When
one hears about piracy nowadays, it isn’t about Jack Spa rrow or Captain Hook.
Piracy is when a product is used or reproduced without authorization from its
company. It is an issue that many companies face and wonder whether or not
actions should be taken to prevent it. Also, one has to wonder how much it
would affect companies that already have a high income of money from sales. I
believe that though piracy is bad, there are other methods that can be taken in
order to reduce unwanted piracy while increasing sales and monetary income.
How big of an issue is piracy?
Using
some stats from the Directors Guild of America site, it is shown that more
people have pirated each episode from the TV series Heroes than have actually watched it on TV (6.6mil to 5.9 mil).
Another statistic on the same site says that one million is the average number
of times Russian movies are downloaded from the Internet during the first week
in theaters. What can be taken from these values is that piracy is indeed a big
issue. And if anyone is like me, he or she can remember when kids used to talk
so much about torrenting - or downloading illegally - different videos and
songs online. Now the numbers show how much piracy is an by the amount of
people that are committing the action, but some other values include money that
could have been used for other services. These values don’t have as much
backing to them because the money doesn’t necessarily go in these areas. If
people decided to use the money that they would’ve used to get videos rather
than torrent them, it’s hard to say where it would’ve gone, if it was used at
all. Another thing to point out is how much piracy actually affects some of the
bigger companies. When we look at the music industry, many people earn billions
of dollars from album sales and nowadays we get digital sales, but having some
of their products get pirated might not actually harm them much. The
torrentfreak website (most likely biased towards torrenting), decides to look
at the different types of music format and how that’s affected sales, mainly
with a decrease in physical copy sales where digital copies end up selling
more. This is where man people blame piracy and attempt to say it is decreasing
the physical copy sales, which is not the case. (Anything else to input?)
Does piracy help promote games?
It
seems like a weird question to ask, but in this case is very valid. As found
about from a Kotaku blog, this game, Anodyne, was able to use piracy to their
advantage. A Torrent for the game would be put on the site, as well as a
donation button and links to pages like Steam Greenlight. This resulted in more
sales overall, more money earned overall for the company that created Anodyne,
meaning they earned more by promoting piracy than they did normally. It’s hard
to say whether this process might always work and one of the main cases if it’s
actually needed for some bigger companies that already earn enough. (Check if
there is anything more concrete that can be added)
How well do anti-piracy measures work?
Though for the most part it’s a lot of
speculation to whether or not anti-piracy methods are cost effective or not,
it’s shown that having anti-piracy methods compared to not having methods have
an equal amount of pirating. Anti-piracy can work to some extent, but how much
effort and how much it costs may not necessarily be worth it. What some video
game companies have taken to is being able to code a program in their game to
detect if the game was pirated and then to make the game substantially harder
once it was detected. Even in the well-known game Earthbound by Nintendo made it so you can still play the game
passed a warning screen, even though it was harder, and just before the end of
the game, it would freeze, crash, and delete the save data that you had for
that file. It should almost be up to the company to find a way to prevent
piracy for their own product, rather than having the government worry about
piracy.
Looking at the numbers:
When
looking at statistics for piracy, it’s clear the numbers are there. What isn’t
easily seen is how the numbers are actually depicted. In one go-gulf stat page
from 2011(http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/online-piracy/),
the stats are valid in terms of amount. When looking at a specific stat,
though, one can tell there is some error. For example: The “Piracy in Numbers”
portion of the page. The stats there show visits per day, minute, and year. One
flaw with this is that it doesn’t say if these views are unique or not, though
one can assume “53 billion visits/year” would mean that they aren’t unique
views. Another thing with this data is that the views don’t have a constant
rate at which they happened, meaning there could be peaks in the view count in
certain month in comparison to others. Another statistic to look at in this
area is the monetary values. Those numbers are a good example of how much is
lost from piracy. And though they are a significantly high numbers, one thing to
notice is that the first one is in reference to the music industry where sales
in general are already at high values (in comparison to another industry that
might have products sold at lower values, where if that much money was lost, it
would mean more sales were lost). In the end it can’t be said that all of these
stats have issues without looking at them in full detail. This site in
particular is more of a well-known group so the info is more reliable. Some
sites will be more biased than others or not depending on if they favor
anti-piracy or not.
Piracy and the Supreme Court
One
of the first cases brought before a jury that involved piracy was Capitol v.
Thomas. This trial found Jammie
Thomas-Rasset liable for copyright infringement for 24 songs and was ordered to
pay $222,000 in statutory damages. An error occurred in the jury instructions
and the trial was brought up again in 2009. This time, the trial awarded
Thomas-Rasset $1,920,000 in statutory damages, and then was lowered to $54,000.
The record labels this time refused to accept the reduced award, so a third
trial that was held only to determine damages was held in 2010 resulting in
$1.5 million against Thomas-Rasset. The trial went through one more change back
to $54,000 in 2011, and then was finally resolved on September 11, 2012 when
the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the District Court’s reduction and
reinstated the award to $222,000. This case was declined to be heard by the
Supreme Court, and thus resulted in this ordeal. Another similar case that
involved Joel Tennenbaum, another file-sharer, was turned down by the Supreme
Court. At the time of the beginning of the case, thousands of other lawsuits
were being made from the music industry and were resolved to around $3,500
apiece until Thomas-Rasset decided not to pay. In the end as well, after all of
the issues were resolved, Thomas-Rasset wasn’t able to pay the final amount of
money because she worked, had four kids, and her husband wasn’t working. After
looking at these two court cases, what has to be looked at now is how much
piracy needs to be paid attention to by the court system and if they do watch
it, how much they will charge people who go against the laws if in the first
place, they were pirating due to lack of money? One has to wonder if the amount
that these two people get charged is enough, too much, or if charging them will
stop any form of electronic piracy in general.
It’s
agreeable that piracy is bad. It is hurtful to the company no matter the amount
of money or product that is stolen, and if one wants a movie, game, or album to
continue on, they should support their company rather than hurt it. In the end,
it may just have to be up to the company itself whether or not they will
include anti-piracy methods or not, or whether they need them. Even if piracy
was prioritized out of the issues to solve, it would probably still last for a
very long time. Where we will have to look now are different approaches to
piracy, and the efficiency of said approaches.
Works
Cited
Kyle Nazario. “6 Hilarious Ways
Game Designers Are Screwing With Pirates” Cracked.Cracked,
Web. 5 Apr. 2013
Iain Thomson. “Supreme Court
silence seals Thomas-Rasset’s file sharing fate” The Register. The Register, Web. 14 Apr. 2013
Patricia Hernandez. “Embracing Piracy Is One Of The Best Decisions These Developers Have Made” Kotaku. Kotaku, Web. 1 Apr. 2013.
Patricia Hernandez. “Embracing Piracy Is One Of The Best Decisions These Developers Have Made” Kotaku. Kotaku, Web. 1 Apr. 2013.
Steve Karnowski. “Jammie
Thomas-Rasset Loses Supreme Court Appeal, Must Pay $222,000 For Illegal
Downloads” Huffington Post.
Huffington Post, Web. 15 Apr. 2013.
