Khross wrote:
What is Taly stealing? While I'm actually a big proponent of intellectual property rights, I want to know what Taly is stealing. She's not denying you money; she's not denying you market access; she's not even undercutting real demand for your product. So, what is Taly stealing? What theft occurs in this situation?
That's the hardest part to define of this entire argument. Does one movie/CD pirated = one sale lost? Absolutely not. (Even though this is what every MPAA/RIAA "total of sales lost through piracy" calculation uses). Are there people who pirated it that would've bought it if it was unavailable through piracy channels? Probably. Are there people that pirated it to listen/watch/play it, and then liked it and bought it? Probably. So are sales lost through piracy? If you look at it one way, yes. Are sales GAINED through the potential increased access to a larger audience and word of mouth? Also likely. It's almost impossible to determine, because there is very little solid data that can be presented that's not being manipulated by someone to prove their point.
The argument is also different for different levels of popularity. I believe 100% that there are indie artists who were having no success in the recording industry that made their records free for download through all available channels and increased sales. I don't believe this applies as much for major artists. People aren't pirating huge bands because they don't know who they are or who they sound like, they don't need to pirate the new Moby album to find out if they like Moby. So it might be cutting into legitimate sales on that side. You can't paint it all with the same brush (even though that's what the lobbyists want to do).
The moral argument is that someone somewhere worked hard and created something, and someone else took it without paying for it. Taly might not walk into a store and pick up a stack of blu-rays and walk out with them without paying, but she has the content from those discs on her drive without paying the content creators. Regardless of how you feel about copyright laws, the creator did not get money from that sale.
The other side of the moral argument is the "evil corporation" viewpoint, that the content creators, the musicians/editors/mastering technicians/producers/directors/writers have already been paid by the huge evil company by the time the product hits the market, therefore they've made their money for the content and the only people not getting paid are the huge content producing record companies or film studios or game publishers.
So what's the resolution to wall of text? That there's probably no good easy way to resolve any of this. Piracy is going to exist forever. If you remove every single digital method of duplication, there will still be people sitting next to their speaker with a tape recorder replicating your content. The scramble is because it is incredibly easy now, opening it up to people who might have never investigated it before. People need almost no technical knowledge to download and burn a DVD or CD these days, and that terrifies the people who exist to control how you can use your content.
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