The Piracy Problem

[jackofallgeeks]

This
really sums up the piracy problem, and it's solution, rather nicely. Piracy
springs up in the face of draconian limitations; they tell us what we can
and can not do, and we buck agasinst it. Someone begins to pirate. The
pirated product is more useful than the retail product in terms of price
and, in most cases, either quality or convenience based on what we aren't
allowed to do with the retail version. In response to piracy companies have
been making their products worse, adding in things like DRM which
further degrade the quality or convenience of the retail product -- and
presumably raining the cost, too. That's dumb. By adding on these
'anti-piracy' mechanisms they're just making the pirated copies that much
better.

If instead they worked to make their product comprable to the pirated
version... Let's be honest, if the only difference were price most people
would by it retail rather than get it for free just to have confidence that
they know what they're getting and to have recourse if they're wrong. And
if all a pirate can offer is the same product minus DRM, then removing the
DRM takes away all of his advantage. DRM is dumb.

Comments

[dikaiosunh.livejournal.com]

This argument doesn't seem to deal with the first-round emergence of things like Napster.

First, let me flag my ignorance - I have no idea how much of a bite Napster and similar things took out of record company profits. Enough to make them worried, apparently, but if it's really small, tell me I'm talking through my hat.

But... it seems like a significant number of folks (like me!) used Napster, solely because of the price point. Ripping a CD to mp3 was pretty easy, and mp3 players weren't around at the time, so the convenience aspect was more or less a wash - dling from Napster and burning to CD was pretty easy, but then so was going down to HMV and buying the CD. The difference was just the price - HMV couldn't compete with Napster's price of $0.00. And people used Napster not because CDs were restrictive - but just because it was cheaper.

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

So, I think Napster et al occupy a different problem space entirely; I wouldn't call what happened then piracy, per se.

That being said, CDs are restrictive -- one of the greatest changes that came about with digital music is the ability to get only the tracks you want. A big reason people flocked to Napster was because they only wanted a couple songs from a given album; the options were to buy the whole CD at whole-CD price, or get just the songs you wanted for free. (Also, why go out to the store if you can just download from home anyways? More convenient that way, which is part of my point.) At the time, you needed to purchace and burn CDs to enjoy those songs anywhere but your computer, but Napster beat the Industry in price and convenience, and any difference in quality was effectively negligable.

The argument isn't saying "price doesn't matter," but it is saying that there are other considerations. I was a big fan of Napster, but even at that if the choice had been Napster or iTunes, I would have gone iTunes. (And I hold that most people would have felt the same, if well-informed.) If the Industry had offered the convenience Napster did -- the ability to only purchace the songs I liked -- then they would have done a better job competing. (Not to mention that mp3 is a lossy format, and the Industry could have improved on the quality of digital offerings in many ways. Instead they just didn't want digital offering at all, they were too focussed on selling CDs.)

Beyond that, CD prices have long been considered extortionate. So it wasn't simply "pasying vs. free," it was "paying more than I feel this is worth vs. free." Napster did fill a need that the Industry wasn't addressing, and that's the point of the argument. Rather than fight piracy by limiting the value of their product with harsher restrictions (which only encourages piracy), the industry should fight piracy by catering to their customer's wants and needs and making their product more valuable.

This isn't even addressing the net benefit that can come from giving away music for free in order to drive sales of other things, like concert tickets or collector's merchandise (see NIN's Ghosts offerings), but that's another parallel argument.

I can't say how much Napster et al ate intio CD sales, but I'd argue it wasn't much, or at least not much more than the Industry was seeing already. My friends and I -- at the time the prime audience fotr most Industry music -- hadn't bought CDs for quite a while before Napster showed up because they were expensive and usually filled with fluff. I listened to a lot more radio back then. Napster just filled the void; CD sales were already falling under their own weight.