-the pirate’s dilemma-

I suddenly felt like reviving my blog. My last update was years ago. (Has the blogging phenomenon been around that long? Hm.) And I’m going to kickstart this revival with a post that has been simmering in non-existence for far too long.

Yes, I am a pirate. And this is a topic I’ve thought much about. Read much about, too. Most people wouldn’t think twice about it; to them, they’re getting a game, a movie, a music album for free, after that, cognition ends. However seeing how we’re in an economic downturn and game developers are downsizing or folding altogether, shouldn’t we be supporting the industry instead of undermining it? After all, someone has to be making these games, and it costs money to produce them, like it or not. So how do pirates fit into the picture? Should they be criminalized and hunted down?

Singaporeans might be familiar with the ridiculous ODEX fiasco – basically, an anime distributor got fed up that people were torrenting episodes instead of buying their VCDs (yes, I typed that right, VCDs in this day and age). So what did they do? Sue the socks off those thieves! Demand that ISPs release user browsing logs so that they can track down offenders! An audacious, drastic, fan-alienating, and frankly quite stupid move that turned everyone against them. There’s now a general ODEX boycott – and I feel it’s a step forward for the industry, because it gives a loud and clear message: We want good anime, delivered fast and cheaply. For the anime we can’t get, we’ll just find other channels for our fix, be it torrent trackers, IRC channels or video streaming sites.

In other words, any modern media industry should treat piracy as a competing business model. How can you beat free, fast and high-quality releases of your product? Make your own content delivery cheap (you have to make a profit after all), faster and higher-quality, provide ample customer support, allow your content to be converted and viewed on any device (a.k.a. death to DRM) and for the love of Haruhi, don’t sue your fanbase! It doesn’t serve to scare people into buying the genuine product, it breeds resentment for your brand name and drives the piracy movement deeper underground, a la the fall of Napster and the rise of P2P sites.

Digital distribution is the new face of media retail. Music, video games, movies, TV series, even books – they all can be digitized and distributed the world over, almost instantaneously. When compared to their traditional medium – audio CDs, DVDs, dead wood and ink – the digital versions boast a bevy of benefits. Environmentally friendly, cheaper for the consumer (by way of cutting out the middleman, such as obscenely rich record companies), shorter time before completion and distribution, etc. However people are still holding on to old media. There are several reasons for this.

They might enjoy having a physical collection to display on their shelf (I’m guilty of this to a certain extent), they may not be familiar with or even aware of the alternative digital version, they may have an attachment to their local retailer, etc. Time will help clear away some of these reasons, as the newer generations adopt digital distribution channels.  Brick-and-mortar music retailers have been steadily losing millions of sales to iTunes these past few years. A huge stumbling block, though, is DRM (digital rights management). Basically it’s the idea that the customer should only be allowed to do certain things with their purchase. Want to put it on your iPod, PSP or mobile phone? No way. Want to have it on several computers at once? Nuh-uh. Want to lend it to a friend? No can do.

Why? Because if they take DRM off, people will just send it to all their friends and we’ll lose sales. Really? What if they didn’t even know about your product or never intended to purchase it? How is that a lost sale? Instead, you might have just gained a new fan. Not necessarily customer yet, but a fan. Paraphrasing Cory Doctorow, the greatest obstacle to creators is obscurity, not piracy. For every person who pirates your product instead of buying it, there are a million more who have never heard of your product. What if after pirating it, he passes it on to five other people? And those people each pass it on to another five. And out of all these people receiving your product for free, a significant percentage become fans who purchase your future products. Of all the music, m0vies, games that you’ve consumed, how much of it was recommended by friends? Did you discover your favourite TV series by buying a DVD without prior knowledge?

This tendency of people to recommend media to friends has been acknowledged and used; its called viral marketing. We share links with friends all the time. Whole websites have sprung up for social bookmarking. Due to the swiftness and vast reach of the internet, word-of-mouth (or in this case word-of-hyperlink; funny how the information age is deprecating phrases) can sometimes be more effective than traditional advertising. Take Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It was a wholly web phenomenon, with websites running interviews and friends passing it along. The pre-release anticipation was enough to crash their servers when too many people tried to watch it at once. And later when the DVD and soundtrack was released, it was an iTunes bestseller and managed to recoup any costs they’d incurred by releasing it for free. My only gripe is that they have it on Hulu, and it used to be viewable anywhere, but now they’ve limited it to US only. So by all means, torrent it or watch it on YouTube or whatever, if you like it consider supporting them with a purchase.

While iTunes has done quite a number of things right, DRM wasn’t one of them. But let’s look at another business model. You may be familiar with Valve’s digital distribution service, Steam. It was first conceived of as an alternate publishing method for their seminal Half-Life 2. It was a mess when it first came out. A few years and a few hundred games later, it is now the best and largest PC game distribution system. It has automated game updates and recently, save-games and setting syncing across computers (Steamcloud). It has an integrated community and its easy to join a friend’s game. You can buy games as gifts for friends. Some games have stats and achievements tracking. And the way it handles DRM is much more informed and user-friendly than say, EA, who treats the customer as a criminal.

It goes like this: you log in to your Steam account, where you can purchase games online which are then downloaded to your computer to be installed, or enter a code from a retail product to link it to your Steam account. As long as a game is linked to your account, you can download it to any computer by logging in to Steam there. But you can only play Steam games on the computer you’re logged in to. Thus you can’t pass it to all your friends, but you can have it on multiple machines at once, and unless you have performed binary fission and want to play on two computers simultaneously, this shouldn’t be a problem. The problem being that you have to be connected to the internet even when playing single-player games or the single-player aspect of a multiplayer game.

Compare to say, CD only DRM where the game checks if the physical disc is in the drive. This has a few problems. One, no CD cracks are often distributed right after a game’s release, two it is inconvenient to have the disc in the drive to play and even more inconvenient if you’ve lost or damaged the disc. However this being relatively non-intrusive, is a good way to handle retail releases (or take Sins of a Solar Empire, which I hear has no DRM at all but still profited!) On the other end of the spectrum is the demonic SecuROM DRM which installs a rootkit-like program to your computer that detects how many times you’ve installed a game. This is what EA did with several recent games, Spore’s case being the most talked about. Even ignoring the ridiculously draconian nature of the DRM, it counts reinstallation on reformatted computers or on computers that have had a major hardware upgrade as using up an allocated install. It’s unethical and pisses off the customer.

Cory Doctorow talks about this, and many related topics, on BoingBoing, in his book Content, and elsewhere. He also makes the accurate observation that teenagers are often time-rich but money poor. As a demographic, they’re much likelier to figure out how to torrent games than to pay retail price for them. How can content owners make use of this? I had an idea partly inspired by dNeero which is a social survey thing I first saw on Facebook. dNeero paid participants for their responses, which accounted for a few dollars in my PayPal account. This info was valuable to marketing companies who funded the surveys. So – why not pay digital credit to teens or students who after consuming your media for free, then spread the word, be it telling their friends, writing reviews on their blogs, posting a video, etc. They can then use this digital credit to fund later purchases. It probably has some problems to iron out – I can’t anticipate them – but it sounds like a good idea to me. Much better than suing college students for sharing music.

There’s probably a lot more I could ramble on about but this post is getting long. I’d really like to hear your thoughts, ideas, comments on this topic. Share it with your friends, get them to think about piracy and copyright laws. Because this issue is not going to be resolved unless both content providers and consumers cooperate for a compromise.

~ by blazerknight on 17/04/2009.