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We need a Steam client for TVs and Movies: A response to Bill Maher
PART 1 =================== I generally enjoy Bill Maher?s show, Real Time, in which he has a panel discussion about current events. His unapologetically harsh take on subjects draws criticism from all ends of the political spectrum, sometimes intentionally. On his most recent show, Bill talked about internet piracy in regards to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA): "The bill is dead, the issue is not. When I first read about it, I was like "oh good they stopped this!" But then I thought, you know what, my documentary, my comedy documentary Religulous. I remember when that was out and they were pirating it and all the money we lost on that. Somebody has to bring up that there is a moral dimension to this. I don't think this is brought up enough. Now I know that they're saying that apparently this bill, somehow, would infringe on free speech. I haven't read the bill, I don't know, I don't even know if anybody who has read the bill could predict that. But it seems like it might be a red herring because people just want to steal, because they can. I call it Caucasian looting (panel starts to respond). Just because you are sitting at your computer in your pajama bottoms doesn't mean you're not stealing." Let?s take a moment to critically analyze Bill?s position in light of the world that?s not under stage lighting. Money lost? ---------------- Perhaps one of the biggest arguments regarding intellectual property in the digital age is the money lost on products. Piracy comes in many distinct forms of varying explicit legality. From a historical perspective, the word piracy elicits a kind of lawless, frumpy and bacteria-infested anti-law anarchist that does what he pleases -- a heroic sort of mythos built up around nonexistent mythicized legends. In recent media coverage, the word pirate brings to mind a disenfranchised Somali citizen willing to hold Americans at gunpoint on ships and demand ransom money. Lastly, internet piracy has two very distinct views between those savvy with how the internet works and those who don't. From my perspective as a student and seeing how the rise of social media has impacted the sharing of copyrighted materials from universities across the globe, there seems to be a few categories in which to place people who use online torrenting websites. A torrent is a file that one downloads that, in combination with software, allows one to access people hosting material via a "seed". For all intents and purposes, the physics behind the operation is no different than writing a book on your computer and hitting the copy and paste keys. One camp of people will download the product simply to avoid buying it. A major factor here is personal wealth and the rising cost of purchasing media in whatever form. Another camp will download it as a test-run for the real product. Still others will download simply because it is there and some may be motivated by personal protest. This is neither a catch-all nor as complex as it really may be, but how it may be constructed in various ends of the university student spectrum. So who else may be in on the (let?s call it what?s actually at stake here) torrenting issue? Of course, with any freely available product that is in high entertainment demand, some will sell the product for a profit. An example may be a street merchant torrents The Elder Srcolls V: Skyrim, burns it to a dvd and sells it for £30. I feel that, in this case, it is legitimate to call the act of downloading a product for free, for sale, piracy. The case for censoring the internet for the stopping of people selling a bootlegged movie on the streets that had torrented it is a murky one. In any discussion of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the case of a street vendor is almost never brought up and, instead, the example that is almost always used against "piracy" is that of a lazy student too cheap to pay $20 for a DVD of Bill Mahers' new documentary. Using the latter example, do students, who very rarely ever sell pirated material for profit, take money from the media developer, in this case Bill Maher, or do they otherwise lose money from these torrents? [The answer, surprisingly, is no.](http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-tons-more-music-than-average-folks.ars) Again, in the case of students using torrenting for a variety of means, the numbers show that those who torrent to test drive often wind up being the media producers' biggest buyers. Since the product has been test-driven and the quality has met their standards (whatever they may be) and, perhaps, the student has the financial means to enjoy the product after buying, the product is bought. A personal example is the National Academies Press. Recently, they released a huge amount of their published works online for free. Torrenting NAP books is difficult, since not many people tend to think on a rainy day to read up on [The Digital Dillema - Intellectual Property in the Digital Age](http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9601). Thus, the demand for such a product is low. By creating a demand for the physical product, either in ebook or hardcover form, via releasing the media for free, people can test-drive the book and then purchase the physical copy. Indeed, according to Ars Technica, purchasing more books from NAP simply from this one reading of a free book increases NAP's revenue by counter-intuitively giving it away for free. An example from the world of academia is also pertinent for discussion about money lost on products freely available. The internet archive for pre-published papers in physics, [arXiv (pronounced archive)](arxiv.org), allows one to put up a paper they're planning on publishing or that is about to appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. Academic journals must be paid for like any other copyrighted medium. ArXiv provides a free preview for scientists like myself to see someone's paper before buying it. ArXiv has not destroyed the academic world's profits for publishing in pay-for journals like Nature, Physical Review or The Astrophysical Journal. Not even close, sorry Bill. Moral argument: is torrenting stealing? ------------------------------------------ The argument that Bill Maher uses is that torrenting is stealing. The act of going to a computer, downloading a product and, instead of paying the developer for the services rendered, not paying them warrants a fine or some other judicial punishment akin to walking in to a book store, looking at a book on the shelf and walking out with it right past the cash register with no qualms about it. What does it mean to copy a file? Is a copied file a stolen version of the original? Let's engineer a thought experiment where we had a Duplicator-o-Matic 9000. We put in Michaelangelo's David and out pops two, atomically identitcal statues. Which one is the original? This thought experiment, also known as the [Ship of Theseus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus), is a philosophical conundrum that simply can't be labeled black and white between stealing and not-stealing. The phrase "this is a phrase" is a 100% exact duplicate of a phrase "this is a phrase" from a book that exists somewhere on Earth. Does my using that phrase without purchasing the book constitute a violation of copyright? Am I stealing that phrase? How about if I were to extend the quoted phrase to the entire context of that example book. Where, along the lines, would it transcend from being not stealing to overt copyright violation? Exact copying has been a sought-after technique for millennia. From scribes trying to make more copies of Aristophanes' plays to share with other Byzantines to monks wanting to preserve the word of God by (trying to anyway) copy the Latin texts of bibles word for word, keeping a message alive through exact copying is a tool. Indeed, its a tool that's integral to the working of modern computers. But is this an argument harboring the use of exact copying for self-profit? Hardly. I wouldn't be the first to rather see profits from scribes' hard word copying go to the "Byzantine Foundation for the Preservation of Aristophanes' Plays" than to some blind street vendor Tiresias who makes a killing off the scribes work by doing it himself and selling it for much less. I don't think the arguments for determining if the copying of bits should be held under the auspices of legal corruption. Even in a perfect world if there were no corruption in politics, this is a discussion better left for philosophers than to lawyers. A problem that exists is one in which those making the judgments in the media are ones without any expertise on the subject, much less philosophers of information. So while Bill Maher may suggest that the mental act of cognitive dissonance (as he sees it) of saying to one's self "you know what, instead of purchasing Bill's documentary, I'm going to get it for free instead because I'm a selfish fuck and don't care about those who do the hard work to product such material" is right on the money for a very small, very select few of those that do torrent copyrighted works, it blatantly and willingly exposes his own dissonance of not wanting to explore the deep philosophical underpinnings of what an exact duplicate of a thing is and the underlying monetary connotations behind it. more