I’m a writer. I sell my work. And I have been pirated. Want to know something? My most pirated work has DRM on it.
You know what really helps with piracy? Not being a complete cock toward honest consumers.
I rarely talk about my kid on this site because he is none of the general internet’s business. But his existence is germane to this anecdote: I have a lot of Pixar movies. LOTS. The kid’s a big fan. I have seen Cars and Toy Story 2 so often at this point that I can recite them, and as such, I am grateful to Pixar for making great movies. (We’re pretending Cars 2 never happened.) I’ve bought them all.
The movie we watch MOST often is… a pirate copy. Now, I didn’t steal it. I bought a laptop off Craigslist and told the guy I needed the software to be legit. He brought the CDs for Office, but to let me test the DVD drive, he brought along a movie. DVD drive thus proven functional, I started looking for the button to pop it out of the tray and he said “Nah, keep it for your kid.” I thought it was sweet of him, and it was, really.
Only I got home and found out the movie was on an unlabeled disc and wasn’t out on DVD yet anyway. Whoops. As an artist, I don’t steal from other artists, and as soon as possible I bought a “real” copy. But as I said, we watch the pirate copy… because my kid isn’t really old enough to understand why he has to sit for up to ten minutes before we can just watch the damned movie. The pirate copy plays immediately.
I don’t blame the kid. I don’t understand, either.
Want to make more money, movie people? Let me skip all of the bullshit. Fuck the warnings, fuck the threatening notices, and definitely fuck the unskippable artsy shit with the fading and the animating and the whatever the hell. I am already committed to paying artists for their work. Stop punishing me, stop acting like I’m the problem, and stop lobbying. Less legislating, more art making.
And while you’re at it, make it EASY to get the movies. Take music. I will always pay a dollar for a song rather than search the pirate networks for some virus-laden file that may or may not eat my brain… at least, now that I actually own the songs and listen how I want when I want where I want. Now that digital music is as much mine as the music I bought on cassette tapes was mine, I buy more of it.
Books? I like paper books a lot. I like writers. I also want my books on my gadgets and I don’t want to buy shit twice. If I buy a paper book, gimme a code to DL a copy for my gadgets, and with me it’s a small gain… and a big gain from people who were happy to buy the book but willing to pirate because the publisher made it hard or impossible to be legit.
Anyway, that’s where I’m coming from. Scott (owner of all things Broken Toysish) is joining the strike tomorrow*. I asked him to take my domains dark as well. There are only eight of you, but the nice thing about a free internet is that all of us matter, even if we aren’t enormous corporations with huge budgets.
*When he wakes up.
” If I buy a paper book, gimme a code to DL a copy for my gadgets, and with me it’s a small gain… and a big gain from people who were happy to buy the book but willing to pirate because the publisher made it hard or impossible to be legit.”
And for fuck’s sake, stop trying to charge me the same price (or more) for an electronic copy as you would a dead tree version. I understand the economics. No printing, no shipping, so what you’re charging me for is the possibility that i might upload it. At this point, if i buy an ebook for full price and don’t upload it to a torrent site i feel like i’ve bought a loaf of bread and let it go moldy. (Disclaimer: I don’t upload books – i just don’t buy them at full price.)
And here here on all the other anti-SOPA/PIPA stuff too. Making bad laws that punish everyone at the behest of people who punish their paying customers in response to the actions of non-paying customers is just bad, bad, bad.
Ultraviolet — truly the height of stupidity in Hollywood. How does switching from a digital copy to streaming help us? I KNOW it helps them keep track of how many times we view a movie… but when you travel… the plane, hotel, etc. have POOR internet and we cannot watch the movie.
I really like the content of BluRay movies, but it would be better to keep buying DVDs so that we can rip them onto the devices we carry around or serve up at home — like you already stated — menus that take 5 minutes to go through an animation… FBI warning… I would much rather spend 30+ minutes ripping a video and playing it from a computer/iPod/etc than to sit through 10-15 minutes of uninterruptable FBI warnings, previews of movies, etc.
This all reminds me of video games at startup… how many gamers know about the developer’s tools they used to make the game? What good is it forcing the player through the list of copyright holders (some 10+ in some games)?
Hah! I have a box of remastered, just play the darn movie already DVDs I created from discs I already owned back when my daughter was young. I wanted both to simplify the movie playing process and protect my investment in Disney and Pixar by not taking the original on trips.
@Matthew – Publishing execs have not convinced me that the physical process of printing, shipping, storage, and displaying of books are not a significant percentage of the cost of a physical book.
Just this morning at Amazon I saw more than one book where the price to buy, in descending order, went:
Unabridged audio version in digital form ($25)
Hardback ($16)
Kindle version ($13)
Paperback ($11)
Abridged audio version on CD ($10)
I get that the cost to make something is not the sole factor in determining price, but when Amazon puts a table like that up in front of you when you go to buy a book, it is hard not to think that the publishing industry is just screwing with you.
I’ve pirated two e-books – both of them because they were not available in digital format. In the first case, the e-book *had* been available, but they took it offline when the next book in the series released and only put it back up for sale a month later. In the second case, the e-book was only available in EU even though the physical version was available in the US as well.
In both cases, I contacted the author and tried to send them money via PayPal to cover the theft. In both cases they told me thanks but not to bother. So instead, when the e-books became available to me, I bought two extra copies of each and gave them away.
That’s why and how I pirate, and I’ll keep doing it until the damned publishers let me buy the books that I know they could be selling me.
As an on-topic aside, all my sites are going dark tomorrow.
Only eight? D:
The funny thing is the amount of damage SOPA and PIPA could potentially do to e-commerce compared to the “potential sales” piracy is eliminating. Art is what makes us great but it is by far not the greatest driver in the economy.
If you treat your paying customers like criminals, they will act like criminals. For computer games having to be online to register a game is pretty common nowadays, but they’re now starting to force you to be online when you play.
So they only way to play the game while I’m travelling and have no internet is to play the pirated copy that has had the DRM removed. It’s quick and easy and if my internet drops out the game doesn’t crash.
NINE! There’s NINE of us! Stop ignoring me!
Seriously, I was wondering today if there was some way we could use certificates in some way to use DRM to stop piracy.
I’m not sure exactly how it would work but if I can carry a bank card that ensures that only I get access to my money and the bank is okay with that, why can’t we figutre out how to make the media available but only readable with some sort of certificate?
Logisitically, it would be ugly (at least initially) but once that is worked out, wouldn’t it mean that we could forego the idea of policing the files, make them available anywhere and then only useable with an authenticated cert?
Like I said, I haven’t really worked out all the details but it would seem to be a way better solution to distribute and manage certs than to polices and inhibit the file copying.
Oh, hell yea I’d buy more books if I could get it delivered to my kindle as well as a paper version for anywhere near the current price of the paper version. I’ve in fact been buying far fewer books since I got my kindle, due to exactly what Wilhelm Arcturus pointed out. When I look it up on Amazon, and see the idiotic pricing it’s just a turnoff and I end up just not buying the damn thing.
I don’t pirate. Have I downloaded copies of games? Yes. I did that because the DRM-laden copies I’d purchased DID NOT WORK, or worked very poorly and/or caused me great problems. Ergo, if I wanted to play the game I PAID for, I had to get a lovely, DRM-free pirated copy. I didn’t want to pirate the game, but I didn’t have much choice. And I feel positively no guilt over that. On the contrary- I’m *angry* that I had to do so.
I love my Kindle, but I refuse to pay ebook prices equivalent to- or greater than- new release hardcover book prices. So I don’t have any ‘#1 Bestselling’ books on my Kindle, and it will remain so until the prices get reasonable… or they (as per your awesome idea) allow me to get, for free or for a minor charge, digital copies of the dead tree books I purchase.
And re: movies… good grief, let me freaking skip ahead directly to the movie. I don’t want to see your advertisements or be forced to watch commercials and/or previews for movies! I’m playing this disc because I want to WATCH a MOVIE. So let me get to it, and don’t make me sludge through all that junk you tack on before the movie, especially if it’s redundant previews for movies that might already have been out for years by the time I’m watching (or re-watching) the movie on the disc!
All of these ways to annoy and aggravate customers for the sake of ‘preventing piracy’, which only serve to drive would-be customers to piracy to remove the annoyance and aggravation.
I have a legitimate copy of every Disney and Pixar animated movie ever. Actually, I have multiple legitimate copies, both VHS and DVD, widescreen and 4:3, enough physical media to fill a refrigerator box. Even just one copy each of the DVD’s is quite a stack, enough to fill a carry-on suitcase. And when it came time to make a 700 mile roadtrip with the 3 year old, I considered the alternatives of:
A) Take said suitcase of DVD’s, try to find the right movie in the confines of a moving vehicle crammed full of people and stuff, try to find the case for the one I’m taking out, try to get the child to stop screaming about how she wants the movie now-now-now while the filler plays….
B) Put a downloaded, pirated version of every single one onto a single SD card and pop it into her InnoTab tablet, letting her find what she wanted to watch herself and switch as often as she wanted. Maybe throw in a couple of dozen hours worth of her favorite TV shows as a bonus. And for the cherry on top, her favorite half-dozen music videos, the ones that have taken up permanent residence in the shadowy place in my brain I reserve for the really dark horrors I never want to see/hear again (did I mention the InnoTab has a head-phone jack?).
I won’t say which door I took. But presented with such a choice, which one makes more *sense*?
–Dave
Hm by the count I’m pretty sure we’re up to like 11 not 8 but math is hard and all that so I could be wrong.
I could be called a pirate cause all the single player games I buy, I ALWAYS download a cracked exe to remove the DRM on the game.
the game plays faster, cracked exe’s often skip all the intro labels (seems games are doing like movies with all the freaking intro studio/publisher/etc label fade in/outs)
I can make a backup copy of the game on an external usb hdd, and just move it over to the main hard drive to play, when done delete the folder and still keep the backed up copy with cracked drm exe on the usb hard drive.
While people had problems with Ubisoft draconian DRM requiring always online to play, thankfully you could download 2 little files to turn off steam requirement and a cracked drm exe so you could enjoy the game the way you want to and not be required to play how they want you to.
So as far as using DRM removing cracks on games, I guess I’m a pirate. I buy the game but for single player games DRM ruins performance, experience, and is way more buggy overall.
Use VideoLAN Classic.
http://www.videolan.org/
It might not look great, but the fact that it will gleefully ignore all directives to block the user from skipping or fast-forwarding past the ads/warnings/etc makes it my favorite computer program to watch DVDs with.
Just saw this today and laughed.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/02/drm-server-transition-to-make-some-ubisoft-games-unplayable-starting-tomorrow.ars
The only people who will be able to play these games are ones who have cracked versions.