If You Think The Cost Of 'Piracy' Is High, What About The Cost Of Enforcement?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Ekaros

To me and you it does matters, to other tax payers in general it doesn't. Loss of physical goods is loss material and manufacturing costs, which is different.

If someone downloads and copies your IP, you loss potential sale. Tax payers generaly won't lose anything, money is just spend in other ways.

So it's OK for someone to take away my income, just because I'm not losing physical goods? You don't lose anything as a result, so the law should give me no protection? Is that what you're saying?

[Ekaros]

Originally Posted by HarryT

So it's OK for someone to take away my income, just because I'm not losing physical goods? You don't lose anything as a result, so the law should give me no protection? Is that what you're saying?

Where did I say it's ok?

I'm just against the notion that tax payers or domestic product loses something. Which I don't believe is true at all... Is that so hard to understand?

[spindlegirl]

While I think the sense of entitlement is ethically wrong, I do have a hard time seeing piracy as "lost sales." Have there been instances where piracy has been reduced and suddenly the sales have gone up?

I can't see frequenters of pirate sites suddenly putting the things on their 'to buy' list. Last year I had a conversation with someone who claimed to download a terrabyte of digital material a month. I wonder how he has time to consume it all, let alone, if he couldn't do it any more, would he start buying said material?

I borrow books from the library all the time and will likely never buy them. If libraries suddenly vanished from existence, I wouldn't suddenly be motivated to go spend hundreds of dollars on books to purchase.
(However, I have actually bought books whereby I have enjoyed the experience of reading them so much that I had to have my own copy and give the author their share). I would buy what I could afford and just shrug my shoulders at the rest.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

So your idea is what?
Make the publishers pay for book piracy enforcement
The movie studios pay for movie piracy.
Car manufacturers for all traffic violations & upkeep of the roads
House builders / Locksmiths / Glaziers for burglaries (Depends on method of entry)
Shops for shoplifting
Microsoft/Apple for all computer releated crime


All these companies are already taxed and should be able to rely on law enforcement to, well, enforce laws.

I might have some sympathy for the corporations if the police didn't take 3 days to arrive after reporting a burglary and then just shrug and say there was nothing they could do because any evidence would have gone by now.

No shop owner expects an army of police to patrol their shop for them, they hire security guards at their own expense or buy cameras and a baseball bat/gun (depending on country).

Anyway, if what the corporations say about losing $50 trillion per day through piracy is true, surely they can afford to pay some of that money towards the cost of wiping it out?

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Ekaros

To me and you it does matters, to other tax payers in general it doesn't. Loss of physical goods is loss material and manufacturing costs, which is different.

If someone downloads and copies your IP, you loss potential sale. Tax payers generaly won't lose anything, money is just spend in other ways.

In both cases, theft of physical goods or copyright infringement you can argue that the net result for society is no gain or no loss. In both cases tax payers only pay for the law enforcement effort (if there is any). A physical good passes on to someone else, for an illegal download you spend the money on something else. The net effect is always zero for society. So what is your point?

[VaporPunk]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's not just large corporations who are affected by piracy - it's "normal" people, too. I'm a software developer, and I'm constantly seeing my software illegally sold on eBay, offered for download on torrent sites, and Usenet newsgroups, etc etc, and, on the whole, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I'm not alone in this; innumerable other software authors, books authors, musicians, etc, see their work pirated in this way, too.

Piracy hurts "ordinary people" and, given that most people do not have the resources to be able to take legal action to prevent it, we have to rely on governments to put laws in place to protect us.

Let me be clear, which is not my forté. I think you,the "small guy", if you will, should be able to stop the piracy or be compensated for loss of income. I would like the government to enforce that, and I would gladly help foot the taxpayer bill. But you won't be compensated, because law-enforcement by and large has limited resources and will always go after pirating that affects the big corporations and big money. There should be laws on the books right now that can help you, so get a lawyer.
What I am afraid of is more government (by which I mean corporate lackey) control of the internet. Which I am not willing to help pay for. But with SOPA and the other bills mentioned in the OP that seems to be the trend. I don't want pirating to become an excuse for more control of the internet. And to add insult to injury, I don't want to help pay for it.

[hrosvit]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

I might have some sympathy for the corporations if the police didn't take 3 days to arrive after reporting a burglary and then just shrug and say there was nothing they could do because any evidence would have gone by now.

Damn police. I knew this whole thing was really their fault.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by spindlegirl

While I think the sense of entitlement is ethically wrong, I do have a hard time seeing piracy as "lost sales." Have there been instances where piracy has been reduced and suddenly the sales have gone up?

Yes.

The passage of France's HADOPI law is correlated with an increase in sales ( http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=1989240 )

Sweden's IPRED law also correlates to lower piracy rates and higher sales ( http://torrentfreak.com/happy-birthd...w-ever-100401/ ).

Originally Posted by spindlegirl

Last year I had a conversation with someone who claimed to download a terrabyte of digital material a month. I wonder how he has time to consume it all, let alone, if he couldn't do it any more, would he start buying said material?

He doesn't.

Let's say he is downloading 4gb movie files. That comes out to more than 8 movies per day.

Let's further say he watches 2 hours of video per day, all pirated. The "lost sales" would then be cable services, video rental services, DVD purchases, or lost TV/Internet ad revenue. So in theory he's downloading $3000 worth of unauthorized content, whereas the real losses are probably closer to $150 (or less). And of course, if he's willing to download 1TB of materials per month, he's almost certainly distributing at least some of it to people who are downloading far less content.

The losses are greatly exaggerated, but are still real.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by VaporPunk

A Corporations lose money because of pirating.
B Tax-payers always foot the bill for any law-enforcement.

Incorrect. Many cases are handled in civil courts, not by law enforcement.

Law enforcement often goes after physical counterfeiters, not online piracy. E.g. the US seized a bunch of domains in... 2009? and the overwhelming majority sold knock-off apparel, and only a few were involved in digital IP infringement.

Napster, Limewire and AllOfMP3 were sued by record labels and the RIAA, not by federal prosecutors. When the RIAA went on a tear and sued large numbers of alleged pirates, they were the ones who paid their lawyers and legal fees. Megaupload is an exception rather than a rule.

And of course, fighting bad numbers with equally bad numbers is not impressive. The person who wrote the article cited a estimate of 4 years of enforcement, which happens to include cybercrime and dealing with physical counterfeiters. The real numbers could even be higher, since that's just one government's expenditures. But you'd also have to balance that out with the value of that IP (which is in the hundreds of billions of dollars) and tax revenues collected from those industries (which probably dwarfs the enforcement costs). But hey, why bother with the facts when you're ranting?

Of course, many people who complain about government antipiracy expenditures were apoplectic when the RIAA actually sued individuals. Government spending is bad; private spending is bad; what is one to think? It should be obvious that the real target is IP laws, not the methods by which they are enforced. As such, while I don't think governments should have unlimited powers to deal with copyright infringement, I don't regard this argument as terribly persuasive.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Let's say he is downloading 4gb movie files. That comes out to more than 8 movies per day.

Let's further say he watches 2 hours of video per day, all pirated. The "lost sales" would then be cable services, video rental services, DVD purchases, or lost TV/Internet ad revenue. So in theory he's downloading $3000 worth of unauthorized content, whereas the real losses are probably closer to $150 (or less).

Lost cable TV services (or at least the premium movie channels), and DVD rental I can understand how you could guess a monetary value for them, but lost TV/internet advertising revenue? They (whoever they are) would get that advertising revenue whether he watched it on TV or not. Assuming it was even something that had been on TV recently that he was downloading.

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

You can't make a simple cost-benefit analysis for fighting crime. If you did, you would decide to leave most criminals alone. Does it pay to go after a thief who stole $200 worth of items from a store? Of course, not. Part of fighting crime is prevention. Make people afraid they will get caught and have to pay often goes a long way.

The utilitarian in me wants to say that you can and should in fact do a cost-benefit analysis for enforcement. In the case of small theft, I think the argument can be made that the relatively low costs of enforcing that law are far outweighed by the good created by dissuading people from thievery (i.e. the prevention you mention).

With piracy, I think there should be some enforcement, but I think that also needs to be looked at from a cost-benefit perspective to figure out how much and what kind of enforcement. It's too simplistic to say, "it's a crime, so that justifies spending infinity-dollars to stop it." If you're spending $5 chasing after $3, I think something has gone wrong.

As a further complicating factor, laws that prevent piracy can also amount to censorship (e.g. SOPA), so an even more careful balancing needs to take place. There's a lot that could be done with education; new laws shouldn't be the go-to answer without carefully thinking through there costs (both monetary and social).

[Ninjalawyer]

Sidebar

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Incorrect. Many cases are handled in civil courts, not by law enforcement.

Law enforcement often goes after physical counterfeiters, not online piracy. E.g. the US seized a bunch of domains in... 2009? and the overwhelming majority sold knock-off apparel, and only a few were involved in digital IP infringement.

There's a number of interesting cases where ICE seized websites, held them for awhile (sometimes as long as a year), and then returned them without any explanation. Several of those sites seemingly had nothing to do with IP infringement or counterfeiting, and the seizure process was incredibly secretive. Dajaz1.com is the goto case on this, where the US government seized the site for a year on claims (that turned out to be without substance) by the RIAA. Here's a particularly amusing/scary quote from Dajaz1's lawyers:

The owner of Dajaz1.com appreciates the fact that the United States Government, on studying the matter further with all the information the RIAA could furnish, determined that there was in fact no probable cause to seek a forfeiture of the domain it had seized and held for a year.

That exoneration, however, did not remedy the harms caused by a full year of censorship and secret proceedings — a form of “digital Guantanamo” — that knocked out an important and popular blog devoted to hip hop music and has nearly killed it.

The original seizure was unjustified. The delay was unjustified. The secrecy in extensions of the forfeiture deadlines was unjustified.

You'll have to take the above with a grain of salt of course, since it's from the site's lawyer, so not exactly unbiased. Other sources have indicated that the process used to seize the site and extend that seizure were quite secretive, often involving the sealing of court records and the site's lawyers not being served with notice of proceedings. It's a pretty bizarre/worrying case on the face of it.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

With piracy, I think there should be some enforcement, but I think that also needs to be looked at from a cost-benefit perspective to figure out how much and what kind of enforcement. It's too simplistic to say, "it's a crime, so that justifies spending infinity-dollars to stop it." If you're spending $5 chasing after $3, I think something has gone wrong.

That's kind of tough on the person who's lost the $3, don't you think? Aren't you effectively saying "you're losing money due to crime, but the law's going to abandon you"?

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That's kind of tough on the person who's lost the $3, don't you think? Aren't you effectively saying "you're losing money due to crime, but the law's going to abandon you"?

No, because I didn't say don't go after that $3 at all, just that cheaper means of enforcement should be considered to be looked at; and

If the purpose of laws are to benefit everyone in society, then I think you need to take a wider view; if society is benefited more by less enforcement, then I think that is the proper approach, even if it results in you personally losing a little bit.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Piracy hurts "ordinary people" and, given that most people do not have the resources to be able to take legal action to prevent it, we have to rely on governments to put laws in place to protect us.

However, it's not clear how the "anti-piracy" measures being discussed would help you. They don't seem to prevent piracy or even discourage it; instead, they focus on finding a few high-profile targets for media campaigns about "the evils of piracy"*, and enacting measures that disproportionately harm people with limited resources to fight false claims.

There's plenty of cases of DMCA abuse right now, especially in politics, where politicians file DMCA notices against blogs that quote them and critique their words. Filing a false DMCA report is illegal... but enforcement is very limited, and most bloggers don't have the resources. The new measures proposed will be even easier to use to silent dissent and critique instead of fighting actual piracy.

I don't see how any of the newer measures would help you, or other individuals like you, who are harmed by piracy. Can you file a claim that will get a torrent site blocked because it carries your software? Can you remove internet access from a household that's downloaded it without paying? Or do you expect that, if Disney manages to block a household that's downloading its movies, that will also prevent the household from downloading your software and that'll be enough protection?

(Honestly curious. I don't see anything in the newer "fight piracy" law proposals that helps individual authors and artists protect their rights any better than the current system.)

* Is there notably less illegal downloading going on now that MegaUpload is gone? Will entertainment industry profits rise in the next quarter because of its absence?