> I got value for money because what I bought was a cheap imitation with a correspondingly cheap price, but I’m pretty sure that the guy that sold it to me made a reasonable profit nonetheless.

This comment suggests to me that, while you consider non-commercial copyright infringment to be A Bad Thing, you have no problem with commercial intellectual property (and probably copyright) infringement, because you saved a few ringits/dollars/pounds and the seller made a few. Surely you 'deprived' Gucci in exactly the same way you accuse pirates of 'depriving' record companies, et al? You suggest that this model is non-viable on the internet, but that somebody will come up with a way to 'Make It Work' - such as finding the cheapest supplier, perhaps, even if that supplier has no right to sell the imitations (copies, to most people) in the first place?

> Pirating copies of Windows Vista or Steven Tyler in China will inevitably to some degree suppress local creativity.

I fail to see your logic. There is only one Microsoft, and only one Steve Tyler - they have both influenced thousands of people who bought their output legally (or otherwise), and those influences may very well have led to further creatvity on the consumers part. The creative output produced by this influence may well hurt Steven and Microsoft in terms of profit if it was sufficiently more attractive than the original offerings, but surely freedom of choice for the consumer is the basis of a free market?

> after working for “one o’ the biggest companies in the world” for the last thirty years or so

Hmmm...no, too easy ;-)

> Why create something when you can just take it?
Because thats what humans do. Nobody wants to re-write an exact copy of Windows. No true musician would want to be a carbon copy of Mr. Tyler (even if he do's make all that money 'without deserving' it! ;-). Creating is not taking, even if that creation relies on something that someone else has created before.

I don’t sympathize with dummard media companies and I have a really hard time getting to the notion that pinching anything from them has any moral implications, against the law or not. It does however have inevitable economic (and related behavioral) implications.

I was in KL a few weeks ago and bought a “Gucci Handbag” for the wife for $7. I was quite proud of myself because the starting price the guy showed me on the ubiquitous hand calculator was Ringgit 175. I got value for money because what I bought was a cheap imitation with a correspondingly cheap price, but I’m pretty sure that the guy that sold it to me made a reasonable profit nonetheless. The Internet is the KL Petaling Street market multiplied by millions, where the equivalent of “Gucci Handbags” have a cost of whatever you can find and take divided by the cost of your monthly broadband connection. My point is that unlike Petaling street, this is not a healthy market model.

As I said before, the likely outcome of all of this in a free market is that someone will show up with a business model that makes them a profit (fair or otherwise). That doesn’t mean that there won’t be some unfortunate side-effects. Pirating copies of Windows Vista or Steven Tyler in China will inevitably to some degree suppress local creativity. It’ll also cause Microsoft or Aerosmith (OK, micro-examples can be argued with) to invest less in creation. You can rail all you want about how market models that depend on greedy corporations are skewed and inefficient, but after working for “one o’ the biggest companies in the world” for the last thirty years or so, I can say that at least in my experience, the sort of Macroeconomics I’m going on about truly do have a profound impact on investment decisions.

Interesting intellectual arguments about how markets establish value are, well… Interesting, but they don’t deal with the fundamental issues of investment and incentive. If no one is paying for it, no one that doesn’t have a gun to their head is going to make it.

So will piracy bring the developed world to its knees? Nope. It’ll just spawn some cleaver SOB to come up with a way to make money off it, maybe by bleeding off investment capital. Will it help the developing world? Surely not. Why create something when you can just take it? It’s just another form of colonialism that sucks creativity from both sides of the (unhealthy) relationship. Seems kind of Orwellian to me, but I’m guessin’ that’s just me :-)

The classic hardware-review-site sort of watermark is, for this reason, usually very prominent and in the middle of the image, which is just awful.

There are also those steganographic invisible-watermark programs, like the Digimarc one that comes (as a demo version) with Photoshop. All those do is let you prove that a picture is yours, though. That's seldom in question, for typical small-scale image-nicking.

Market-based arguments are, you'll be unsurprised to hear that I believe, also dicey in this situation.

Just because some people are willing to pay $25 for a CD doesn't mean that the CD is "worth" $25 and, by extension, that it's inherently OK for the makers of the CD to take action to collect $25 from anybody who copies it for free. This argument only works if all - or at least most - of the people who copy stuff would otherwise be willing to buy it, one way or another. In that case then you actually can argue that copying the software/music/movie directly deprives the people who sell it of the value of a sale, and that in that case copyright infringement actually is, for practical purposes, quite like stealing. Even then, it's still not the same as stealing - mainly because the infringement does not reduce the seller's stock of things to sell - but it does become quite similar, in some respects.

But clearly, it is in many situations impossible for a pirate to buy stuff instead of ripping it off. Never mind whether they want to or not - they just can't.

Take, for instance, the classic high-school software pirate with a vast collection of programs (...most of which he's never actually used; 14-year-olds do love their Server editions of Windows...). The retail price of that software collection is orders of magnitude higher than the kid's actual net worth.

Software companies and their representative bodies like the BSA (and the BSAA here in Australia) are famous for making the argument that if you copy a hundred programs with an average retail price of $100 then you owe them $10,000 (actually, they often seem to argue that you owe them a lot more than that...). But they have never been able to demonstrate that the actual harm to their business is anything like that high.

Clearly, many people believe the fair price for movies and music is zero, or close to it. Most Internet pirates don't think too hard about the subject, of course, but if you ask them whether they should have paid $20,000 for their MP3 collection which contains songs from a thousand albums, they are likely to say no. They are also likely to say that they feel a bit naughty about having ripped almost all of it off, but certainly don't believe themselves to be the perpetrator of a grand theft. There's no way they would have paid full retail price for all of that music.

In the case of actual literal taking-a-material-object-from-someone theft, your ability to acquire the object legally is irrelevant. A billionaire who steals your TV is guilty of the same crime as a penniless hobo who does the same thing. But this is another of the areas in which copyright infringement is not like stealing, no matter how often IP companies say that it is.

[UPDATE: Connoisseurs of the message-board flameout may find this MetaFilter thread, in which one commenter simply cannot countenance the possibility that copyright infringement might not be theft, entertaining.]

I'm not trying to argue, however, that just because many people think copied stuff is worthless then clearly it actually is. The popularity of the iTunes store and the new Amazon MP3 downloads (woo! Got an affiliate link in there!) has demonstrated that lots of people believe something less than one US dollar is a fair price for a single song, as long as it's not encumbered with too much DRM crap.

But there's no way to tell what an actual "fair price" is, because the market is so heterogenous. Some people believe the fair price for, for instance, a single MP3 track is literally zero in all circumstances, some people reckon one per cent of their daily wage sounds fair - which could mean five dollars or 0.8 cents, depending on where they are - some people don't even really care what it costs because they're really rich, and on it goes. If we give everyone on the planet an even vote, then I think the "market" price for a single MP3 track is likely to be only a few cents. I'd pay that :-)!

And, as I said above, all "providers" of copyrighted data are not alike. I'm not saying "creators" there, because the creator and the provider are often completely different entities, especially in the movie and music industries. If you know for a fact that buying an album by your favourite band will definitely not make the band any money at all, because they've got a major-label contract [note: naughty words in that article] that actually takes money away from them, and if you don't buy the major labels' argument that they need the money to find and "support" other upcoming bands that you might also like (and today, it's really not hard for regular non-top-40 musicians to distribute their music directly), then I can, once again, see nothing ethically wrong with your argument for piracy. It's still unquestionably against the law, but so are various drugs that're much less harmful than the legal ones.

And, for this reason, I believe I'm in the right when I VeRO picture-copiers on eBay, while not being concerned in any way for the poor little major-label record companies or top-40 artists who might be a bit richer if the IP companies reached their goal of making everybody pay every single time they "enjoyed" just about anything copyrighted.

All of these arguments have, of course, been made before, and will be made again. I don't think I've presented them terribly well, either. But I do think you need to work out the details of whatever argument you want to make here.

DRM pushers and information-wants-to-be-free-man pirates always make facile arguments about how it's axiomatically true that anything someone will pay for should be paid for by everyone, or that anything you can copy for free should be free to copy. But I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

Yeah, that'll work.

Firing solution found, Cap'n! VeRO notice... away!

One changed the pics in almost all of their auctions, but forgot one, so I VeRo-ed that one. The other one ignored me entirely, so I got to VeRo five auctions there. They'll probably be gone in a few hours; the VeRo people act pretty snappily.

I think the reason why VeRo works so fast is that it's used, on a much larger scale, by major IP companies, who are not known for their patience. They're supposed to use VeRo to smack down sellers of counterfeit handbags and bootleg DVDs and so on, but some companies instead use it to try to maintain a monopoly on the sale of certain products.

For a while there, for instance, the Church of Scientology was VeRo-ing every attempt to sell a Scientology E-Meter on eBay, even though the devices were perfectly legally owned and not counterfeit. (Useless, but not counterfeit! :-)

I note that there are currently E-Meters and user manuals on eBay, so with any luck eBay got wise to this. But I think there are still some companies that VeRo stuff they have no business preventing. It's like the plague of unjustified DMCA takedown notices.