this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Not really. Most people who "pirate" games or media wouldn't have paid for them anyway.
As Gabe Newell said (and demonstrated with Steam), "piracy" is a service problem.
Give people an affordable and more convenient way of accessing said games or media (Steam, Spotify before it got enshittified, Netflix before it got enshittified and the market got fragmented beyond any reasonable usability), and we'll happily stop "pirating".
If anything, "piracy" increases profits. Neil Gaiman compared it to word of mouth, or sharing your copy of a book with a friend: people in markets his books had trouble reaching (again, a service problem) "pirated" his books, liked them, and shared them with others... increasing his sales in said markets (people liked his work enough to try to find the books and buy them, and many who would have never heard of him became paying fans).
"Piracy" is free marketing (of course, this doesn't work if your product isn't worth its price, but bad products not earning money is a good way to improve overall quality), not theft. And without all the inconveniences of paid marketing. And often it's a symptom that the way you're selling your content is too inconvenient or overpriced for at least a fraction of your potential consumers, and thus needs to be fixed or improved (either voluntarily or through regulation).
You haven't disputed my description in any way.
In fact, it seems like you agree but you're just spending a lot of effort defending the act of piracy.
You're saying "piracy" subverts the means for a producer to profit off their product.
I'm saying the exact opposite: that it not only doesn't do that, but in fact almost certainly increases said profits (and linking references to support said position).
And I'm absolutely not defending "piracy". It shouldn't exist, as its existence is a symptom of serious issues within the market. And getting rid of it is simple: just provide an affordable and more convenient alternative. Valve did it. Netflix and Spotify did it, for a while.
But, if said alternative doesn't exist, "piracy" will happen, and it happening, while definitely a worse situation than said convenient and affordable option existing, will be more beneficial to both society and content producers than the absence of both.
You are suggesting that piracy eventually leads to profit. That's not a definition of piracy.
I am saying piracy is obtaining a digital product in an unauthorised manner to avoid paying for the product.
I am ambivalent to piracy. I think it's a common factor and it is up to content producers to combat it. I am familiar with the studies you've linked, but that's not the topic I'm discussing.
Provided the product is something people want, yeah. If not, at the very least it won't decrease profit. As I said it's free marketing. Sharing. Word of mouth. Trying before you buy.
No, it's not, correct. I don't know why you think I was attempting to define it, but to be clear I was replying to this rethoric question of yours, and disputing your implicit assertion that it subverts the means for a producer to profit off of a product (which it evidently doesn't):
(This is the end of the previous paragraph; just putting this here because otherwise, at least in my client, the two quotes back to back look like they might be confusing to read; this probably is, too, but hopefully not as much.)
No, piracy is the practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea. Of course dictionaries also include, at this point, definitions like (from Oxford's) "the unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work" (which is clearly wrong, as it would include things that no one refers to as "piracy", like plagiarism or copyright infringement) or yours (also wrong; that would be corporate espionage and sabotage; you might have been trying to say "obtaining a copy of a digital product..."), due to the concerted malicious efforts over several decades by IP lobbies to attack such a fundamental aspect of culture and of human nature as sharing (which is what is being attacked when the word "piracy" is used in this context) by labelling it with the same word as a particularly horrible crime.
That's horrible, tragic, and sad. Regardless of whether you're using the correct definition or the malicious one.
Sure, if by that you mean provide an affordable and more convenient alternative.
Though I'd argue that given that most of them (with exceptios such as Valve, which is doing an excellent work combating it, judging by the amount of unplayed games in the stereotypical Steam library) seem to prefer to make their customers' experience worse (to the point of installing malware on their computers) such alternatives should, at this point, be forced through customer protection regulations.
I wasn't replying to whatever topic you were discussing (and at this point I neither remember what it was, nor care to), as I thought was evident by quoting a specific part of it I was replying to said specific part, to wit, your implicit (and clearly incorrect) assertion that "piracy" negatively affects profits.
Then for some reason you started talking about definitions, and here we are. 🤷♂️