If you don’t like reading long posts, here is a quick summary: I’m not saying piracy is good. In terms of gains vs risks, piracy makes more sense than purchasing for individuals. For the individual, piracy is purely a moral issue.
START OF POST:
With the release of Windows 7 today, I had a discussion with my friend about why it is important to purchase legal software and support the developer. While arguing with him that there is no good argument for piracy, I realized with a shock that there is no good argument against piracy either.
I invite your input on this controversial claim, but let’s leave morals out of the discussion for just one second and look at this purely in terms of personal gains vs personal risks.
Pro’s of piracy:
- You get software/media for free that would have cost you money otherwise or that you might not have been able to afford.
- If you pirate a product and it doesn’t work on your system, doesn’t work as you expected, or is of inferior quality then there is no loss to you.
- You get software/media that is not restricted or crippled by DRM and annoying splash screens/ads/anti-piracy announcements/menus that can’t be skipped.
- You can get access to software/media that is not available in your country at the time.
- There is almost no risk of being caught.
Con’s of piracy:
- Pirated software may be more difficult to update and could lead to vulnerabilities and malware infections.
- In the highly unlikely event that you are caught, you could face civil (not criminal) charges as long as you weren’t making money from it.
A brief look at the pro’s and con’s of obtaining media and software via file-sharing networks makes it clear that the piracy option delivers relatively massive gains for almost zero risk. Just in terms of capitalist financial theory, it doesn’t make sense for you to pay for software or media at all! What it boils down to is that if piracy is not an economic or legal issue, then the decision to pirate or not is entirely a moral issue.
Now I challenge you to make a single argument against piracy that is not in some way based on morals or ethics. For instance, you might point to the popular anti-piracy slogan “You wouldn’t steal a car”, but stealing a car is very different economically speaking. Morally, it is just as wrong to copy software as stealing a physical object, however stealing a physical object involves vastly more amounts of risk. The gains are still high, but the risk involved in stealing something becomes a much bigger factor than in the case of copying bits of data. So, again leaving morals out of it, stealing a car’s gain/risk ratio is just far lower than the gain/risk ratio for piracy and economically speaking the risk is just too high for most people to consider it. Also, stealing a car deprives somebody of their possession, but copying a CD still leaves the original owner with it to do with as he pleases.
You could say that piracy damages the economy, and thus influence us all adversely, but this is not necessarily true. The vast majority of entertainment and software that is purchased in South Africa is produced overseas. Every single sale of an international product sends money from home to another country and out of our economy thereby decreasing our GDP and contributing to a trade deficit.
Are you saying I should pirate?
No! What I’m saying is that piracy is morally wrong, but there’s no real non-moral argument against downloading a movie/music/game/software. There’s not really even a point to this post, other than it being a challenge for you to prove me wrong.
Support developers and creators of entertainment. They deserve it. Show your support by giving them your money and encouraging them to deliver more and better products. On the flip side, if you buy a movie and it sucks, or you spend a bunch of money on a game and it doesn’t deliver, or a R150 CD only has one good song, or Microsoft asks your R1500 for an OS that Vista should have been when you bought it, then where is your moral compensation for that? hmmm?
9 comments ↓
tldr but I pirate because:
I have no money for anything but studies
I hate capitalism
Commercial software developers have jobs and money. Why should I increase the gap between them and myself by giving them money I dont have?
I work hard too, I just dont get paid!
>> “Also, stealing a car deprives somebody of their possession, but copying a CD still leaves the original owner with it to do with as he pleases.”
You are depriving the owner of income he otherwise would have received from legal sales of his albums, and money is a possession just like any other tangible thing.
>> “You could say that piracy damages the economy, and thus influence us all adversely, but this is not necessarily true. The vast majority of entertainment and software that is purchased in South Africa is produced overseas.”
This is purely from South Africa’s point of view…what about pirates in America? They are putting a huge dent in their country’s GDP.
There is no 1:1 relationship between copying an album and a lost sale. It can be argued that only a small number of people who copy an album would have potentially purchased that album in the first place. Not only that, but a potential sale is only a potential income, it’s not money he already has that you are taking away from him. So if you look at it like that, copying an album may or may not (most likely not) deprive an owner of potential income. This is very far removed from the case where actual money is actually taken away from somebody as in the case of theft.
Since I am a South African living in South Africa the only point of view that concerns me is the South African one. The problem is that companies like Business Software Alliance and SAFACT makes claims of massive losses to the South African economy which is simply not true. From a South African perspective, a US product pirated in SA is actually beneficial to our economy.
I don’t think this is the correct way to tackle the dilemma. If you are listening to an artist’s music, the artist *should* be compensated for it. This is a real right, and the artist has an undisputed claim to the amounts receivable. Denying him this claim is synonomous to stealing actual money, and should thus be treated as theft. The fact that a download does not lead to a 1 for 1 increase in sale is irrelevant, because an artist earns money/royalties as the songs are listened, and not when the potential for sale arises.
From what I understand, the artists are paid royalties, and the excess profits goes to the ventures themselves. So if Musica loses out on 1 million album sales due to piracy, then they’re the ones bearing the loss (as well as the original artists).
I just spent 30 minutes typing out a reply and it got lost.
But the gist of it is that Musica does not directly lose money due to piracy. They buy their CDs from content distributors and operate on the fundamental principle of supply and demand. At the moment, the demand for music is declining as people are spending their entertainment budgets on more diverse avenues of entertainment. Piracy may also contribute to this decline in demand, but macro economic factors plays much larger roles, ie things like the recession. Musica as a business just has to match its supply, and to feel sad for them losing money would be the same as feeling sad for Apple losing money because people are buying Windows instead of OSX, it doesn’t make sense.
To say that you deny an artist his claim by pirating his music is to say that you deny his claim by not buying it either. In that case, every person on earth who does not buy an artist’s CD is responsible for him “losing” money. This is not the case. Denying somebody revenue and taking money from them is NOT synonymous, they are vastly different concepts. Just think about the case where a large number of people decide to boikot a certain product (and this has happened in the past). In this case, they are denying a company revenue and it’s a perfectly legal thing to do. If, however, these people decided to raid the offices of the same company and steal actual money, that would have been a different thing entirely, so I don’t think your claim that it should be treated as theft holds any water:
This isn’t a good analogy. Regardless of whether people buy Windows or any other operating system (freewares excluded), money is still being spent. Whereas if people turn to pirated copies, the money that would’ve been injected into the economy is no longer absorbed, which then leads to lower consumption, etc.
Obviously there are bigger players out there that affect the economy, but I’d like to draw attention to this:
You can’t start off by claiming that sale of international products leads to a trade deficit (which hints that this is a problem of a certain magnitude) and then carry on to say that these sales are insignificant in the grand scheme of things because other factors play a much bigger role in macroeconomic development.
Again, you’ve misunderstood my position. I’m not saying an artist has a claim to everyone who hasn’t bought his CD. I’m saying if someone *downloads and listens* to the songs, it is at that point whereby the artist’s claim to royalties arises. In other words, if you don’t download the songs or have no intention of ever listening to the songs, then the artist has no claim whatsoever. However, the minute you download the songs with the intention of listening to them, *then* you are required to compensate the artist.
I have to disagree, I do think my analogy holds up and I’ll defend my analogy by saying that your argument against it hangs on the assumption that money is NOT being spent when you pirate an operating system.
This is not something you can say for certain, in fact I’d go as far as to say that it would be a safe assumption that the money “saved” by pirating an operating system will eventually end up in the very same economy anyway, just through different channels. Like I said earlier, people have X amount of money, and when they decide to spend a part of their budget on other things, they can still obtain the products they cannot afford through illegal copying. So you’re going to have to take another swing at my analogy to debunk it I’m afraid
Well, you’ve caught me out. What you say is true and you’ve found a logical fallacy in my arguments, this one is yours.
I’m glad that you make this statement because it’s exactly what my post is about, and that is that piracy is a moral issue. The point is that my post is to challenge you to convince me why I should be required to compensate content distributors in cases where there is a fundamental difference in the price the content distributor feels is fair to ask, and what I feel is fair to pay?
Let me give you some solid examples that affect me personally so we don’t keep discussing hypothetical situations of which the scope is not clearly defined:
Case 1: Windows. After writing this post I have decided to purchase Windows 7 legally, but I still feel that MS owes me a major discount after I purchased Vista which was delivered late, bloated and with many promised features missing and considered by many to be a flop. I’ve decided to buy it because it is The Right Thing To Do (a moral decision), and it will only cost me a couple of months worth of saving up. However, there’s a lot of South Africans struggling far more with finances than I do and I don’t think the price MS asks them for an essential piece of software is fair.
Case 2: TV Series. I have absolutely no moral issue with “pirating” TV series because the terms on which our broadcasters are willing to deliver this content to me, and the terms that I demand are so vastly different. I want to be able to watch the latest episode of my favorite series on the day it is released. I want to be able to watch it where and when I want, and on whatever device I choose to view it on. I’m willing to pay for this, but I’m not willing to be ripped off for this. Since neither DSTV nor SABC are competent in delivering content to me, I do not feel bad at all about downloading the latest episode of House.
Case 3: Music. Even though I am a great fan of music, it is impossible for me to afford every single song that I love to listen to. It’s just too expensive, and attempting to purchase everything would mean I’d have to take out a number of loans and incur massive debts. What I do though, is buy the albums and merchandise of the artists that I listen to the most. I try to support the performer as much as I can, but I can only support so much. After that I have to decide whether I’ll do myself the injustice of simply not listening to music I enjoy, or to download it illegally. Unfortunately I just love my playlist too much to give it up.
Case 4: Movies. I’m actually quite opposed to piracy of movies because I feel the price my local cinema charges for a ticket (under R20) is completely fair. However, not all movies I want to watch ever make it to my cinema. Not only is it not possible for me to enjoy these movies when they are released, but now I have to wait months for a DVD release that will cost R400 and that I will watch only once. This is completely unacceptable for me and so if it’s impossible for me to view it in the theater, should I feel bad about getting a copy from a friend?
As you can see, each of these cases involve a moral decision. “I cannot afford product X, but I’d really like to have it. Since I cannot afford it, the owner is not losing anything if I do not buy it. Since the owner is not losing anything, why should I feel bad about obtaining a copy?”
Not necessarily. The rational behaviour would be to save the money. e.g. I have x amount set out for an OS. I obtain a pirated copy instead. The money can now be saved in the bank (which is outside the economic flow). Of course, not all people behave rationally. But that’s not to say *all* people behave irrationally. So if a certain percentage of people act rationally, then the amounts attributable to them would not wind back into the economy (not immediately anyways).
I would say that piracy is a legal issue as well as a moral issue. When we purchase a good, we are required to pay the seller in exchange for the good, not because we are morally required, but because we are legally obligated to do so.
Just because people can’t afford a certain product doesn’t give them the right to obtain illegal copies. What’s considered a ‘fair’ price is purely subjective. It is impossible to draw a well-defined line when it comes to fairness, which is why there are competition commissions to regulate certain (but not all) prices.
Which competition commissions do you refer to? Who should I write to when I feel I’m being treated unfairly?
When there is no fear of legal repercussion, legal obligation does not matter and it falls back to moral obligation.
Exactly, just because they can’t afford a certain product gives them no right to obtain an illegal copy, but it does make it much easier to justify it morally, especially since nothing is actually taken away from anybody. My argument is that the chance of getting caught is so slim that legal repercussions plays almost no role in the decision to pirate. It’s purely a moral decision.
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