Some personal thoughts on piracy (warning - long post)

[superluser]

I can sincerely say that I have ALWAYS bought the things which made a lasting impression on me, even if I have pirated them before; I have a whole 2m long rack of original CD's, movies and games at home to prove it. As an example: I downloaded and finished the whole Warcraft 3 saga TWICE and after that I was still impressed enough to go buy the Warcraft 3 Warchest set, which today sits on that rack, still unpacked and in original wrapping.

Wrong again - it still depends on the individual person and his/her perception of worth.
My first incentive to actually buy something i have already downloaded is having the gratification that I can call myself a sensible pirate, the knowledge that I actually helped the artist and a fuzzy feeling each time I look at the original boxes on my rack.

I wanted to make a point about this the last time it came up. We have essentially decoupled the cost of a digital product from the product itself. You can get just about any digital product for free. Once we decouple that, we essentially have two prices: cost of the product (in material) and cost for supporting the people who made it.

For physical products, the first price is obvious: it's the price that will prevent the clerk from giving it to you. The second price is rather intangible and involves paying the clerk, paying the other people at the store, paying the truck driver to deliver it, paying the money for the driver's gas, paying some guy in the Northern Marianas for making it, paying the people who designed it...

For digital products, the first price is all easily ignored. You don't often think of the price for your internet connection, the price for the electricity, the price for the hosting service or any other less tangibles, but the second price is obvious: the price for the people to make your product.

People perceive these two prices to be out of sync for digital goods, so they simply look at the first price and decide what they should pay based on it (and the price they decide is zero dollars). The model for paying for things needs to be changed if we are going to have any success in digital goods. The way to do this, based on my own personal experience, and based on statements like the one by Nospheratu, is to appeal to patronage.

I will gladly pay for something if I know that it will support some artists whose work I want to see more of, but on the same side of the coin, I will (and have) refused to pay people for work that I don't want to see more of.

An example of the former is Penumbra and Amnesia. I downloaded the Penumbra Overture demo and loved it. I had to buy it to support you guys. Piracy was not an option for me at that point. Then, I preordered Amnesia because I wanted to support Frictional again. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I would rather have paid the full price as a preorder to be reimbursed after the release to make sure that you guys got enough money to make it.

An example of the latter would be the Animatrix. I hated the Matrix series (yes, even the first film), which I thought was just a poorly-executed, all flash and no substance exposition of some ideas that had been better explored in earlier films like Dark City and had been done to death in novels. Later, I found out that one of my favorite artists, Peter Chung, had done one of the bits in the Animatrix. I couldn't exactly pay for the lousy thing, because they wouldn't take it as an endorsement of Peter Chung, they'd take it as a vote for more things from the Wachowski bros., which would probably mean more Matrix-like crap. So I pirated it to make sure I didn't pay for it--not because I wanted it for free, but because I wanted to express my opinion of the work. Then, the Wachowski bros. made V for Vendetta, which was good enough that I was able to revise my opinion and rent a copy (see, happy ending; I paid for it in the end).

Whoever figures out how to make a new model for digital content will be a very rich man, but it cannot be the same model as the physical concept model. Physical concepts have a very strong physical rights management that makes a lot of natural sense in a way that digital rights management never can, and figuring out a way to make the digital price for patronage seem as natural and obvious as the physical price for ownage is pretty much the key to a successful digital economy. If we can figure out how to make that happen.