There has been a lot of rhetoric flung back and forth between providers of content (be it books, games, music, or movies) and those who “pirate” them, but not a lot of dialogue.
Recently, Cliff Harris, an independent game developer decided to change that. He asked for e-mails that would answer the fundamental question: “Why do you pirate my games?”
What he got back was partly what he had asked for, but more of the answers seemed to address the broader issues of game piracy in general.
Remarkably, only a small portion of the answers fell into the “I don’t believe in intellectual property” crowd, or the “I like free stuff and am not likely to get caught” crowd. Even though these two groups tend to be among the loudest (or the loudest denounced) in the public Internet discussions on the matter, they apparently make up the small ends of the bell curve. (Though, granted, this is assuming the respondents were completely honest.)
The majority of the complaints fell into four areas that gave me a strong feeling of deja vu, as they are all complaints (or, in one case, an advantage) I have also heard voiced about e-books (and, for that matter, music and movies): price, quality, DRM, and convenience.
Price
Some of the pirates said they pirated because they could not afford the high price of games, which can often cost $60 or more new. Likewise, many people complain about e-books that are priced equivalent to hard covers when they do not have the same printing and distribution costs hardcover books do.
This has also been a common complaint about music CDs, which often cost almost as much as DVDs. I have heard more than one person ask, “Why should I pay almost as much for a soundtrack as for the movie it came from?”
Quality
It seems that many gamers end up feeling ripped off by the games they buy, because they do not have the quality they expected when they plunked down their cash. And, of course, there is no way to return a game once you have opened it the way you can a book. (That this near-universal store policy is itself due to piracy is not something Harris mentions, but is something I find ironic.)
If you buy an e-book and it turns out to be lousy, you are likewise unable to return it. Even if you buy a paper book and don’t like it, you still have to spend the gas and time to take it back to the store (or ship it back to Amazon).
It is not surprising that, as Eric Flint indicates in his Prime Palaver and Salvos Against Big Brother columns, many people illicitly download books in order to try them before they buy. It is not surprising that they might do the same for games or movies, either. (But music, since it can be downloaded illicitly in as high or higher quality than the iTunes store downloads, may be another matter.)
DRM
Harris writes, “This was expected, but whereas many pirates who debate the issue online are often abusive and aggressive on the topic, most of the DRM complaints were reasonable and well put.” Expected indeed, and a complaint common to games, ebooks, movies, and digital music.
As Harris says, no one likes DRM, but the gaming industry may have it worse than most—witness the SecuROM debacle, where the DRM system as first proposed would have to call back in every few days to verify that the installation was still legit.
At least MobiPocket and eReader ebooks will stay unlocked without periodically checking in (though there have been similar ebook schemes in the past—such as Sony’s infamous “expiring magazines” for the Librié).
Convenience
Some pirates said that obtaining games on-line was more convenient than going to the store. Interestingly enough, they praised the Steam distribution system, whose games they did not tend to pirate. This one, at least, is an area where e-books actually have the advantage—especially the Kindle and the iPhone’s eReader, which can go online to buy the books directly from the appliance itself.
Likewise, the iTunes music store has become the biggest retailer of music in America, and is rapidly getting there in the UK. On the video side, Netflix, iTunes, and others are pioneering video rental by Internet services that can counter the inconvenience of going to the store for the DVD.
Conclusion
Many of the articles covering this dialogue are talking about how great it would be if the game industry could take a lesson from the answers Harris got. I am going to go further and say that the content industry as a whole should listen and learn. The best way to sell content is not to lock it down so tightly that people have to buy it to experience it—it is to make people want to buy it by making it convenient to purchase and use.
(Additional coverage: Ars Technica, Slashdot, Wired.)
Yep. It’s what I’ve been thinking all along — less rules and stipulations, and you’ll have a more harmonious outcome.
I am on the side of the pirates on this one—not that I approve of law-breaking, but I agree with their points. I can look at a paper book in the bookstore and see every page, try before I buy as it were. On ebooks, you can’t do that. There was one time where the brief sample chapter on Fictionwise which I used to decide on a purchase was so misleading that when I got further into my legally purchased book and realized how much violence, swear words, typos and overall just bad, amateur writing was in it, I emailed customer service and they agreed to give me a refund! Books like that give e-books a bad name.
DRM is also a big issue for me. My ebookwise is my preferred book reader right now, but won’t take secure ereader. Fictionwise could have gotten literally twice as many sales from me if these books were NOT the secure ones—I know it’s not their fault, and the publisher decides, but as a consumer I care less about that and more about my own bottom line 🙂 If I can’t read it on the eBookwise, I don’t buy it, and it frustrates me because Fictionwise has more titles which are not available at ebookwise so I prefer to shop there. And I don’t like buying from ebookwise because most of the titles are protected so they can only be read on the device I have right now, which means that if my device gets lost or stolen or broken, I can’t read those books anymore. It is just way more tangled a web than it has to be, and they could make so much more money of they just let people buy the books they want in their preferred ways.
Piracy is one of those things that have always bothered me. I have to admit it though, I tend to do a fair bit of it. I used to buy a lot of games for my PC, I have a box of games that I played once and then shelved as they were rubbish and not lived up to the publishers rant on the back of the box. Now I tend to pirate the game first or download a demo and I then actually do go and buy the game if its any good.
Books now thats another thing, I have a paper collection of hardback and paper back amounting to nearly 5000 books in all. I recently discovered the pleasure of electronic reading and started to purchase quite a few ebooks from different publishers. I stupidly got myself a ipod Touch after I destroyed my other ereading device, (it went into the toilet), Not realising that I could no longer read almost 50% of my purchased books, I am so annoyed. I am now aware of a few places where I could replace my books without any of this DRM stuff and decided that Im not going to pay a third time for something I own already. An example of an author that has written 40 books that I have purchased in Paper form and also in electronic form that has DRM. I have the entire collection paid for twice. Even though it was my fault I bought the incorrect reading device, should I have to pay again. So I now have a problem, do I join the ranks of DRM stripping, Pirateing and general law breaker or keep wasting money that could be better spent on new authors works. I know that I will end up with a few books that I dont own or have lost but I feel I have been forced down this path by the big companies. I feel a little dirty pirating a book, since I feel that the author deserves something off of me. But as I now only really read electronically, (bad eyes, need big fonts) I dont want to spend big dollars again only to have this same problem next time I give my device swimming lessons. I wish the authors would set up a web page just for those of us driven to this form, and let us know the royalties they normally recieve and let us donate to them and then send back a electronic signed copy or something. As there is no way I am buying DRM stuff again unless it is so cheap I wont care if I have to buy it over and over again.
THanks for reading my Rant
@Tony: “Pirate” away. You should *not* have to pay a *2nd* time for an ebook because: 1) the file format is not universal, 2) DRM locks your device out. You’ve paid for the *words*, not the container. Yours is a *sinless* “piracy.”
>>>“Why should I pay almost as much for a soundtrack as for the movie it came from?”
Damn. You know, in all the years I’ve complained about the rip-off price of soundtrack CDs, I never linked them to the price of the DVD! In most cases, the DVD is far less!
Come to think of it, that’s true. It’s just at first release that the soundtrack costs “almost” as much, since DVD prices traditionally fall after a few months while CD prices don’t tend to. You can get movies in the $5 bin at Walmart now whose soundtracks are still at full price.
One day a gardener decided to develop a few new types of flowers. Once she had a few that she thought were pretty, she went to a Botanical Garden and offered to sell her new flowers. The Botanical Garden said sure, we’ll put on a display, and charge people to come see. And we can also sell the flower seeds to people who like them – and this they did, and made lots of money. But they said to the people who bought the flowers “you can never give any new seeds away or sell them to anyone else”.
But some of the seed buyers grew new flowers, and they soon had lots of spare seeds, and decided to pass them on, because hey – they had so many just sitting around. And soon wild versions of the flowers were growing all over the place, and some people picked them and put them in their gardens, as they were just growing there freely.
But the Botanical Garden came along and said “Hey, you can’t grow those flowers! How can we make money if you do that? And why would any gardener ever develop and new type of flowers if they can’t make money from it? If you keep this up soon the world will be drab and boring because nobody will make new flower types.”
And then Monsanto came along with GeRM (Genetic Rights Management).
Anyway… soundtrack price vs DVD price is about perceived value. The soundtrack in stereo playable format is basically just worth more (to the consumer) than the movie itself, clearly. Does this make pirating the DVD right? Is stealing a $40 shirt from a store OK just because it only cost 5 cents to make in Indonesia?
>>>Anyway… soundtrack price vs DVD price is about perceived value. The soundtrack in stereo playable format is basically just worth more (to the consumer) than the movie itself, clearly
You must be young. CD soundtracks prices are outrageous. I used to buy them pre-CD in LP format. They were *never* at gouge price points.