Piracy and Economy and Ethics

The recent debacle of over-protected games has made the situation even more clear. The old ways are on their last legs. If people are refusing to buy your game because it is easier to steal it, there's something wrong with your business model. Especially if those people are a major part of your target audience.

A government's laws are basically unimportant and unenforceable when it comes to this sort of thing. Sure, there's always froth, always some poor innocent grandma or seven-year-old getting crushed on the public stage, but you're more likely to get hit by lightning than charged with piracy. This is true no matter what kind of piracy you engage in, aside from fairly obvious exceptions such as actual, physical hijacking of naval vessels.

I don't pirate because I find I (A) want to support people who produce things I like and (B) have enough money to do so. The only times I am tempted to pirate is when a game I want to play has ridiculous anti-piracy measures. Once pirated, I don't have to worry about the piracy protection. Which is an indication as to the hopeless nature of the fight.

However, I haven't pirated in quite a long time. I generally find there are plenty of games I want to play, so I just go get a different one. (This is actually pretty severe. I went to Bioshock 1's opening party, got myself "adam" shots from models in bloody nurse outfits, the whole affair. I did not buy (or pirate) Bioshock 2. Because of its "protection".)

My "morality" of not pirating is not some kind of fundamental morality. In this situation, there is no fundamental morality. There's a reality, and it is our nature as humans to adapt to the reality, and then backwards-reason excuses for ourselves. Anyone who proclaims that piracy is wrong, or anyone who angrily claims pirate protection is oppressive, they're both reasoning backwards to reach that point.

The truth is that the cost of data duplication is so low that it's more or less free. So you think that someone has the right to steal music, or pirate games, or whatever, that's irrelevant. Same with thinking that the people who produced it have a right to gate it. Also irrelevant. Both of those are reasons provided by your clever backwards-thinking brain in response to older experiences in an older reality.

Welcome to today.

As time progresses, our morality will shift to a data-centric view. Because data is cheap to duplicate and extremely hard to contain, we are going to drift towards a "data is free" mentality. Your kids (or grandkids, I don't know how old you are) will look back on the idea that game companies charged for distributing games with awe. Sort of like you looking back on the laws intended to protect scribes from the printing press. How could anyone have tried to stop or slow down the printing press? Sure, you feel for the scribes, but you can't save them.

It's the same situation here.

Right now, most of our morality still derives from rationalizing our old behaviors in our economy of stuff. In an economy of stuff, stealing something is bad because it makes that something not available to the person who owns it. The idea of patents and copyrights was perhaps the first major reference to data economies, but that was in a very different time with very different characteristics. We have formed our morality around them, but it isn't a fundamental morality. Our current era works differently, and we'll watch as our morality swings to favor reality.

How far this will go or what will result is hard to say. Some people believe it will be the death of art, games, music, and so on. These people are really dumb. It may be the end of the reign of pop music and EA, but games and music will continue on without any problems. Hell, people will make them for free even if they can't figure out a way to profit from it. (Although I think there are plenty of ways to profit.)

Other people think it will be the death of money. This seems equally unlikely. Our data economy still exists in the "cracks" of our fundamental economy, the one that sells us power and lattes and other physical things. It may be that in the fullness of time these things will become so easy to produce that they will not be worth much money, but until then, we'll always need cash.

All I can say for sure is that it means the death of copyright and patents as we know them. It may take twenty more years, but eventually people will begin to think that distributing data is a fundamental right, like being allowed to walk down main street. They will begin to think this because we will rationalize the fact that we do distribute data willy-nilly. Our moralities arise from our world, they are not some magic set of rules handed down from on high.

Please note this also applies to DNA, and our ability to manipulate it.