Don't beat them, join them.

[bladespark]

Eric Flint, Baen author and manager of their free library, explains what happens when you stop trying to fight piracy.

An interesting read. I recommend it highly. Admittedly the facts in this case apply to authors, not to singers, but I have this sneaking suspicion that the results of such an experiment with music may well be not entirely dissimilar to the experiment performed here with books.

Comments

[graydown.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for linking to that. A friend of mine is quite shrill about "piracy is theft! piracy is theft!" My first impulse was to try to get him to read that essay.

On second thought, I'll just print it out and hit him with it repeatedly. :D

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

An excellent idea.

And piracy may be theft. Maybe. But if it is, who are you stealing from, exactly?

[graydown.livejournal.com]

I know! "Piracy is theft" leads to so many logical difficulties, such as...

I borrow a CD from the public library. Not theft, says my shrill friend. I rip it to my computer and return the CD to the library. Piracy! Theft! Says my friend. Ok, but then I decide that I don't like that CD, and delete it. Not theft... but... grimace, wibble.

I think his brain nearly went 'splode. I don't even want to know what would happen if I told him that I haven't bought Firefly on DVD because he loaned them to me. =^.^=

[rigger.livejournal.com]

I find it amusing that the end of the essay talks about digital music and napster. Seems a bit prophetic doesn't it?

[kaura-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

I do note that the experience between reading a physical book and its digital equivalent is worlds apart and not to be underestimated. You can't as intuitively bookmark a digital book, after all- much to my dismay during my constant rereadings of Charles Stross's "Accelerando." In fact, the ease of use of a bound, paper medium's pretty much convinced me to get the physical version of the book this week.

Music, however, admittedly has a slightly different problem. The era of CD-quality MP3s does make piracy more of a factor for that slice of the entertainment industry- and frankly, the feel of a small MP3 player is same or superior to that of a bulky CD player anyhow. iTunes has gone a very, very, very long way towards fighting against piracy merely by being more convenient to download with a negligible cost- but free is still free when it comes to music, and it's not as if iPods can only play Apple-encrypted files.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Did you read the article from Apple about ipods, piracy, and music sales? Apple is not making its money off of selling songs. Not really. http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ Apple itunes are only a tiny fraction of the songs being played on ipods, most are ripped off of CDs or outright pirated. Apple isn't fighting piracy. Apple doesn't give a fig about piracy.

The thing I see is that whether piracy costs companies revenue or not, piracy cannot be stopped, and attempts to fight it are often costing more than they're saving. If you can't stop a thing, fighting it tooth and nail is a losing strategy. What the winning strategy for the music industry may be I'm not sure, but their current course isn't it.

[silveradept]

I would suggest that the winning strategy for the music companies is to admit that piracy happens. Once they can admit that, they could find out why piracy happens, and adjust their tactics to try and get people to buy who would otherwise continue to pirate. Which might mean making the prices of their media lower, or trusting that people who borrow media from a friend will then go out and buy it if they like it enough and the price is right.

Insisting that piracy and sharing is bad only creates bad juju for them.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

Take myself. I pirate music. (Whoops, should I be saying that? Ah well, they only prosecute 2% or so of "pirates" from what I hear.) I download music on a fairly regular basis. Based upon what I download, I decide what artists I like. And then, when I'm at the store, and looking over CDs, I will, of course, buy CDs containing music by artists I like. Without the piracy, I would never actually buy any music at all, because I wouldn't want to risk getting a CD full of crap by buying one by somebody I don't know. Simple facts here. I don't listen to the radio, so I can't learn new artists that way. Instead, I download. And honestly at least half, if not more, of the music I download gets deleted, because it is crap.

I would be willing to bet that my pattern is fairly typical. That the music industry isn't "losing" sales when folks like me pirate, because we'd never buy the stuff in the first place! It is, instead, gaining sales. Admittedly I download a lot more than I buy. I have 10 gigs of music on this computer, and probably 20% of it was bought. But if I didn't pirate I'd have... hrm. I'd have the Mormon Tabernacle Choir stuff still, because my dad is in it, and the Irish stuff, and a bunch of random weird CDs I've been given, but I think I've bought maybe... three mainstream CDs that I hadn't pirated something by that artist first? (And regretted two of those, they turned out to have one good song and otherwise sucked.) So were it not for piracy, I'd have not even a tenth of that, and most of that MoTab, which has their own label.

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

I note that Apple has just announced that they'd like record companies to give up on DRM. Which is, admittedly, probably intended as a strike against Microsoft's overly lovey-dovey feelings for DRM, but still is significant.

There's also the fact that most people who download music (if I'm any indication) have bought CDs (and gone to concerts, which is actually better for the artist than album sales) on the back of downloaded music. I bought all of Tori Amos' albums after downloading tons of MP3s (including concert recordings).
I also have digital copies of music which I haven't bought the CDs for. This is because the value of the music in question is below the price I'm required to pay for it. Thus, I would have never bought that music in the first place (in addition, much of this is in the form of title themes to movies, some of which I own on DVD. Hence, I already own a medium with containing the music itself).
This is, of course, ignoring the free music whic makes up the majority of my digital music collection.

So, the Music Industry has, in fact, made no losses, and some net profit from my downloading of music for no cost.

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you're aware of this, but it used to be legal to offer full copies of computer games for free on the cover of computer game magazines (obviously, with the assent of the game publisher). All the evidence suggested that, especially with low-selling games, this actually improved sales of both game and magazine.

The UK anti-game piracy body, in collaboration with the UK anti-copyright theft body basically made it illegal.

The history of evidence that free copies is good is therefore quite long - although it's lovely to have more recent evidence with actual figures!