Piracy is piracy, theft is theft
February 13th, 2007Piracy is theft: now and then, when I watch a DVD, instead of the typical legal warning text, I have to watch a complete video sequence involving people stealing cars, purses, and other objects, and the ending shot is someone downloading something from the internet, with a vibrating slogan in large red letters: Piracy is Theft. I say no. Piracy is piracy, theft is theft, and it is not up to Sony Music or Warner Home Video to brainwash me into redefining what theft is.
What is theft?
I believe that ever since the concept of property has germinated inside the narrow conscience of a pervert Homo not-so-Sapiens (germination accurately captured by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes), theft has always been two inseparable things: the victim is deprived of something he/she has worked for, while the thief obtains something without having worked for it. Prejudice for the victim, benefit for the thief. Which one is more important?
I frankly doubt we would consider theft the same way today if historically it had not deprived the victims of their property. If people could still use their stuff after it had been stolen, I doubt they would even contemplate filing a complaint with the police.
- Officer, someone stole my Ferrari last night.
- Right. What model was it?
- F430 2006. Yellow.
- License plate number?
- 4361 GHT 12
- Do you have a picture of it?
- No, but if you have a digital camera, it’s parked right outside.
- Huh? What do you mean? You still have it?
- Er yes, fortunately.
- What’s the problem, then?
- Well, I sort of resent the idea that someone is now driving the same car without having spent a ridiculously huge amount of hard-earned tax evasion money on it.
And for a complete proof ad absurdum, here is the reciprocal situation:
- Officer, someone stole my idea.
- Right. I need you to describe it as accurately as you can.
- It was sort of brilliant, with a very sharp insight. It was about energy savings.
- This is a bit vague; can you tell us what it was exactly?
- I wish I could, but I do not have it anymore; you see, the thief took all of it.
- You would not have a picture of it, by any chance?
- I am afraid not. It was quite new, you see.
- I understand. ‘Brilliant, Sharp Insight, Energy Savings’. It’s noted. We’ll contact you if we find something matching that description. I would not get my hopes too high if I were you.
What is piracy?
With digitally-stored intellectual material, I can duplicate a movie, a piece of code, a song, without the owner missing it. To me, it is the same thing as stealing: I get something I did not work for. But to the victim, unlike theft, piracy results in no prejudice, at least no immediate prejudice. Piracy is only one of two things theft is about, and probably the better half. As a matter of fact, where is the harm when I get something I did not work for? If a movie, a book, an idea can bring joy, enlightenment or epiphany to people, and if it costs nothing to make copies, then you’d agree the world would be a better place if we could all share it.
The inadequacy of the commercial model
The narrow-minded reply is that the people who worked for it need to be paid, and if we distribute free copies, they will not be paid, which is bad. I agree. The problem is that the commercial model in which we sell an object for a price is not valid anymore with digital material. It was adapted to selling socks, cars and bagels. It is always more difficult to bake two bagels than it is to bake one. This is not true anymore with intellectual ‘goods’, and the commercial model becomes totally counter-productive.
Let us take an example: Meteo-France, the French weather forecasting agency, has a premium online service where you can pay a small fee to get very accurate forecasts for local weather. Obviously, they do not run the computations as you click. All the data already exist. It is the same cost to show them to one person or to a million people. Maybe Meteo-France’s institutional funding is insufficient to keep this service running, hence the fee policy. But by using a commercial model, they very efficiently manage to stifle the value of their results: only a fraction of society benefits from the information, even if the work has already been done and could be shared at no extra cost. Sharing these results for free could save huge sums each day (think of the colds uncaught, the hairdos unruined, the barbecue parties unspoilt), and just a fraction of the value could very well fund the service.
Essentially, the right business model with digital/intellectual ‘goods’ is to fund them collectively, and then distribute them freely. This is how we get the best value for the smallest cost. How about a Peter Jackson website where everybody can pay 3$ to fund his next movie? When there is enough money, the movie is made, and it would be public domain. Web2.0 has understood that there is a whole universe or brand-new business models we can invent. Sony Music and Warner Home Video have not.
Sadly enough, instead of working out a different model, the industry is trying to make us believe piracy is theft. They tickle our right-thinking protestant work ethics so that we agree everything has to be earned, and they flash the bright torch of the commercial model at our eyes so that we cannot see all the other models in the background and how inappropriate the commercial model is in comparison, at least for non-material objects. As we follow them down this path, we become old dried-up Scrooges, or worse.
The filthy hobbitses has stolen it from us. … Our preciouss, ours, ours, ours!!!!!
Read on
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Wow! What an amazing post. Thanks for articulating clearly the distinction between piracy and theft. I couldn’t quite see where you were going with the “stolen idea” quotes, but was converted upon reading the following:
“The problem is that the commercial model in which we sell an object for a price is not valid anymore with digital material. It was adapted to selling socks, cars and bagels. It is always more difficult to bake two bagels than it is to bake one. This is not true anymore with intellectual ‘goods’,…”
Did you read the recent news that Steve Jobs urged music companies to abandon DRM (Digital Rights Management)? The argument, which is sort of related to your post, was that music companies are using DRM not to control piracy, but to control sales and manipulate the market.
Lol at the Gollum quote. I would pay $3 in a heartbeat if I knew that it would help Peter Jackson to make The Hobbit. The news last month was that his deal with Newline had fallen through.
I’d even donate a hundred times 3$ for The Hobbit: it was the book that started me reading English literature. Somehow the big-bang of this blog.
What a wonderful job you’ve done. There can be no doubt now in anyone’s mind who reads this what the difference between piracy and theft is. Capitalism and consumerism are so interesting, aren’t they? It seems things are invented to sell all the time without anyone ever putting any thought into what the ideal selling model will be, and then they come up with ways to really rip off the public. When TV was first invented, people bought one, plugged it in, and they could watch everything that was available to watch in their local area. Now people not only have to buy the TV, but they also have to pay a fortune every month, if they want to watch everything that’s available on. Imagine buying a sofa and having to pay a monthly fee in order to sit on more than one cushion. I’m waiting for the day when surfing the web costs much more than a monthly fee (I’m sure that day is coming).
I am not so sure that day is coming. Have you ever tried pushing all the water to one end of the bath tub? Noticed how it seems to want to find every possible breach and opening to go the other way? The more the commercial world pushes, the more we lucid individuals will push back, and the Internet is the perfect meeting place for those who believe in non-commercial non-violent non-cooperation.
I so wish I were as idealistic as you are. I think I’ve spent too much time observing greedy, greedy people pursuing the “American dream.” But let’s hope I’m wrong, and you’re right.
Maybe there’s room enough for both of us to be right, but yes, I’d be happy to be more right than you. And I take the ‘idealistic’ epithet as a compliment.
As I remember reading in the good old Illuminati trilogy, “Property is theft!”
And as I wrote on walls during the Vietnam days, “No Government is Good Government.”
I guess I could find good arguments to explain why property cannot be theft, but I really like the formula anyway. As for the Vietnam days, I have a nostalgia about the slogans they (you?) used to come up with. We do not have those anymore. ‘Make love not war’ has been replaced with ‘Because I’m worth it’. Obviously all brilliant anti-war protesters turned into brilliant advertising copywriters.
But the best of all slogans still remains ‘Romanes eunt domus’.
Okay, I almost buy it. Until I start thinking about the band of musicians which is just starting out and have trouble making it without their day jobs. Is it right to download their performance without paying for it? Is it fair to copy it 25 times for your friends so they can hear it too? How is this neophyte band or musician supposed to make a living?
From what I read all around the internet, free copies and distribution is exactly what these new bands need. If I tell you: “I’ve come across a fabulous new band, do you want to hear their first album? It’s 10$”, I doubt you would take the risk. Whereas if it’s free, you give it a try, you love them, and next time they are on tour near your place, you’ll gladly pay 20$ to listen to them live on stage. My belief is that the internet offers an unprecedented medium for independent and small bands to get to be known without having to run the obstacle course of finding an agent and a label: they can concentrate on the music, and on the tours.
In my dreamworld, recorded music would be free, and musicians would earn their living by playing music in concerts, which is what music should be about, think of Irish fiddlers or even Mozart. And the commercial model is all right for concerts.
“How about a Peter Jackson website where everybody can pay 3$ to fund his next movie? When there is enough money, the movie is made”.
Hey, I think I’ve got a better idea! How about instead of $3, we donate $10 and instead of waiting a few years until they raise enough money to make the movie, they give you the movie as soon as you pay for it? Then, in something like 50 years time, it becomes public domain (I mean, we can wait that long, can’t we? LOLZORZ)!
This way, we get our movie upfront rather than in 15 years when enough money is made (or in some cases, never if enough money isn’t raised). Also, we’d be able to tell all our friends whether or not the movie was crap right then and there. I mean, I’d be pretty pissed if I donated $3, waited 6 years and by then Peter Jackson, who’d had a stroke and was now mentally retarded, made some piece of shit movie nobody wanted to see.
I also really like your ideas on how we should share all our books and movies around. People in the movie industry are all bums anyway and should get real jobs working in factories making cars (which can’t be reproduced for free yet), rather than doing stupid acting. Maybe the government could pay for all the movies to be made from the taxes it collects from our 15 hour days working at the coal mines? I’d sure like that world!
Nobody would force you to donate. But you’d get free access to the movie nonetheless.
If you wish to leave further comments on this site, I’d like you to turn your sarcasm down. You do not have to agree with what I write, and I have nothing against fair criticism when backed up by interesting arguments. The delete button is just one click away — you play fair, I play fair.
Firstly i`d like to say that it is a very interesting article…
If you wish to see a model of where that very film idea has already been put into use, check out http://www.starwreck.com/ the first films were released free of charge on the internet, and was in essence some friends having some fun. They have now produced a full length montion picture on the back of that, and despite the fact that the movie is free to wacth on the internet i have still bought the DVD for 2 main reasons, 1 i love what these guys have done and so wish to contribute to the cause as it were. and 2. i still wish to own a physical copy of the film (this has been leant to some friends without internet, and has genereated more sales than they would have got normally)
in contrast i have stopped using itunes who employ a DRM system to limit the number of machines you can listen to songs on, beceasue i am limited to only 5 machines, (i have in the house my laptop, my pc (which has two op-sys on it, both of which require a unique use of the DRM) and my girl friends pc, now you may say well thats only 4 uses so you should be alright, well my own pc crashed a while ago and i had to rebuild it, thus using up all my remaining liences`s and i can no longer lissen to music which i have bought and payed for, without using one of the other 2 machines. and since i am in the process of upgrading the hardware of my g/f`s machine this will leave me with only the laptop which i only really use out of the house.. how is that fair? i payed (in my opinion) over the odds for a single, but that is fine as i was having the convenience of getting the song more or less straight away without leaving the comfort of my home. only now to be unable to listen to any of the music i have bought from them!
I will rush to download starwreck as of tonight! Thanks for the tip. In return, I suggest http://www.elephantsdream.org/, which is entirely open-source, made from open-source software (not much of a plot, but stunning images).
As for DRM systems, I am getting fed up with my sony MP3 player, as it features a proprietary encoding that does not allow ‘drag and drop’ to copy music or podcasts from my computer: I have to go through sony’s buggy interface, for which there is no linux equivalent. I have to keep windows only for my music and I find this terribly annoying.
wow, just trawlling the web and it looks like someone else is in agreement:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
Well, Mr Jobs does not exactly say that music should be available to everyone for free. He only says that DRM does not work, but maybe that’s a good starting point in the recognition of the specificities of digital ‘goods’ in the marketplace.
[…] something is close to zero, applying a model that was invented to deal with scarcity is just nonsensical. Yet, it is what the French representatives are trying to do right now, by legislating clumsily […]
Best illustrated by the following tshirt found on Ebay.
http://search.ebay.ca/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=piracy+vs+theft
Thanks, I updated the article accordingly