[HN Gopher] Software Piracy and IP Management: Strategic Respons...
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Software Piracy and IP Management: Strategic Responses to Imitation
Author : azalemeth
Score : 370 points
Date : 2021-09-03 15:56 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (papers.ssrn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (papers.ssrn.com)
| summerlight wrote:
| S. Korea gaming industry once suffered a lot from piracy in 90s.
| This was a main driver of their rapid transition toward online
| gaming. In fact, one of the earliest graphical MMORPG was
| invented by Nexon (a year before UO). Coincidentally, Nexon is
| also the inventor of loot box which becomes their dominant
| business model. And I think not many people prefer this over old
| fashioned game packages.
|
| So yeah, piracy could corner industry to "innovate" their product
| and business model in order to survive. But it's not guaranteed
| to be in a societally beneficial way.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Online gaming is a societally beneficial innovation imho.
| reificator wrote:
| I agree with that statement.
|
| MMOs and lootboxes are a societal harm however.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Software piracy might not be as bad as actual piracy of the
| "attacking ships on the high seas" variety, but it's still pretty
| unethical, and promotes the spread of proprietary software that
| does not furher the best interest of its users. Please use fully-
| FLOSS alternatives instead whenever reasonable.
| jedberg wrote:
| There is a long standing debate on the ethics. High seas piracy
| is bad because when the pirate steals, they deprive someone
| else of their property. But in the digital realm, no one is
| deprived of anything when someone else steals it, because in
| almost every case, the person was not willing to pay for it
| anyway, so there is no loss of revenue.
|
| Honestly, there isn't a whole lot of difference between
| something like open core software or open source with
| commercial support and commercial software that is easy to
| pirate. In both cases, the people who are willing to pay will
| pay and the rest don't.
| oauea wrote:
| In some cases it may even increase revenue. There's been
| multiple times I've pirated a game, only to buy it later to
| get easy access to updates. Of course a good demo system
| would help with this, and Steam's refund policy is somewhat a
| step in the right direction.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Is it true that no one is deprived of anything in digital
| piracy? There is surely a group who would not pay anyway, but
| isn't there another group who would begrudgingly pay but
| pirates if possible? Does this not deprive the software
| makers of a bit of sales? Is this a marginal bit or a huge
| amount of the sales? And does the piracy potentially lead to
| popularization and more sales?
|
| It sounds very tricky to measure these phenomena in software.
|
| In music, I think the majority of musicians themselves live
| off of their fans coming to shows or a small percentage
| buying the albums, and side-gigs haha. There are probably
| only dozens lucky enough to get huge payoffs from digital
| sales.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > Does this not deprive the software makers of a bit of
| sales?
|
| I'd welcome a more neutral phrasing for this though. Yes,
| it may change people's behavior. But depriving someone of
| something sounds like something they _had_ is taken away
| from them; but these are not sales or property they _had_ ,
| rather it's something they perhaps _would have had_ if the
| world were different. Now, a lot of things can "deprive"
| me of things that I'd like to have but never did..
|
| As you say, it's very difficult to measure. Actually, it's
| not something that can be measured, because it's a world of
| hypotheticals. It's like measuring how tall you would be if
| you had lived in the 1500s. You don't measure that.
|
| If piracy isn't a choice, then I might look for an
| alternative.. and if I find an alternative that pleases me,
| then I'm less likely to deal with the author of the
| original un-pirateable software, thus "depriving" them of
| something they perhaps could have had if they had first
| gained me as a user somehow.
| [deleted]
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > We find that rising piracy increases subsequent R&D spending,
| copyrights, trademarks, and patents for large, incumbent software
| firms. Furthermore, copyright and trademark filings precede those
| of patents, and firms with large patent portfolios
| disproportionately increase copyrights and trademarks following
| the shock. We conclude that piracy and similar competitive shocks
| push firms to innovate to stay ahead of imitator products, and
| that this effect is moderated by their existing patent
| portfolios.
|
| Is it pushing firms to claim more intellectual property?
| otrahuevada wrote:
| The biggest issue with "piracy" overall is that it describes a
| phenomenon where users of an existing platform are sticking to
| the agreed upon way of using that platform as designed despite
| corporate lawyers' best attempts at changing terms to try and
| invent a scarcity where there is none.
|
| They tried to invent jaywalking for the web, and it went...
| poorly. At least outside of corporate-lawyer-heavy circles.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| They're trying to use a system created in the 1700s in the 21st
| century. They're out of touch.
|
| Back then, if you wanted to copy a book, you'd have to do it by
| hand. You'd need to literally write the words into a new book.
| Copyright infringement at scale required industrial hardware
| like printing presses. Distribution required physically moving
| stuff around.
|
| It's the 21st century now. Computers exist and nearly everyone
| has one. Copying data is a fundamental operation. It's as easy
| as copy and paste. We can easily create millions of copies of
| any data in seconds, filling up entire hard drives if we want.
| We can transmit these copies over the network to any number of
| computers at negligible costs.
|
| These copyright people are so out of touch with reality it
| hurts. The level of tyranny required to stop this would give
| any free society pause.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| It's an interesting topic. I agree with you but let's
| remember that paper-based information still exists. New books
| are being written and printed as we speak, and the cost is
| greater than neglible ($20/book single print). Computer-based
| information is a _very_ new thing and could potentially
| vanish overnight to some unexpected space weather. Society
| hasn 't transitioned completely from one to the other. As
| long as cash exists beside banks' computers, paper
| information exists and _must_ be given the serious
| consideration it deserves.
|
| The printing press was invented some 600 years ago. Computers
| have existed for like 50. It's very much "in touch" to not
| dismiss print.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Paper exists in the physical world. It makes sense to apply
| old copyright laws to them. They're physical things,
| naturally scarce.
|
| My argument is that they make no sense in the virtual
| world. Once information makes its way there, it can be
| copied and distributed worldwide at negligible costs and
| with zero limitations. Pretending otherwise means living in
| denial of reality.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Yea but it's not like all of our laws, institutions, and
| processes can just pivot instantly. There's
| organizational inertia to keep doing things the old way,
| regardless of whether it _makes sense._
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Then it's our responsibility to shock and disrupt them
| until they wake up to the new reality. The alternative is
| they're going to retrofit the old systems and apply them
| to computing and the internet, destroying their potential
| in the process.
|
| Enforcing copyright in the 21st century means ending
| computing freedom. They must make it so computers only
| run approved software. I would rather see copyright
| abolished.
| sebow wrote:
| Yea no sh*t, that's why Hollywood allows it (after the obvious
| defeat from the dot-com era of the internet).
| jwhite_nc wrote:
| Adobe had 3 generations of designers, etc hooked on their
| products because of ease of piracy much like drug dealers giving
| out samples of crack in early 80s to build their customer base. A
| large part of "their" patents came from companies they acquired
| and integrated versus innovating on their own. So I don't think
| patent portfolios are a good measure. Disclaimer: "May not apply
| in all situations. Use at your own discretion".
| azalemeth wrote:
| And now, the zeitgeist is if anything in the opposite
| direction: Capture One Pro, Raw Therapee, and Darktable have
| got a _hell_ of a a lot better compared to Lightroom and C1P in
| particular _proudly offers_ a lifetime license, not a
| subscription. Similarly, DaVinci Resolve has a _free_ (if not
| FOSS) business model, designed explicitly to compete with
| Premiere, and, again, lifetime licenses. Affinity Designer
| /Photo/Publisher are cheap, software that you "buy" and
| increasingly "good enough" for pro use, to the extent that many
| post about moving away from the CC treadmill to them.
|
| Adobe arguably won this decade on the basis of the three
| generations you mentioned. I am _not_ confident that they will
| win the next ones - the last time I printed an actual book, the
| publisher used CS6 +- Quark XPress internally (I wrote it in
| LaTeX; they had some tricks for printing it on SRA4 paper and
| wanted to use those tools to get the bleeds & trims right).
| The SaaS model was _explicitly mentioned_ as a reason for
| sticking with the old software.
| cletus wrote:
| So there's a tweet I've seen where some anti-vaxxer is asking if
| anyone else has noticed why all these unvaccinated people are
| suddenly getting Covid like there's some sort of conspiracy.
| Sadly it'll probably be taken as "confirmation" of nanobots or
| something. Of course, this all just misses the point entirely.
|
| I have the same feeling about this. It's not that piracy
| increases innovation. It's that overly restrictive limits stifle
| innovation and this includes the ridiculous software patent
| fiasco.
|
| It's not really surprising that the Patent Office didn't discover
| that patents in general and software patents in particular are in
| fact the problem.
|
| There's tons of evidence of this too. The Wright brothers'
| original patent on flight control completely stifled the aviation
| industry such that when the US entered World War One they were
| unable to build planes and they had to buy them other nations.
| This particular event is why there's a patent pool for aviation
| now.
|
| A smartphone is literally covered by thousands of software
| patents for completely obvious "innovations".
|
| Commercial software tends to have a lot of restrictions such that
| only paying customers can (legally) use it. Sellers would rather
| not have someone use it and view them as a potential future sale
| than risk giving it away for a low or zero price. Many of those
| people using that software would probably lead to innovation.
|
| The lesson here should be that overly restrictive IP enforcement
| in general is the problem.
| [deleted]
| duffpkg wrote:
| I wrote "Hacking Healthcare" for O'Reilly, which is still in
| print after 10 years, amongst others. My intention in writing it
| was never pecuniary but to hopefully encourage smart technology
| people to enter healthcare. It has sold more copies than many
| popular authors I read who seem much more "bestselling", which
| always surprises me.
|
| It is my opinion that piracy has helped that book much more than
| it has hurt it. It is very widely pirated in torrents in non-us
| countries from what I can tell from google searches and a
| longstanding history of emails to the effect "hey your book is
| being pirated [here]". I sincerely doubt that the overwhelming
| majority of people who pirate that work did so instead of
| purchasing it.
| M277 wrote:
| N = 1 here, but as someone from a third world country this is
| definitely true for my experience. Like, 90% of students here
| can't really pay US-prices for textbooks at all, so they resort
| to either piracy or buying imported used books (which are
| significantly cheaper somehow, but sometimes badly worn or old
| editions), or even buying printed pirated books.
|
| My university department even had someone who would pirate
| textbooks and print them and sell them to the students at cost
| (what it cost to print them), he was very popular and people to
| this day still remember him very fondly as he was arguably
| doing a major service... the students wouldn't have read the
| books otherwise.
|
| It may be legally wrong in the West, but morally? The author
| doesn't lose (like I said, the books wouldn't have been bought)
| and the students get access to knowledge they wouldn't have
| been able to access otherwise.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> It is my opinion that piracy has helped that book much more
| than it has hurt it. It is very widely pirated in torrents in
| non-us countries from what I can tell from google searches and
| a longstanding history of emails to the effect "hey your book
| is being pirated [here]". I sincerely doubt that the
| overwhelming majority of people who pirate that work did so
| instead of purchasing it._
|
| Tim O'Reilly agrees with you:
|
| https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...
| platz wrote:
| How is piracy defined here
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Piracy would be much easier to enforce laws for if copyright law
| didn't protect nearly a century's worth of works.
|
| If copyright law was something more reasonable, say five years,
| then the MPAA/RIAA could viciously protect everything within
| those five years and consumers would more likely stay away from
| those materials given the negativity of the consequences.
|
| The way things are now, you literally _have_ to pirate some games
| like No One Lives Forever because the copyright law around them
| is so convoluted that no one knows who can legally sell it
| anymore. Even worse if you 're looking for something like The
| John Larroquette Show which can't be found anywhere outside of
| piracy due to a lack of interest by distributors.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yup. The truth is these copyright holders are nothing but rent
| seekers. They've created successful works, made their money.
| When it's our turn to reap the benefits via public domain? They
| won't accept it. They change the rules of the game instead.
| They move the goalposts. They lobby the government until
| copyright duration is functionally infinite because god forbid
| mickey mouse enters the public domain.
|
| Why respect their rights when they don't respect ours?
| Copyright only works because we pretend their works are
| artificially scarce. Let's stop pretending.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| "We conclude that piracy and similar competitive shocks push
| firms to innovate to stay ahead of imitator products, and that
| this effect is moderated by their existing patent portfolios."
|
| I guess it's good to study that this is the case, but isn't this
| exactly why companies fight piracy and attempt to patent and then
| enforce those patents? That is to reduce competition and make it
| easier to extract value from what they've produced?
|
| Basically, isn't the premise that if privacy was rampant and
| patents didn't exist then more people and companies would be able
| to innovate on the technology without fear of a lawsuit? I think
| of how stagnant the Eink space is, and how much broader usage
| might that technology get if it wasn't encumbered by patents
| (just one example)?
|
| I guess I just don't find this surprising.
| lutorm wrote:
| It doesn't mean that innovation is to the benefit of the user,
| though, does it? Maybe all the innovation is in anti-piracy
| technology?
| robinsoh wrote:
| > I think of how stagnant the Eink space is, and how much
| broader usage might that technology get if it wasn't encumbered
| by patents (just one example)?
|
| I work in the display industry and I have no idea what you're
| talking about. I see this again and again in HN. Look at my
| comment history. There's reasonable amount of innovation and
| competition in electrophoretics. But it is a niche technology
| and the actual physics of rheology are what limits innovation
| in this space. If you feel I'm mistaken, please say exactly
| what you mean is being limited in a technical sense. I perceive
| your type of comment as equivalent to a display engineer
| posting on a software forum claiming that patents are limiting
| progress in operating systems and that's why Microsoft Windows
| is the only non-innovative product available. I hope the
| analogy is clear.
| kenjackson wrote:
| "We conclude that piracy and similar competitive shocks push
| firms to innovate to stay ahead of imitator products,"
|
| In the case of piracy, this seems like an odd statement. If I
| can pirate your software and make it widely available then
| you're innovating to stay ahead of yourself -- which I'll just
| immediately pirate when you release it.
|
| How does me innovating quickly, help me stay ahead of people
| simply copying my product? Unless the innovation is around how
| to monetize my product, even in the face of piracy (e.g., ads,
| support, SaaS) -- in which case those things don't really imply
| that I need to innovate on the actual product itself.
| azalemeth wrote:
| I think a lot of it depends on the rate of piracy -- and also
| the circumstances under which it is done. I've met people in
| Denmark who genuinely pay attention to, and don't skip,
| youtube ads because they want their content creators to get
| more financial support. At the same time, at least one of
| these people has told me that they pirate software to try it,
| before buying it. They tend not to like DRM but will happily
| "give things a go".
|
| It's not hard to imagine that a small percentage of piracy
| actively helps spread a product, and if you get 1000%-fold
| growth and your piracy rate goes from say, 1.5% to 5%, you've
| still massively won overall. If you're a person like my
| Danish friend, it's not hard to imagine that if anything the
| "try before you buy" piracy then means that products are
| evaluated more on their features, if anything _increasing_
| competition to innovate between market leaders in their
| segment.
|
| The company only goes bankrupt if _literally everyone_
| pirates everything -- or, more likely, transitions into a
| FOSS-style support+ business model. (Which, IMO, is far more
| preferable than software-as-service)
| katbyte wrote:
| Also if individuals pirate your software and learn that
| then that's the preferred let's say image/video editing
| software when they work the company more the likely buy
| legal licenses for them
| atoav wrote:
| I probably spent multiple thousand Euros on software that I
| had previously used dubious copies of.
|
| My reasons:
|
| - I could now afford it
|
| - I earned money with it
|
| - The new version of the software had some great feature
| that the old pirated version didn't have
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Businesses and self employed people will usually pay for
| software. They can deduct it from their taxes anyway.
| Also it doesn't look very professional when you're using
| a cracked version of Photoshop at your presentation.
| 13415 wrote:
| I don't know what _their_ explanation is, but one explanation
| would be that people frequently use piracy to try out and
| compare products. Later, once they have decided on the best
| product, some of them go legit. That 's certainly how I used
| piracy in the past.
|
| So the customers are way better informed with piracy, which
| forces companies to innovate more quickly to stay ahead. They
| can no longer rely on deceptive marketing practices and
| market dominance.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Free demos can fill this gap. Though IME it can feel
| overwhelming trying many at once so you don't have to pay
| before being fully informed. Professional reviews can help
| too, assuming ones needs aren't too niche.
|
| All that said I can imagine some folks feel justified
| pirating them to reduce that trial expiration anxiety. Just
| beware that pirated copies or cracks can also contain
| Trojans.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| You're trying to sell artificially scarce copies of something
| that is infinitely abundant. Change your business model.
| You're supposed to be getting paid _before_ you create the
| data, not after.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Specifically that article says that firms vulnerable to
| piracy file patents, copyright registrations and trademarks.
|
| All of those are tracers for innovation because they're not
| supposed to give you any of those for something that isn't
| new, but they are really weapons one would use against
| pirates, imitators, competitors, etc.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > isn't the premise that if piracy was rampant and patents
| didn't exist then more people and companies would be able to
| innovate on the technology without fear of a lawsuit?
|
| This isn't just a premise. It is fact with historical
| precedent. Check out this thread for numerous examples:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28330810
|
| Patents, copyrights, intellectual property in general...
| Nothing but state-granted monopolies with the explicit aim of
| preventing others from competing with the established players.
| Society is better served by ignoring such bullshit.
| danielheath wrote:
| I don't have a problem with the concept that - having done
| the expensive work of testing things out until you find one
| that works - you should be rewarded via protectionism.
|
| What's absolutely crazy to me is how long the terms are. In
| most fields, 2 years is plenty of time to make bank; in a
| few, 5 may be appropriate, and in a few very rare cases
| (pharma?) you may need longer to make up the cost of
| experimenting in a highly regulated space.
|
| There's no justification for the expansive terms available
| now.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > What's absolutely crazy to me is how long the terms are.
|
| Yes. Intellectual property is imaginary property, based on
| the lie of artificial scarcity. We could easily _tolerate_
| this arrangement though if the terms were reasonable
| enough. After a while, the works would enter the public
| domain and things would be as they should be. Seems like a
| small sacrifice in order to ensure creators can be rewarded
| via the familiar product sales model.
|
| Unfortunately, these intellectual property holders turned
| out to be rent seekers. They create successful works, make
| their money. When it's our turn to reap the public domain
| benefits? They refuse to allow it. They lobby the
| governments for extensions. Copyright durations are
| functionally infinite. They want to extract value out of
| their imaginary property forever.
|
| Can't remember the last time a movie I watched entered the
| public domain. Don't think I'm ever going to see it within
| my lifetime. They don't respect our public domain rights.
| Why should we respect their imaginary property? Let's stop
| pretending their products are artificially scarce because
| they aren't. Everything is public domain.
| deeviant wrote:
| > Basically, isn't the premise that if *privacy* was rampant...
|
| God could you imagine such a world, one which privacy was
| rampant, I can't but I wish I could.
|
| Sorry couldn't help chuckle at your typo.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| ha, I didn't even notice that and even reread it a couple
| times.
|
| can't change it now ;)
| danShumway wrote:
| I think you might be slightly out of touch with mainstream
| attitudes/beliefs about what the effects of software piracy
| are.
|
| Personally, it is extremely common for me to find people who
| argue that piracy reduces innovation and discourages businesses
| from building new things. I don't have survey data on this, I'm
| just speaking anecdotally, but I suspect that's the prevailing
| view among most Americans. I'm not sure if that attitude is as
| prevalent in other countries.
|
| There is a certain group of people where this will basically
| just confirm some of their priors and it won't be surprising at
| all. But there is another group of people who (I think
| sincerely) believe the opposite, and (keeping in mind that this
| is only one study) I do think it pushes back against their
| priors in a potentially interesting way.
| pishpash wrote:
| It may do both, increase small, incremental innovations and
| decrease large, R&D-heavy innovations.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| Maybe I am out of touch. There is a different question and
| that's if piracy is good. That's a little harder to answer.
|
| Piracy is potentially good for the overall market (free
| innovation, etc). Piracy is probably bad for the
| company/person who produced the good (ie they lose revenue
| and have to innovate themselves more to stay ahead of free).
|
| The second has been debated at length, and I know I honestly
| don't know the answer. I used to see a lot of arguments that
| piracy can be used as a means to get access to free training
| and lock-in with a specific product, but then when they go
| legitimate, they then acquire real licenses. But the
| producing company has to make it clear that if people don't
| go legit, then they will get sued.
|
| It's kinda like the SaaS freemium -> enterprise license
| models some providers use.
| dogleash wrote:
| I don't think it's an argument that "piracy is good", but
| instead piracy serves as a sort of test case to explore the
| extent to which current boundaries of intellectual property
| law is "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful
| Arts."
| bluejekyll wrote:
| Right, and that seems to be the ultimate question. Which
| side of the scale should society fall on some of these
| questions. Is it better for the majority to progress more
| quickly without those intellectual property laws, or do
| we need the profit motive for companies to innovate and
| therefor be rewarded for that innovation.
|
| It doesn't feel like an either or, but more of a how far
| in either direction should the laws be.
|
| As a question, would software patents be more acceptable
| to people if they were limited to 2-5 years rather than
| the 15 (I think) they are now?
| zepto wrote:
| > Piracy is potentially good for the overall market (free
| innovation, etc)
|
| I haven't seen any innovation done by software pirates
| other than what's necessary to circumvent protections.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Are you kidding? Certain pirate sites have been compared
| to the library of Alexandria due to their massive
| collections and organization. No copyright holder ever
| managed to even come close, some streaming services can't
| even manage to list episodes in order. Pirates often care
| more about quality than the companies that release the
| product they're pirating. You'll see pirates using hacked
| PS3s to rip SACDs for the best possible audio. You'll see
| pirates sourcing multiple Blu-Rays in order to create the
| perfect encode.
|
| These people work their butts off. It's honestly
| embarrassing that billion dollar companies can't compete.
| zepto wrote:
| Ok, so no innovation other than the piracy itself.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| You don't consider better software, better service,
| better results, better _everything_ to be innovation? I
| wish these billion dollar corporations were as innovative
| as pirates. They pretty much _invented_ digital content
| distribution years if not decades before the legitimate
| industry managed to understand what was going on. They
| reached worldwide audiences at mere fractions of the
| costs associated with legitimate services.
| zepto wrote:
| > You don't consider better software, better service,
| better results, better everything to be innovation?
|
| That's just not accurate. I agree that for a while it was
| true in the days of Napster, audio galaxy etc, but it
| isn't anymore.
|
| But you are missing my point. Other than in improving
| _ways to do piracy itself_ , piracy doesn't lead to
| innovation.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| My point is piracy itself is the biggest innovation of
| the 21st century. We're actually going backwards because
| of these copyright holders. Things would be so much
| better if not for them.
|
| > I agree that for a while it was true in the days of
| Napster, audio galaxy etc, but it isn't anymore.
|
| You gotta be kidding me. Pirate sites offer more content
| at much higher quality. Netflix streams "high definition"
| shows so thoroughly compressed even black frames have
| artifacts. My satellite TV streams content with so much
| compression it gives me motion sickness.
|
| The main difference is piracy doesn't happen out in the
| open anymore. You need to be invited.
| zepto wrote:
| > Pirate sites offer more content at much higher quality.
|
| True.
|
| > Netflix streams "high definition" shows so thoroughly
| compressed even black frames have artifacts. My satellite
| TV streams content with so much compression it gives me
| motion sickness.
|
| Ok, but that high quality pirate content can't actually
| be delivered to a large customer base over low bandwidth
| links like satellite. It's a meaningless comparison since
| they are solving different problems.
|
| > The main difference is piracy doesn't happen out in the
| open anymore. You need to be invited.
|
| Ah - so it's _objectively worse_ than simply paying for
| content because it is only accessible to a small clique.
| Whereas with commercial services, anyone can just buy
| what they want.
|
| What you are describing is the exact opposite of making
| things more freely available.
|
| It's a small group stealing content for their own
| exclusive use, and giving nothing back to society.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > What you are describing is the exact opposite of making
| things more freely available.
|
| I know. That's what I meant when I said we're going
| backwards. Copyright enforcement drove piracy
| underground. It's not supposed to be like this.
| zepto wrote:
| It wouldn't be piracy if there was no copyright
| enforcement. What you are saying is that piracy is simply
| failing to innovate.
| fishtacos wrote:
| Innovation doesn't have to be done by the software
| pirates, merely nudge it along:
|
| 1. Circumventing anti software piracy measures and
| learning that performance is gained instead of lost when
| the DRM is bypassed. -1 for DRM, net gain for users.
|
| 2. Pushing for new features alongside the updated DRM, a
| net gain for users.
|
| 3. Finding holes in the initial DRM and plugging them. A
| net gain for developers/publishers.
|
| It's a win/win any way one looks at it.
| zepto wrote:
| As I said, the only innovation I am aware of that piracy
| has produced is circumvention.
|
| You seem to be confirming that.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I think the typical argument is that piracy makes things
| accessible to everyone, and the market as a whole
| benefits from that greater audience. Think of how many
| photographers got started with a pirated copy of
| Photoshop or reverse engineers with Ida.
| zepto wrote:
| Sure, which is only true if the maker actually gains from
| the greater market share indirectly.
|
| This is almost certainly only going to be true in a tiny
| number of cases - e.g. photoshop, where commercial users
| generally don't use pirate copies, and do get sued if
| they are found to.
| 10000truths wrote:
| Sometimes that circumvention itself has the side effect
| of QoL improvements. Like that Resident Evil 8 crack that
| significantly reduced framerate stuttering when the DRM
| calls were patched out.
| zepto wrote:
| Just one bug fix that multiple people are mentioning is
| hardly evidence of innovation.
| robocat wrote:
| Pirate Party (various countries), Napster, exe trojans,
| BitTorrent, game mods, after 1 minute of thought. Are you
| trolling? You get lots of downvotes, especially when you
| respond to others that answer your own comments.
| zepto wrote:
| > Pirate Party (various countries), Napster, exe trojans,
| BitTorrent, game mods, after 1 minute of thought.
|
| Ok - so innovation in piracy itself, not innovation in
| anything else.
|
| > You get lots of downvotes, especially when you respond
| to others that answer your own comments.
| robocat wrote:
| > not innovation in anything else
|
| You have much absolute opinion, and little supporting
| fact. Try reading:
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/bittorrent-we-represent-
| innova...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%22innovation%22+%22pirat
| e+p... which represents political innovation that is not
| about supporting piracy, but is about modifying the legal
| encumbrances (which often prevent benefits to society
| accruing from the products of that society.)
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%22innovation%22+%22napst
| er%...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%22game+mod%22+user-
| innovati... - much of this is innovation is not piracy
| but just removing locks so that you can modify games one
| has paid for. Piracy enables the innovation in games, but
| the user innovation in gameplay is not actually about
| piracy.
| zepto wrote:
| BitTorrent is innovative, but isn't a result of piracy.
| The piece you linked actually says that.
| silisili wrote:
| I agree with the premise of the second. The big money comes
| from pros and corporate concracts, who generally (but not
| always) avoid pirated software.
|
| I feel if MS and Adobe weren't so lenient on piracy, they
| wouldn't have captured/held the worldwide market in their
| segments at such an astounding rate.
|
| For a smaller, non-monopoly, it may be a very different
| case though.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| At one point, Bill Gates openly admitted that this was
| part of Microsoft's China strategy [1]:
|
| > Although about 3 million computers get sold every year
| in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they
| will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it,
| we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted,
| and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime
| in the next decade.
|
| [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
| xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...
| bserge wrote:
| Don't know about China, but that worked really well in
| Eastern Europe.
|
| After things stabilized and the west "brought law and
| order", a lot of companies started paying MS licensing
| fees. Because everyone grew up on Windows and Office.
|
| Same for Adobe.
|
| Then there's this bullshit:
| https://www.inputmag.com/culture/peak-design-accuses-
| amazon-...
| bdowling wrote:
| > Then there's this bullshit:
| https://www.inputmag.com/culture/peak-design-accuses-
| amazon-...
|
| I don't see how someone could confuse those two bags. Is
| the brand company claiming that no one else can make a
| sling type bag?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| As a complete remorseless pirate (as in, I download stuff
| but I never uploaded anything I purchase) and as someone
| whose software was pirated (causing me to go out of
| business, for that specific venture), I think piracy is bad
| purely because someone is infringing on a contract.
|
| If customer A buys my software and accepts a contract which
| say not to redistribute, he can't go and break that
| contract unpunished. I should be able to legally persecute
| customer A, if I can prove a breach of contract happened.
| If someone is re-sharing that content or if they're
| downloading it, they never had a contract with me and they
| should be able to do what they please.
|
| Sure, that's bad for me, but that's part of doing business.
| Eventually the price of things will go up to account for
| people pirating.
|
| Also, if I'm selling so much of my software that I can't
| possibly trace and persecute all the users leaking my
| software, I think we should accept a certain amount of
| piracy and loss of revenue. Call it, a natural tax on my
| software being so successful.
|
| Still, the government shouldn't be able to intrude on
| customer A privacy, internet providers shouldn't be
| compelled to release data on customer A. DMCA is absolute
| cancer and the proof that the government is not doing the
| people's interest but the interest of big media
| corporations.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| This is a strange argument that I've heard repeated
| often: "repeal copyright and just treat it as an NDA". I
| personally would consider that _worse_ than the status
| quo.
|
| NDA-based copyright-like ownership has three different
| problems:
|
| - If the group of people with the software is large -
| like most mass-market works - enforcing the NDA will be
| absolutely impossible. Someone will leak, and that
| someone will _not_ have the financial means to remunerate
| you for your subsequent loss of exclusive ownership.
| Making an example of them will not work. Once leaked,
| people will be able to legally republish without
| repercussion, so such NDAs are far weaker than even the
| weakest copyright.
|
| - If the group of people with the software is small -
| like most specialized software - enforcing the NDA will
| be so successful that the software will effectively never
| enter the public domain (in both the intelligence and
| copyright lawyer sense of the word). Archival of old
| works will be impossible purely because the NDA did it's
| job too well. Such NDAs would be far stronger than even
| today's life+70 monster terms.
|
| - In either case, traditional exceptions to copyright
| such as fair use, first sale, the merger doctrine, scene
| a faire, and so on will not apply. The NDA will prevent
| disclosure of even things that would not be considered
| copyrightable. Want to benchmark the software? Sorry, you
| can't, it's all under NDA - just take our performance
| claims as gospel.
|
| The underlying problem is that copyright is supposed to
| be a bargain: the public agrees to respect a limited
| monopoly over publication of the work in exchange for
| creating a market that encourages more works to be made,
| as well as unlimited access to the work once the monopoly
| expires. In a sense, this bargain has been broken.
| Copyright owners lobbied for hilariously long ownership
| terms, right around the same time that individuals got
| access to commercial-grade publication tools that made
| piracy easy and interesting to do. "Just NDA everything"
| proposes abandoning the bargain entirely in favor of
| extremely authoritarian yet difficult to enforce controls
| on all works; something that we should not accept if we
| want to continue to have a market for works of mass
| culture.
| LocalH wrote:
| Copyright should return to its original term length, or
| if anything a _single_ extension (so some combination of
| 14 and 28 years between original filing and renewal). If
| "you" as a business can't make enough money from a work
| in 56 years then fuck off, based on copyright you _owe_
| us the work. Their rent-seeking behavior enrages me.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Economists use number of patents as a measure of innovation,
| and my reading of the abstract was basically "piracy
| increases innovation where innovation = patents".
|
| I think a more interesting study would compare software
| innovation in China vs the West. Anyone who remembers
| computer vision pre ~2013 will fondly remember that simple
| things like image descriptors and occupancy grids are
| patented. "Patent encumbered technology" was jargon.
| Thankfully a lot of the more egregious patents from the
| dotcom era are now expiring.
| belval wrote:
| Eh this approach still exists at FANG companies, it seems
| like we stockpile patents to ensure that if we get sued by
| another FANG-level company it's mutually assured
| destruction.
|
| The legal department at a startup I used to work at was
| pretty open about it.
| rhino369 wrote:
| It can also be lucrative if business wanes. Companies
| with near monopoly power already printing money
| regardless so they don't bother. But a lot of once-great
| companies turn to monetizing patents.
|
| Some of the most successful patent trolls buy portfolios
| from companies that were actually engaged in the field at
| the time.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Eh this approach still exists at FANG companies, it
| seems like we stockpile patents to ensure that if we get
| sued by another FANG-level company it 's mutually assured
| destruction._
|
| _> The legal department at a startup I used to work at
| was pretty open about it._
|
| They also can be (and have been) used as a cudgel against
| smaller companies to force them to make a deal or even
| sell out to the patent holder:
|
| _> The blue suits did not even confer among themselves.
| They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit
| responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe
| these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do
| you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters
| in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or
| do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20
| million?"_
|
| https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044_print.html
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| >image descriptors and occupancy grids
|
| What can actually qualify for a patent in Software seems so
| unclear and variable. Did someone invent the concept of
| "Infinite Scroll" and just not file for IP protection so it
| gets used everywhere? Or is it copywrite of the actual code
| that delivers one Infinite Scroll embodiment in
| JavaScript_Flavor_1? Pirating software as in cracking a
| keygen of some whole branded Application is very different
| from launching a relabeled product clone with some reverse
| engineered feature parity. By some interpretations you
| literally can't implement a text box without infringing on
| IP. And I don't see a way, in advance, to figure out what
| patents overlap with your proposed innovation... you just
| appear to cross your fingers, file, wait for the examiner
| to pick a few citations out of a hat, and if you get past
| that rejection, then you launch said feature (if you
| haven't already) and review the take down notices case by
| case. The discovery process can definitely be improved but
| a lot of innovation takes place in spite of the as-is
| patent system; not as a result.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > piracy reduces innovation and discourages businesses from
| building new things
|
| The power of intellectual property holder propaganda really
| is something to behold.
|
| That's not just false, the opposite is true. Infringement
| helps create new industries and more competition. Check out
| this thread for historical examples:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28330810
|
| Also, look at China. Intellectual property infringement is a
| huge part of the reason why it's so prosperous now. Wish my
| own country had the balls to do this.
| zepto wrote:
| > isn't the premise that if privacy was rampant and patents
| didn't exist then more people and companies would be able to
| innovate on the technology
|
| No, because innovating on technology costs money and if you
| can't get a return on that, the incentive to invest is
| eliminated.
|
| The eInk situation is indeed dysfunctional, but the fact that
| one patent holder is bad at business doesn't mean much more
| than that.
| foxpurple wrote:
| It's not just eink. So many technologies are blocked by
| patents. It's said that 3D printing only just exploded
| because the patents required had expired.
| reificator wrote:
| > _The eInk situation is indeed dysfunctional, but the fact
| that one patent holder is bad at business doesn't mean much
| more than that._
|
| Whether they're bad at business or not, it's certainly not a
| situation that makes me feel like the patent system is in my
| best interest.
| zepto wrote:
| Sure, but the point is that no system is going to be
| perfect, so just this one example doesn't tell us much.
| maram wrote:
| Steve Jobs always quoted Picasso
|
| "Good artists copy, great artists steal"
| chadlavi wrote:
| The title of this post was changed from a good summary to the
| pretty much nonsense businessspeak title of the article.
| spir wrote:
| As anecdotal and loosely related point, in the ethereum community
| we think that the unprecedented rapid pace of innovation is
| largely attributable to the need for smart contracts (and often
| their UIs) to be open source or users won't trust them.
| coretx wrote:
| Piracy, according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of
| the Sea (UNCLOS) of 1982, consists of any criminal acts of
| violence, detention, or depredation committed for private ends by
| the crew or the passengers of a private ship that is directed on
| the high seas against another ship, ...
| renewiltord wrote:
| If you read the article you'll find that this is exactly what
| it's talking about. Ships of yore developed techniques to fend
| off pirates which eventually led to faster, more reliable
| shipping.
| azalemeth wrote:
| For the avoidance of link rot, the full paper is at
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3912074
|
| A populist lay summary: https://torrentfreak.com/software-piracy-
| triggers-innovation...
| dang wrote:
| We've changed the URL to the paper from
| https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/economic-
| research/publicatio..., which is a list of papers that this one
| currently happens to be at the head of.
|
| We've also changed the title above from "US Patent Office
| Report concludes software piracy increases innovation", which
| broke the site guidelines against editorializing: " _Please use
| the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don 't
| editorialize._"
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
| azalemeth wrote:
| My apologies Dang - consider me educated for next time.
| dang wrote:
| Appreciated!
| koeng wrote:
| Avoidance of link rot should probably be done with the paper's
| DOI number - https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3912074
| durovo wrote:
| If you consider SAAS and locked-down subscription models to be
| innovative, then this is definitely true.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I want to expand on measuring "innovation":
|
| Rather than summarily declaring that "filing for IP protection"
| IS "innovation," the empirical thing to do would be:
|
| 1) Collect "ground truth": assemble teams of "experts" in various
| disciplines, and give them all lists of companies. The teams
| could be as small as one. They score each company as "innovative"
| or "not innovative" in some given period of time.
|
| If they cannot agree, then you can stop right there. If the teams
| do not agree with each other, then you can stop.
|
| But let's say you do get lists of companies that are agreed as
| "innovative" or "not innovative."
|
| 2) Try out your metric of innovativeness, be it "patents" or
| "copyrights" or whatever. What is your AUC?
|
| Until you do that, you can't say you have a metric of
| innovativeness.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| They're using the release of BitTorrent as a natural experiment
| here, seeing what happened before and after with a combination of
| a few techniques (matching, DID, and IV). I'm not convinced that
| this will say anything more than "after the 90s and early 2000s,
| firms started doing XYZ." The causal statement here is plausible,
| but the methods are unconvincing.
| tablespoon wrote:
| From the summary at https://torrentfreak.com/software-piracy-
| triggers-innovation...:
|
| > The research doesn't look into specific types of innovation.
| However, it mentions that in more recent years the subscription
| model has been embraced by an increasing number of software
| companies.
|
| If the "innovation" is concentrated in anti-piracy
| technology/practices, then the real implications may be quite
| different from first glance.
| duxup wrote:
| What if the result is everything is a rental / SaaS?
|
| For the record I really don't mind SaaS products, they work great
| in many situations.
|
| I just am not sure the innovation is the innovation we want.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Once we get tired of SaaS, the market will create standalone
| expensive software.
|
| Even if I have to say that the subscription model is pretty
| good for B2B: fixed expense per month, someone to bother if
| things don't work, instead of spending my own employees time
| keeping infra up and debugging bugs.
|
| I don't like SaaS for my personal use, I prefer to pay once,
| keep forever and fix on my own (for similar reasons to why I
| like cooking my own food instead of ordering take out all the
| time).
| duxup wrote:
| >the market will create standalone expensive software.
|
| Maybe even hardware, like a Pi server that serves up the app
| even...
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| They suck for two reasons: primarily now I need an account for
| everything I use with separate billing charges. It becomes
| annoying to manage. The other reason the egregious costs these
| companies charge. For a compiled version of software back in
| the day, I could get something that worked for $30-$100 and it
| would last years if not a decade. Now, some of these places are
| charging like $3-$20/month! Software value has not increased
| that much. If I gotta start paying for TODO apps and calendar
| managers, I'm just gonna move to Org Mode. The majority of what
| software provides is a nice gui environment to manage text. No
| clue how this crap can be worth as much as it is aside from
| supporting multiple platforms and enabling web based usage.
| abj wrote:
| We need a SaaS that manages all of these SaaS subscriptions
| and accounts! That's something I'd pay $10 a month for
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I think it's because software has finally reached a point
| where everybody is adequate at using computers that new
| problems have developed compared to the ones that existed
| 10-20 years ago. So now the people who have no idea how to
| use a computer (or are willing to learn) they just pay for
| a SaaS.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The big guys are trying to get this in their store models
| so that they can pull their 30% cut.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| That's fine. SaaS is just a fancy way of saying the software is
| running on someone else's computers. They can do whatever they
| want with their machines, including charging money for access.
|
| People will eventually get fed up with it and make free
| software that runs locally. It will take time but I have no
| doubt it will happen. I find this is a much more reasonable
| proposition than waiting the 100+ years it takes for copyright
| to be invalidated.
| BigMajestic wrote:
| I wish more companies would follow the way of open source,
| self-hosted free version and paid version hosted in the cloud.
| Win - win.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Unless they get crushed by one of the major cloud providers
| offering a rival managed service powered by the original
| codebase.
| Animats wrote:
| _What if the result is everything is a rental / SaaS?_
|
| That's the paper's conclusion. They see the beginning of the
| piracy-friendly period as the release of BitTorrent in 2001,
| and the beginning of the end in 2013 when Microsoft Office 365
| came out.
|
| Now everything is tied to central control, who can turn off
| your service any time they want to.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Hm. I'm sure it can. However, in my line of work, pirated
| software leads to furtherance of proprietary and
| unexportable/hard-to-export file formats that further push others
| to piracy.
|
| Switching to FLOSS systems and open data formats sidesteps this
| whole issue. With open formats, open specs, and FLOSS
| implementations means that data is now portable and easier to
| write translators for. And data is not a roach-motel model, where
| proprietary software uses that model as a form of lock-in.
|
| Tl;dr. Starting off makes sense to pirate. Longterm, FLOSS makes
| more sense for your data and content.
|
| (And, software piracy online feels like the equivalent of
| jaywalking in terms of "criminality". But this is just a personal
| feel.)
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Best of both worlds, pirate FLOSS :)
|
| Which makes sense, given that FLOSS is a legal response to
| overbearing copyright, and piracy is the practice of ignoring
| it.
| p1mrx wrote:
| I only read the abstract, but why do they conflate "product-
| market imitation" with software piracy?
|
| Doesn't imitation mean creating new software with similar
| functionality? That would be relevant for patents, but not
| copyright.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Ah, now to see if we have to decide between:
|
| - Software patents are not a sign of innovation
|
| - Software piracy is good for innovation
|
| I have this here in meme form https://i.imgflip.com/5lspw4.jpg
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "Second, we build a dataset that matches the financial
| information of publicly traded software firms with (1) R&D
| expenditures and patent, copyright, and trademark counts, and (2)
| a unique dataset of pirated software."
|
| That's fine, but they're measuring what _can_ be measured easily
| and calling it "innovation" (at least in the headline), rather
| than anything meaningful. Having more patent filings doesn't mean
| you're "innovating" more. Nor does spending more on "R&D" which
| is mostly just an accounting convention.
|
| At two companies, I worked on getting more patent filings,
| because that was seen by management as The Thing To Do. In both
| cases, we would ask the engineers "what have you done lately?"
| and then decide if any of that might be patentable. Usually this
| involved paying a bounty to the "inventor" if a patent
| application was filed, and another if the patent actually issued
| (4-8 years later).
|
| In one case for awhile (Google Maps), they were actually paying
| people a bounty for submitting an _idea_ for a patent, even if no
| application was filed! I was on the committee that decided if the
| idea was (1) great, file for sure, (2) pretty good, maybe file,
| (3) OK but don 't file, or (4) so bad you don't even get the idea
| bounty. (*Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure this
| system isn't in effect anymore.*)
|
| I've written elsewhere [1] about the dubiousness of software
| patents, so I don't need to explain how they have nothing to do
| with "innovation."
|
| [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580
| MadcapJake wrote:
| > I've written elsewhere about the dubiousness of software
| patents, so I don't need to explain how they have nothing to do
| with "innovation."
|
| _Nothing_ to do with innovation? I 'm not convinced. If filing
| more patents and spending more on R&D is not a sign of (at
| least a desire for) innovation, what is?
|
| I think the biggest challenge with studying this is that how to
| innovate is going to be wildly different from one firm to the
| next. Did this study use the best general measures they could?
| I would say so.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > "the best general measures they could"
|
| If you can't put a number on a phenomenon that actually means
| anything, then saying "well, this is the best we have" is
| pretty weak.
|
| You also said "at least a desire for" which may be your out.
|
| I can give other metrics that have been studied, but I think
| the onus is on you now to justify your claim, or maybe admit
| that one can't define "innovation."
| ortusdux wrote:
| I'm pretty confident that Adobe came to this conclusion a long
| time ago.
| vxNsr wrote:
| And yet, they've made it much more difficult to pirate their
| suite now...
|
| I disagree with anyone who thinks Adobe, Microsoft, or any
| other software vendor made pirating easy bec it would boost
| long term sales.
|
| 100% of executives are focused on this quarter and nothing
| else.
|
| Bad licensing enforcement was just a by-product of focus, and
| resources. As we see pirating O365 is impossible, pirating the
| offline Office suite is doable but much harder than it once was
| and usually requires buying a volume key instead of downloading
| a crack. I know pirating Adobe is technically possible but from
| what I've seen requires a lot more work and isn't foolproof
| like it once was (download Adobe, click crack on crack
| software).
|
| In general good software licensing frameworks have been
| commoditized and it's pretty easy to add to your product. Idk
| anyone who would look at that and think rolling their own
| broken solution is better bec it could lead to better long term
| sales.
| duxup wrote:
| >And yet, they've made it much more difficult to pirate their
| suite now...
|
| Nobody said you get the innovation you want. :(
| vxNsr wrote:
| As in pirating encouraged innovation in licensing? Fair.
| But it's not really the argument that most people
| understand the headline to mean.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I think because of their stranglehold and egregious fees,
| it's opening up other companies to compete reliably now.
| Although businesses just don't want to get away from the
| "Photoshop" or "Premier" name so they just shell out for it
| when they can easily get by without for way cheaper.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Right but that would be an argument away from pirating, ie
| straight competition encourages innovation bec ppl don't
| want to pay the egregious fees for software that they don't
| fully utilize.
| makotech222 wrote:
| Literally ask any marxist about what intellectual property does.
| We've known this for about 150 years now; private property is a
| parasite on society.
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