24 hours? Done. I'll pay for convenience and predictability. The only thing I download nowadays are foreign shows whose licensing prevents streaming or other availability in the US.

AVSIM is curious whenever the topic turns to copyright violation because it ignites a moralistic streak that I (who view things through an economic lens) find somewhat curious. People by and large want to do the right thing (and they do, if you let them) and most corporations being the amoral entities that they are tolerate significant amounts of piracy to establish market share and grow sales (and crack down later). There is a long history of this.

By and large, people can be divided into two groups - those who are more upset when someone doesn't get something that they are entitled to, and those who are more upset when someone receives something that they are not entitled to. I suspect it has strong predictive properties when it comes to politics as well, but I won't go there. 🙂

Cheers!

[himmelhorse]

Luke,

A great response.

I also have to admit that in some cases, I may well have done exactly the same.  However, none of this makes it legal. and that is my point ... this is what I mean by "human nature"  With enough effort, we can justify (righty or wrongly) most of our actions throughout life and this is what defeats the best intentions of anyone who is trying to prevent theft and or piracy.

I cannot imagine, in my wildest dreams, a situation where "piracy" (indeed ALL, or even some, criminal activity/s) will be stamped out, but this is not to say that the effort should not be made.  Better people than myself will eventually come up with a temporary solution.  I stress again, the word "temporary" 

Speaking of doom and gloom though, may be it is time for another flood to "temporarily" sort out our problems LOL

Regards

Tony

 

[HiFlyer]

From my experience it's all about providing whatever you are selling at a price people are willing to pay.

When books were cheap(er) I went to the store and purchased them 3 and 4 at a time.

As they got more and more expensive, I purchased less and less, went to the library more, borrowed from friends, and discovered clandestine book sites on the web.

When things like Amazon Prime became available, allowing you to pay a set monthly fee for access to zillions of books, then the need for anything else went away.

The same is true for the various movie and streaming services such as Netflix and HULU, and is becoming true for the new game streaming services like GAMEPASS that will shortly be hosting MSFS2020 and hundreds of other games for a set fee.

There is a service, VIVEPORT now doing the same for VR games.

If you want to understand why piracy might be dropping, look at that as a factor.

Edited July 24, 2020 by HiFlyer

[Luke]

1 hour ago, himmelhorse said:

I also have to admit that in some cases, I may well have done exactly the same.  However, none of this makes it legal. and that is my point ...

I didn't make any claims about its legality - only that as convenient consumer-friendly choices have appeared, piracy in my ecosystem (my family and those I know) has decreased significantly. I wouldn't be surprised if overall music sales (in terms of volume) has gone up.

I would also suggest that there are several concepts in play here - what is legal, what is moral, and what is criminal. There's a Venn diagram of the three and there are definitely different areas of intersection. I've violated plenty of software licenses, and while that was not legal, it was probably moral and certainly not criminal.

Cheers!

[himmelhorse]

Luke,

I am not trying to start a war here.  I am not condemning you, nor am I condoning, nor am I attempting to justify what you, myself and many others have done. My comments, whilst in  response to you, are general in nature and definitely not personal.  

If violating software licenses is not legal, and it IS not legal, it cannot be moral, and it certainly, however justifiable it is in our own minds, therefore is criminal. 

It appears to me that if and when piracy is committed by whomever, the normal practice is to keep quiet about it.  The majority of people following this practice do, in fact keep quiet about it and beause of that we will probably never know the full extent of it.  This is not a justification for the inital or ongoing theft by individuals and never will be. It is also not a reason for piracy to be accepted as normal or an accepted practice.

Regardless of my thoughts, this conversation is not going to change much in the final analysis for reasons that I have previously mentioned.

Regards

Tony

[Luke]

28 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Steal something because it's inconvenient to insert a DVD/BD/CD and adjust the volume? 

No, it's inconvenient to buy $300 of stuff I don't want to get $40 of the stuff I do. Fortunately people with better business sense saw the light and changed their business model, and things (unsurprisingly) got better and the vast majority of digital downloads are entirely legal today.

 

30 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I wouldn't consider artists/musicians exactly "corporate" culture ... 95% of the musicians in this world are below poverty or working a day job at McDonalds to survive (very very few make it). Theft is NOT about being moralistic ... its about basic survival (sad that you can't appreciate that) ... someone works extremely hard in order to earn money which they use to buy food and shelter (basics of life and living not really a moral concept) ... someone steals that work so that person no longer has money to buy food and shelter ... that's not a "moralistic" debate

Years ago I posted a link here to an essay called "Piracy is a form of Progressive Taxation", and the general thrust was that for most starving artists, their biggest problem was not piracy, but exposure. I expect if you look at statistics on what content gets pirated, there's a pretty linear relationship with sales and popularity. Most starving artists I know are more than happy to give away their content, encourage people to record and pass things along because they realize that their problem isn't people downloading their content, it's a lack of people knowing about it and liking it enough to even consider downloading it!

It's no different than Microsoft vs. Novell 25 years ago. Novell had an excellent (for the time) copy protection scheme making it very, very difficult to setup a NetWare server at home to fool around and work on. NT Server, on the other hand, had no copy protection and you just needed to clone the install disks and CD and off you went. Microsoft understood that they were never going to sell a $500 operating system for home use, but in a few years there were thousands of us completely familiar with NT Server and next to no one kept up with Netware (even their 2-user license was so cheap and chintzy to be of little value). Within 5 years Netware had gone from over 90% of the market to next to zero.

My point is not to make a moral argument pro or con piracy. It is simply to illustrate that the question is more nuanced than your hyperbolic view, and that in several cases the so-called "victims" of piracy have a compelling and rational economic reason to encourage it. That makes it an interesting question to study, and I am a curious person.

39 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

It's theft and hence why theft is a criminal activity.

And this is just wrong. Copyright violation is like trespass, it can be civil and it can be criminal - and it depends a great deal.

It's also important to note that it's very different from theft of a tangible asset which deprives everyone of its use. IP theft doesn't do that - at most it deprives someone of revenue and even that is a stretch in certain cases, especially when the product is no longer for sale. That gets suspiciously close to the "someone got something they didn't deserve!" issue I pointed out earlier.

[Luke]

12 minutes ago, himmelhorse said:

If violating software licenses is not legal, and it IS not legal, it cannot be moral, and it certainly, however justifiable it is in our own minds, therefore is criminal. 

I do not wish to start a war either. It is clear we will not agree on licensing, but I do want to take note of this comment of yours.

The fact that something is contrary to the law does not ipso facto make it immoral or criminal. If I park at a parking meter and pay for two hours, if I am delayed by five minutes and the meter expires, I can get a ticket. Parking at an expired meter is clearly contrary to the law and therefore illegal, but it is not criminal. Whether it is moral (and whether my two hours of paid parking balances out my five minutes, etc. etc.) is a discussion best had over a few beers and more than a few hours.

I also happen to live in a jurisdiction where until a few years ago it was both illegal and criminal for me to marry a black or asian woman, and until even fewer years ago it was illegal (but not criminal) for me to marry another man. Were those acts immoral then? Did they become moral when the laws changed, or were they always moral? More interesting questions which if nothing else suggest that the three are not as linked as you would believe.

Cheers!

[HighBypass]

15 hours ago, TravelRunner404 said:

My Mom used to buy a dress before Easter, hide the tags and return it after church that Sunday bc we were too poor.

 

13 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

..but I don't understand the connection between being poor and stealing products that are for entertainment ... I could understand perhaps stealing food to survive, but for entertainment?...

Rob mentioned the word I was going to use in my reply:- "entertainment" .

My opinion is that TravelRunner's mother did what she did because of pride and self esteem as seen from her peers. Many people like to put on their "Sunday best" to go to church, kind of a tradition as it were. It shouldn't really matter (without getting into a religious discussion), but I suspect (my assumption) that her peers might well have looked down on her for turning up in the same, old dress, even if it was well looked after and clean. She was doing what she did for pride, and perhaps misguided self-esteem, not for entertaiment.

Now, pirating something just because you desire to be entertained by it is wrong. I'm no saint in that department - I had a twin tape deck hifi system as a teenager (I believe they were quite popular back in the day... ) and even hooked up a VHS recorder and a Betamax recorder to transfer rented movies...

Even though it was for personal use, rather than me trying to sell 50 bootleg copies at a local market, it was still wrong.

Funny - with the twin cassettes - I cannot recall ever making a tape from a bootleg - I used to borrow original tapes (and vinyl albums) from my friends and vice versa; I'd bought an original or my friends had. Granted, there was only one purchase and not two, still wrong, and all for entertainment..

[RXP]

1 hour ago, HighBypass said:

Many people like to put on their "Sunday best" to go to church, kind of a tradition as it were. It shouldn't really matter (without getting into a religious discussion), but I suspect (my assumption) that her peers might well have looked down on her for turning up in the same, old dress, even if it was well looked after and clean. She was doing what she did for pride,

Hi, I won't be debating the piracy question, but I can't help being distracted with this assertion. In some religions, Pride is a deadly sin isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins#Pride

Maybe this means people put on their Sunday best to have something to confess about while they are there, otherwise maybe there isn't any religious reason going to the church besides showing off.

Whether being religious or not, I find it quite puzzling anyway I read it. 🙃

Edited July 24, 2020 by RXP

[HighBypass]

Jean-Luc - correct. However, there's no denying that people sometimes expect other people "to take pride in their appearance" especially if there's peer pressure to do so. My assumption is that there would have been such pressure to look presentable, though perhaps it may have been the lady's own perception (her imagination).

[RXP]

[off topic]

Mark, please let me assure you I was not trying to single you out at all and that I'm understanding the idea you've expressed above as you'd expect it to be understood. Rest assured also I'm not feeling offended at all and I hope you, or anyone believing in god, are not taking my comment to be any form of offending comment about anyone's right to believe in whatever one's want to believe in (be it god, santa clauss, or flat earth).

Maybe the example about this old lady is not the best example justifying the author's idea in the first place after all.

[back to original topic]

 

Edited July 24, 2020 by RXP

[HighBypass]

As far as I'm concerned - I definitely do not take any offence to your comments. Far from it. This was just an interesting little side-debate from the main topic.