Brain Drippings

There’s a lot in the news currently about piracy, what with the attempts to pass two Internet-destorying bills (SOPA and PIPA) in the name of saving hundreds of billions of dollars in lost sales and three-quarter of a million jobs. Those numbers, provided by the media shills trying to get these draconian bills passed, are completely made up and have no basis in fact. They could have easily said eleventy trillion dollars and 800 billion jobs and been just as accurate.

The simple truth of the matter is that media piracy has been around for more than a hundred years (Edison complained about it back in the days of wax rolls), and while Lars Ulrich has fond memories of his media piracy days, swapping tapes in his friends basements, when the piracy became digital suddenly that became bad. It’s especially ironic that Metallica, a group that built its fan-base almost exclusively on the backs of tape-trading, concert bootlegs, and other piracy activities should have become the frontmen for the music industry’s war on the Internet. A little known facts that during this time the RIAA also tried to shut-down the used record market, claiming that reselling a record was “exactly the same as theft” and also tried to make it illegal for people to digitize their own copies of CDs. This is the industry we were dealing with, thugs and bullies, liars and cheats. Basically, the scum of the earth.

The music business in the late 1990′s a was corporate machine that was designed to fleece as much money as possible from the consumer. Despite astonishingly lower costs on producing CDs than the costs of the newly defunct vinyl records, media companies continued to charge a premium of about 50% for CDs over records. Additionally, the records that did come out more and more had recycled content and a couple of new songs, or were records with only one or two songs anyone wanted, but you had to spend the $18 for the entire disc.

Of course, a lot of the music we already owned on vinyl and we simply wanted to be able to listen to it on our computers where we worked all day. Short of patching your stereo into your computer and recording at 1:1 speed, it was simply more convenient to download another copy of the music you wanted. Lost sales here? None.

But that’s all in the past, the distant mist-shrouded days of legends and dragons in Internet time, where are we now?

First of all, piracy is much easier than it’s ever been. Bandwidth is higher so downloads are faster and it is trivial to find pretty much any song, album, of movie. And yet, the iTunes Music Store is selling billions (yes, billions) of songs. How can this be? Well, the prices are reasonable ($10 for a ‘CD’ or $1 a song instead of the $15-20 more valuable 1995 dollars a CD cost), the convenience is stellar, and for the most part people are not feeling forced to re-buy their existing collections.

Now, let’s look at another segment of the piracy world that I have some personal experience with, the world of Japanese Animation known as anime. Back in the 80s and 90s there was a lot of piracy of anime productions from Japan. There were entire networks of people across the country who traded VHS tapes of shows like Urusei Yatsura. Now, this was a little bit different because the Anime was simply not available in the US at all, or it was un-dubbed and un-subtitled imports, or it was adulterated garbage like RoboTech (a mashed up collection of garbage ripped from Macross and mashed up with a couple of other Anime series.) Robotech was terrible, but only if you’d seen real anime. For people who’d never seen any, Robotech was brilliant. But I digress.

So in the 80s and 90s we had people who ‘smuggled’ VHS tapes from Japan, edited them to add subtitle tracks, and then produced a few hundred master tapes that went out across the country (and even in to Europe). These tapes would be recorded over an over onto new tapes and so the distribution network spread. These people were spending many hours, sometimes hundred or thousands of hours, translating the Japanese audio into English text and using their Amigas and Video Toasters to create professional grade subtitles. Why? Because they were fans.

And what these fans did was built a fan base in the US for anime. Sure, Robodreck helped, but by the time it came along there was already a healthy pirate distribution network and a burgeoning fan base. Today there is a healthy industry in the US for English-language Japanese animation and Manga, all thanks to ‘pirates’.

A few years ago in the UK a new band put out their first album. The album was leaked onto the Internet months before its scheduled release and quickly became the most downloaded album in the UK. Millions of downloads. There were so many downloads that the label rushed the production and put the CD out early to try to prevent a total melt-down of sales. Sound like a rep ice for disaster, doesn’t it. Except that the Arctic Monkeys “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” was the highest selling debut album in UK history. It sold more albums in one day than the number 2-20 albums combined.

The Content Cartel likes to claim that every pirated movie, game, album, or TV show is a ‘lost sale’. A moment’s thought will show that this is absurd, but another moments thought will reveal that it is a self-serving ploy to inflate the problem. The Arctic Monkeys success shows us that piracy is a vehicle for publicity, and it is a far more effective vehicle than adverts or even radio play.

For a more recent example, let’s look at Louis CK, an American comedian who recently decided to conduct an experiment and release a new concert video on the Internet, at very low cost, and without any of the draconian DRM that most media comes with. How’d he do? Over a quarter million sales, despite the video being available the instant he put it up for pirates to download and share.

And one final example.  A few years ago a new game came out for Windows that had such draconian and absurd DRM built-in to it that for many people, including a good friend of mine, it was impossible to install the game on their computers. This happens a lot more often than you think, and the clever people at the Content Cartels have made it legally impossible to return software. My friend was out $60 and had a game that he simply could not use. At least not until he got a cracked version of it from the Internet with all that DRM removed. I know many people who have had to download a movie they owned on DVD or BluRay because their new player won’t play it, or the DRM is preventing it from displaying on their computer screen because they have the wrong cable (I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried).

So, what’s the truth about Piracy? It’s complicated, but here’s a few of them:

1. Pirated content is almost never a lost sale. Either it would never have been bought, it has already been bought, or it cannot be bought.
2. Piracy increases exposure. Think of it as digital word of mouth. Increased exposure translates to increased sales.
3. Pirates tend to be fans of what they pirate. When you alienate your fans, you cost yourself money. Ask Lars Ulrich if he regrets some of his comments during the whole Napster ordeal. He does, because he and his band lost a lot of their core fans once they started referring to them as thieves. I know several ex-Metallica fans personally, including one who has made a point of sharing the entire Metallica discography online for more than 10 years now; before that he went to 15-20 Metallica concerts every time they toured.
4. People don’t like jumping through hoops to access their property. Games that force you to keep a DVD in the drive to play them are going to pirated much more than games with no DRM at all simply because some people like to travel without their entire collection of install media, but also because when you piss people off, they tend to stay pissed off. I found the security measures on Valve’s Steam product so offensive that I refuse to buy any Valve/Steam product, ever. I found SecureROM so contemptible that I stopped buying Sony products as well (I recently bought a new TV and never even looked at the Sony offerings). This is besides the fact that the Steam installer under Windows is essentially a root-kit that gives Valve/Steam complete unfettered access to your entire computer and allows installed games to also install root-kits on your machine.

There aren’t hundred of thousands of jobs lost to piracy, and there’s not billions of dollars in lost sales to piracy, these numbers are fabrications. There’s no evidence that media piracy has ever costs anyone a job, in fact.

In closing, take a look at this image:

I know a lot of people with small kids who routinely ‘pirate’ the DVDs they bought for their kids simply to get around all of this sort of crap. One complained that the unskippable advertising on the DVD was actually longer than the actual content, with over 20 minutes of previews, trailers, and ads for a video that was less than 20 minutes long.