this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Technology
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"Intellectual property" is a silly concept that only exists because under capitalism massive powerful corporations benefit if they can leverage the legal system to permeantly keep knowledge, innovation, and art behind a paywall, and people in society are dependent on monetary gain to survive.
We should, to the fullest extent of the law, make it such that proper credit is given to people who make things, but calling something "theft" when the person you're "stealing" from literally does not lose anything is asinine.
Serious question, when is intellectual property being pirated/stolen (pirating a movie for example), not cause the studio to lose something? You can say that person would've not watched it in the first place, but there's really no evidence suggesting that to be true, and plenty to the contrary. Things that want to be open for knowledge, like open source software or Wikipedia, are consenting to be open, which is in their license. It's not stealing from them because of their license, so why is it also not stealing when there is a license preventing them from doing so? I'm referring to a digital context btw, where pirating is glorified copy&paste over the internet and nothing is technically physically stolen.
I'm not sure of any evidence suggesting that piracy impacts the bottom line in a meaningful way. The piracy problem is primarily one of competition and innovation--people pay for things they find valuable and convenient, and if the barrier to payment is too high, they won't pay it.
Highly pirated movies tend to be the most successful, most profitable ones. I don't know of any high profile, highly regarded pieces of media that didn't earn their investment back purely because everyone pirated it instead of paying for it.
Some links you might find interesting: https://copia.is/library/the-carrot-or-the-stick/
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/22/eu-piracy-rates-tick-back-up-in-study-that-shows-income-inequality-and-less-legal-options-to-blame/
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/12/how-not-overly-enforcing-its-ip-universal-made-the-minions-ubiquitous-and-beloved/
That last one is an especially interesting case study, albeit a perhaps accidental one.
The key here is that as a business your objective isn't to capture every last dollar that you potentially could have if every single use of your IP was completely in your control--you want to make enough people want to pay you so that you can be profitable. Pirates are often just providing free marketing to someone that may or may not have ever heard of your product.