On the one extreme, many groups that track such numbers (including my own company) cite an 80%-90% piracy rate for games. Despite my own pressures I still find my kids watching full pirated movies and TV episodes on YouTube and then complaining when they are eventually taken down. On the other end, even the simple use of caching on servers is being contested as copyright violations (since they are preserving copies and redistributing without express permission); indexing and cataloging by search engines is being challenged repeatedly in countries around the world, almost all the courts finding it is a legal use of IP. These are generally not express allowances made by law, but are exceptions carved out by courts on a case-by-case basis.

Firstly, I don't pirate games. Just to make that clear before the rest of this post.

Now, I am very much in the pirate because products are not made reasonably available to me camp. I pirate some tv shows and stream NFL games online not because I don't want to pay for them, but because it is either impossible to acquire them legally for me, or because it is absurd and I have moral objections to the way you get them legally.

For a more specific example, I pirate Top Gear because it's the only show I want to watch on the BBC, and I would have to get an absurd cable package just to watch that one show. I would be fine paying to watch individual episodes or giving ad impressions all day for it, but thus that option is not available where I live.

The other example of NFL games is just that I only really care about the Packers. Living on the east coast of canada means I either have to get another absurd cable package, only be able to watch some packer games, go to a bar to watch (I do this sometimes, but I don't really like doing it every week), or pay something like $200 for just the regular season for all teams. As I just want to watch the Packers, which I would be fine paying a smaller price for, I cannot justify the huge investment into just regular season games, so I'm not giving them any money.

That said, I am totally open to paying either through ad impressions or literally paying once the price and availability is reasonable, but that's something content providers need to adapt to before I'll stop.

[quote name='Promit' timestamp='1324858054' post='4897360']
2) You cannot simultaneously preserve Internet freedom and stop piracy (or other far more reprehensible things like child pornography) in any effective way. Inappropriate measures may be the only effective ones.

Likewise, you cannot perserve personal freedom (and indeed, democracy itself) and prevent all crime (and even then). This is nothing new. We still have murder. People have realized this ages ago and have come to grips with reality. Yet somehow the internet is different?
[/quote]

Real world law only works when the population is generally law-abiding.

When the masses ignore the law several things happen: Police struggle to arrest the accused due to the sheer number and difficulty in catching them. The AG office and other legal gropus don't have the resources to prosecute (which results in 'catch-and-release' problems). If they do make it to court it is less likely to be convicted; I recall reading that during the Prohibition in the US around 80% of the alcohol trials had a jury nullification. (That's where the jury refuses to find the person guilty even if there is enough evidence to convict). We have recently seen the same trend with marijuana violations not getting convicted, and with 3-strikes provisions where juries resist giving a third conviction even when the violation was blatant.

When enough people stop following the law the government and social institutions that support the law lose their power.



COPPA is a great example of this.

COPPA has two sides, the most obvious is the service provider: Businesses are still largely compliant and block anyone who claims they are under age 13 and does not have the right paperwork. Paperwork is costly and time consuming so many sites take minimal steps to block anyone who doesn't claim to be age 13 or older. The suits are rare, but periodically there is one like Xanga facing nearly $1M in penalties. They follow the law, the law is enforced, and that side is generally satisfied.

COPPA has another side that is ignored: A few seconds on Google pulls up this research paper and others that claim for online pre-teens, 42% of online 12-year-olds report that they use social networks. Another report by Consumer Reports says 7.5 million kids under 13 have joined Facebook. That is in spite of Facebook's policy against it. ... That means EVERY ONE of those parents and children who were involved in getting their accounts are guilty of a federal misdemeanor.


So why don't we have roughly 10 million convictions from pre-teens on facebook? It is extremely easy to find them without help; law enforcement could subpoena their records and compare against other federal databases to turn up a long list of probable violators, so why don't they?


The answer is the same as to why legal attacks on piracy are ineffective. We see a handful of cases, yes. The ones that go through are usually against businesses and large groups. Most are fishing expeditions against individuals by media companies where they ask potential infringers to sign a document stating their guilt, but those that go to court are often quickly dismissed on technical reasons. SOPA and the laws similar to it all suffer the same fatal flaw of too many offenders and not enough resources.

When new copy-protection or anti-piracy laws are enacted they tend to hit the businesses and organizations --- look at Napster and Pirate Bay --- but the massive list of commonfolk offenders make hitting the other half of the equation virtually impossible.

An RF transceiver can be made out of 3-ish basic electronics building blocks. In extreme case, their crude counterparts can be home made. But powering it up so it transmits makes it an illegal device just about anywhere in the world. Illegal to the point of governments having specialized mobile equipment for tracking them.

Internet requires some of the most expensive construction projects involving either undersea cables, satellites, precision microwave dishes or underground cables. Needless to say, tens of billions are invested before first packet goes from point A to point B.

RF space has been regulated since forever. Original term pirate meant Pirate Radio Station.

In 10 years, internet will be locked down. But unlike RF, which has been controlled by governments, internet will be controlled by private corporations.

And it is quite possible that running a server will require a license and come with legal disclaimer, enforced by law.


The argument of freedom, innovation, economy - RF transmissions cannot be controlled yet they have been locked down tightly. Internet comes with controls built in today. Just change a config line, perhaps remotely and you're done - a country loses internet.

I think the two things that worry me most are the following:

1. The secondary liability stuff is a VERY VERY serious issue that needs to be handled very carefully. It could in theory shut down any forum, comment allowing blog, or any user generated content site/agregator. I really think this is very touchy and would prefer it not be in at all.

2. One thing Cnet brought up in an editor round table is that they are legislating before they have any solid data, just estimates. SOPA I believe calls for commisioning a study to gather unbiased data, but that should be done before any legislation should be made imo.

One of the numbers that nobody knows that is hugely important is the disparity between the claim that 80+% of content users pirate the product vs that 80% being missed sales. In realtiy a lot of the pirates either never would buy the product or pirate it because there is no trial version. A closer estimate of actual lost sales would be a huge indicator of how much legislation is needed and what actually needs to be legislated.

Similarly, the stuff valve's been saying about piracy shouldn't be discounted. There's a lot to be said for piracy being more about convenience and quality than money; quality in that you don't have to deal with drm or content that might not be localized in the case of what valve found in Russia.

Piracy is driven by a misunderstanding of an evolving business model and customer dissatisfaction -- at a certain price point, mostly the traditional 60$ for AAA titles, people don't want just the product, they want the service to go with it. Sure it's not viable for many types of games, for various reasons, to provide constant updates and other assorted that would make it implausible or tedious to keep up with a pirated version (look at Minecraft, a game which updated so often that pirating it just became silly) but it is what the costumer wants and they're right -- a 60$ game is, for the most part, not really worth its price.,

Article related: http://wii.ign.com/articles/121/1215619p1.html

I read this this morning and I think it's kind of stupid. Here is my take on a recipe for piracy.

1. Have a desirable product.
2. Implement measures that force your markets to be separate more than they naturally are (region based DRM for example).
3. Only release the desirable product in specific markets.
4. Don't even hint at the product coming to a significant other market.

To do these for things and expect people not to pirate the game is kind of silly imo. The writer of the article says that people who pirate need to support the game, but ignores that the developer isn't supporting the game the way they need to in the first place.