Here’s an excellent video by author Neil Gaiman on the issue of Copyright and Piracy online.  He makes an excellent point that I and others not “in the industry” have been making for years.  Essentially, more freedoms mean more uptake in consumption.  It’s worth watching and after the video I’ll add some other commentary on the issue of my own. 

So here’s some other thoughts on this whole issue.  Firstly, it’s very black and white, and for the most part, most people “get it” assuming they aren’t part of “the industry”.  I’m using the term “Industry” here to collectively refer to music, movies, television and books.  All of these groups are facing the “digital transition” in one stage or another.  Music is pretty much 100% digital these days, Books are well on the way.  Movies and television are still on the pretty early stages, mostly due to bandwidth constraints, though this is really becoming a non issue quickly.

Firstly, let’s look at the problems with numbers.  I’m not a bit fan of any statistics or numbers on any issue and the ones involving piracy are extremely sketchy.  There was a point when the music industry more or less claimed that they lost more money due to piracy than there was money on the planet earth.

One major issue with “numbers” is that according to the Industry, every case of piracy is “a lost sale”.  This is patently not true for a variety of reasons.  Especially in the case of music.  Some people will pirate an album they would never buy and many will pirate that same album and end up never listening to it.  there’s a lot of archival mindset going on here.  Also piracy of an album or eBook could be done because a person owns the physical copy already and doesn’t want or can’t afford to buy it again.  The entire concept of “you can consume it in the way we say you can” is extremely prevalent in the music industry and in general, it’s a ludicrous idea to anyone EXCEPT the industry.  It’s also essentially a huge ‘fuck you’ to anyone who enjoys music.

I also would suggest that the volume of pirated material consumed is actually quite a bit smaller than any numbers would suggest.  You can’t go and ask every person if they bought, pirated, or didn’t consume at all every piece of copyright work ever.  So estimations must be made.  The problem is that any industry will fudge the math in a way that helps support their idea.  They’ll assume every initial case of piracy leads to 50 more when it may be only 10 more sharings, or likely less.  Want to push a number higher for shock value in the news?  Let’s just neglect any level of saturation that may occur.  1 case leads to 50 leads to 2500 leads to 125000 leads to millions of pirated copies of any one occurrence pretty quickly. 

There’s also a problem with the concept of “lost sales”.  This happens a LOT in reports, more often with movies.  It’ll be said that a movie “lost money” then it’ll be blamed on piracy.  The problem is that most of the time “lost money” doesn’t mean that the movie didn’t MAKE money, it just means that it “didn’t meet expected earnings”.  Simple numbers for simple math, a movie that cost 10 million to make that makes 100 million at the box office still MADE money even if it was “expected to make 150 million” at the box office.  the problem is the spin says ‘”Movie X lost 50 million dollars to piracy”.  No it didn’t it still made money hand over fist, there’s just a zillion factors including the movie sucks that could have cause it to not “make as much as expected”.

The other points are more along the lines of those presented in the video above by Neil Gaiman.  I could come up with probably a hundred examples when this occurred in my own lifetime.  Hey, in college I pirated a bunch of Oasis MP3s.  Guess what, I now own like 5 real Oasis CDs.  Would I have bought these CDs had I not listened to their less mainstream music for “free”?  Probably not.

Which brings up another point I like to push when it comes to piracy.  It keeps interest when a person may otherwise lose it.  This is part of why piracy is higher in college campuses.  During college a person has less time for a job due to the need to study.  They therefore have less money.  They also have huge bills for schooling and room and board and therefore have less money.  Naturally, a person with less money will consume less.  So what’s your choices here?  This student goes out and discovers other free/cheaper ways to entertain themselves and loses interest in said author/band/whatever.  -OR-  This student starts pirating all of his content so he can keep up with whatever’s new and exciting this keeping up the interest in the medium until they graduate and get a job and thus, in theory, have plenty of spending money to start consuming normally.  Granted this transition back probably won’t be instantaneous.  The thing here is that overtime this student gains income but still has less time due to employment.  this works in favor of returning to “normal consumption patterns” since it tends to be a bit of work to pirate materials between finding the files in the first place, waiting for the download, hoping it doesn’t turn out to be fake/corrupt, worrying about viruses or other malicious side effects, etc. 

Suddenly itunes or the ebook store are looking extremely enticing.

one last other random note: I imagine this video alone will help Neil Gaiman’s sales.  Hell I want to go out and try one of his books now.  I’ve never read a Neil Gaiman book.  The guy makes a good point on an issue I support and therefore I want to support him.  Win win for him I suppose.