Piracy is not theft, and not really bad either

I've seen quite a bit of "piracy is terrible, you're stealing and breaking the law" videos/posts as of late. Since I don't have anything better to do while banned from /g/ I thought I'd give my 2 cent on piracy.


First of all, I believe the whole "piracy is stealing" idea is completely untrue and wrong. Pirating does not remove anything from the original owner. If I steal something, I physically remove something from the owner, such as money or any other physical object (for example a figure, a laptop or a keyboard). When someone pirates something, the person makes an identical copy of the file, while leaving the original intact.
Markus "Notch" Persson (creator of Minecraft) once said:
"If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world".
And that sums it up pretty well. So no, pirating and stealing are two different things.

Another thing which often gets brought up is that each instance of pirating is a lost sale. This is not true at all. A lot of people pirate for example games in order to try them out. A lot of games these days puts heavy emphasis on the multiplayer aspect of the game, which is something you in most cases can not experience on a pirated copy. So a lot of people pirate the game, tries the single player and then maybe buys the game. If they aren't satisfied with the game then they won't buy it. If they weren't satisfied with it then they wouldn't have bought the game to begin with (because of for example bad reviews).
One of the first pirated games I played were Quake 3 Arena. My neighbor gave it to me on a CD he had burned for me. This was back in the early 2000. Without him, I most likely would not have gotten into Quake. Him pirating the game indirectly made me buy all Quake games when they were released on Steam.

As for movies/TV shows/comics, piracy can actually help boost sales. I like anime a lot, and most of the shows I watch are never even released outside of Japan. The only way for me to see these shows are through pirating fansubs. So I got 2 alternatives. I could do nothing, or I could pirate the shows. The first alternative does not do anything at all. The second one not only gives me the ability to enjoy the shows that I like, but it can also encourage the studio/company behind the show to release their products outside of Japan. If they see that people outside of Japan are interested in their show, they might release it in those countries.
There is a manga called "It's not my fault that I am not popular" which quite recently became very popular because of piracy. The manga is about a very socially awkward girl who tries to become more popular. It has been heavily pirated even since someone decided to translate it into English, but it is still selling very well. It even managed to get to number 10 in sales one week, beating series like Rozen Maiden, Naruto and Fullmetal Alchemist. The author himself have recognized that he owns part of his success to the people over at 4chan who mostly pirates the comic.

Michael Moore does not agree with the copyright laws either. He thinks that people who pirate his movies helps spreading his message, and I really agree with him. Borrowing a DVD from a friend is not illegal, yet you get access to the content without paying anything, nor does Michael Moore get any money. It's basically the same as pirating the movie.

The whole "we need to fire people because of piracy" is just plan wrong. Even if piracy had a big negative effect, it wouldn't cause for example sound engineers for the movie to get fired. The worst thing which could happen is that the actor/actress won't get paid 12.5 million dollars per movie. Maybe just 10 million dollars per movie. The fact is that both total gross revenues have increased and box office receipts have DOUBLED in the last 15 years. From 52,8 billion dollars (1995) to a whipping 104.4 billion dollars (2009). Not only that, but executives gets paid more than ever as well.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker said in a commentary that:
"South Park was one of the first shows to get downloaded on the Internet, and be alike all over the place and everyone getting it for free over the Internet. And it didn't hurt us at all. It actually helped us so much."
They also bring up the whole "piracy is not always a lost sale" which I talked about earlier.


Neil Gaiman, the English author who has won multiple awards for his creations, is pro-piracy. He made an experiment about piracy. He took the book "American Gods", a book which has won multiple awards such as a Hugo Award, and he put it up for free for a whole month. Guess what happened when his book was available for free, on the publisher's website. The sales on his other books went up by 300%.
Here is a video he made afterwards which mentions this experiment, and a few other experiments he has made.
Here is a video where he talks about this experiment, as well as a few other observations he has made.
Gaiman on Copyright Piracy and the Web


What he means is that when someone pirates his books, it's like if someone borrowed a copy of his book, which is basically free publicity, and can lead to more sales.

When it comes to music, piracy is not really that bad either. Alex Day is pretty famous on Youtube. He makes music and put the songs up on his website for free. Yet his single "Forever Your" managed to get to number 4 on the UK Singles Chart and it sold over 50,000 copies. Why did people buy the song when they could listen to it for free? Because they wanted to support Alex, and they liked the song. Putting the song out for free gave him a huge amount of publicity.

Here is a quote about his thoughts on piracy (full article can be found here):
"If any musicians, videomakers or creators of other types of media preach about how vital it is to legally purchase things and support their field of industry, I deem them narrow-minded. File-sharing is just a product of technological change. You can either fight it, or adapt. And I think fighting it is a bit pointless.

So my way of adapting is that I stream all my music on my website for free. If you want to own it, I’d appreciate you paying for it (and I put a lot of effort into making physical products that I hope you consider worth the money you’d be spending on them), but if you want a ‘try before you buy’, you can listen online as much as you like and decide whether you would like to invest in owning the media or supporting me so you can hear more."

Joss Stone, a singer, will agree with me that piracy isn't that bad. She said in an interview that:
"I think that we should share. It's OK. If one person buys it it's totally cool. Burn it up, share it with your friends, I don't care. I don't care how you hear it as long as you hear it. As long as you come to my show and have a great time listening to the live show it is totally cool."
The full interview can be found here.
I think her answer is great, and I fully agree with her point. Not only that, but I believe that piracy could potentially increase the amount of money she makes. If more people hear her music, more people will go to her live performance. I went to Sonisphere 2 years ago and listened to bands such as Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Slayer, Mötley Crüe, Alice Cooper (to name a few), and I have never bought a CD from any of these bands. I went there because I wanted to see them perform live. I had listened to lots of their songs before, in some instances not legally. However, the point is that if I had not heard their songs before, I wouldn't have gone there.


So my point is that piracy is not a bad thing. It can often help people not only spread their message, but it can also help boost sales. It is not destroying the industry, nor do people lose jobs because of it. At least not in the same way as companies try to picture it.

The real problem is that companies are trying to stick with an outdated business model. The Internet is a great tool for making money, but a lot of companies still try use the old and outdated things like TV and DVD sales, as their only income source. I am not saying that they should put out their stuff on the web for free, but they could do things such as launch services such as Nexflix outside of the US. I believe that one of the big reasons people pirate is not to avoid having to pay for it. It's because it is so convenient to pirate. Instead of having to drive to the store, stand in a queue, drive back home, watch an hour of "don't pirate this", look through the commercials even though you've already paid for the movie, and then watch the movie, you can just press a download button and then watch the movie maybe an hour or so later. Without commercials, without annoying "don't pirate this" messages, in great quality, and you can easy watch it on other devices as well.

Steam is a great example of an awesome service. It gives you access to a huge library of games. It is easy to pay for things, the prices are usually great, and it is very convenient. You get all your games saved in a single place, you can login to your account on multiple computers. Hell, you can even install Steam on an external hard drive, take it with you and then plug it into a random computer and play your games from there.
I am not a huge "gamer". I play a few games once in a while, but I have bought 25 games on Steam, and I only started using it maybe 2 years ago. In these last two years I have bought about as many games as I've done during the other 17 years of my life.

So yeah. If any big company is reading this, here is my suggestion to you. If you want to stop piracy (even though it's not IMO a big deal) then make services which are better and more convenient than pirating. Steam, Netflix, Spotify are great examples. Try to replicate what they do and you won't have as much problems with piracy, and the customers will be happier as well.