Marsden is Here

Or, what we believe is wrong.

I've personally matured through several mindsets with regard to piracy (and things called piracy, like format shifting) over the years. I never understood 'because you could' though, which seems to be approach many take.

Actually being able to pay for things, or in the past having been able to pay for things, makes piracy, at least for me, a 'more wrong' option.

But why don't people fear getting caught? Because the size of any significant penalty compared to the value of what they've taken is ridiculous? Because they know cost of enforcement outweighs the value of what they've taken? What is the value of content?

Here is a tangentially relate read on how content + internet breaks the traditional economic model (http://blog.braintraffic.com/2009/09/the-value-of-content-part-1-adam-smith-never-expected-this/)

The internet has made content piracy trivial, but in recent years also removed any business case for it.

There have always been forgers & bootleggers, people for whom the risk of being caught was outweighed by the profit to be made from copying and selling a painting or a cassette or a dvd, and people who were willing to pay the cheaper price knowing they were getting a copy.

For music etc now the owner of the content can compete directly with the bootleggers on price (effectively negligible) - and if both are available and you are willing to pay for it at practically free why wouldn't you get the real thing?

The price you can charge has plummeted, but the potential market has exploded (and that's something else more internet connectivity will only help improve), and the cost of replication/delivery has vanished.

People will be copying mp3s from their friends for years to come, because the internet is not yet so pervasive that it's easier to pull up a link to a store than copy a file to a pendrive. I don't have a problem with that, because that's one way artist recognition develops. It's when they go home and torrent the album, to use Rayne's example, rather than picking it up for <99c per track (not that we can do that in NZ yet, even with the current exchange rate).

For computer applications there are good free alternatives out there to most expensive packages - certainly any that you'd want for any non-business use. 10 years ago perhaps that wasn't so much the case. Not-so-geeky me used a pirated copy of Windows 2000 for years before I could afford the $$$ for an updated legit copy (my first computer came with a legit copy of '95). If I was geekier I would have been running Linux, but I never got my head around it. Today I'd be running Ubuntu instead.

I think part of the problem lies in the perception of digital products. When you have a book or a cd in front of you it is a tangible representation of the effort that went into producing it.You know you own something (unless it's software, in which case your licence could be revoked at any time, but that's another rant). As a physical reminder of the production and distribution processes it represents everybody who put time into the content, even when you're not using it.

With a file on a computer you hear/see/use the content, then it's out of sight, out of mind. You think about the artist, but everyone else is invisible. With software, you never even think about the people who wrote it.

That's all long and disjointed and may or may not have a point. I may have to turn it into a post or posts of it's own :)