Nonsense. I'm a designer (say) that makes fancy clothes. I will only ever sell to famous Hollywood types, so they'll wear my clothes and make them trendy.
Because I'd never sell them to you, do you have the right to take my fancy clothes without paying for them?
Or, better example: you make some popular clothes. Hollywood is wearing them and they are just THE RAGE. You'd like everyone to wear your clothes, but you think it's better to force people to buy them from your Santa Monica boutique that is only open on Sundays for an hour, and require a receipt from the parking garage to get in the door. People who have been to your store in the last month are allowed to order online, but only a month after you release a new line. A year after you release a new line, you make everything available online, but only if you buy the entire line at once.
Another clothes-maker, noticing the popularity of your design and the growing frustration of your customers (and potential customers), creates clothes that look and feel exactly like yours, and make them available with free shipping online within a few hours of you making new designs.
Your customers (and potential customers) who don't live in Santa Monica, or those who can't make it to your store during business hours, or those who take public transit—frustrated with the roadblocks you've put between your clothes are their wallets—start buying from the pop-up e-tailer.
You complain about how this (and this alone) undermines your business. Your customers say you forced them into it. Neither of you is right.
Agreed. But making the point that offering an alternative to piracy (a real alternative... the point is simplicity) will solve part of the problem and is good business sense. But it's change, so it's scary.
People waving fistfuls of cash in your face isn't a bad problem to have.
And, no, that won't stop piracy. Some people just don't want to pay for something if they can get it for free. But those people are not taking dollars away from your income statement: they never would have bought in the first place.
Because I'd never sell them to you, do you have the right to take my fancy clothes without paying for them?
A better comparison would be counterfeiting your fancy clothes, rather than stealing them, because piracy isn't theft, it's "copying".
Many elements of fashion design are not eligible for copyright in the US so it's conceivable that your design (minus the logos, etc) could be legally copied and mass produced by someone else who is willing to sell to customers that you are not. To me, that's a closer parallel to what is happening in the movie/tv industry today, except that in the media industries, copying the product costs virtually nothing, meaning everything is available as a copy, and distribution costs virtually nothing with the right technologies. Even more strange, those customers, who judging by the success of iTunes, Amazon and Google music stores, are perfectly willing to pay despite high quality, convenient, free copies being available a couple of clicks away.
I think most people follow a pretty simple ideology with this stuff: If you give me a way to pay for a TV show that moderately compares to the experience of watching the pirated version, I'll pay. If you refuse to sell the product to me in any way, I will not feel guilty about downloading one of the six different versions in three different file formats available to me via some other source. Your customers understand that as a business in the media industry you had a choice: (1) Give me a way to pay you or (2) Don't. Unfortunately, option #2 just means I now have to choose whether or not I'm willing to do something that, in my view, is only "morally questionable".
This is a hilariously bad analogy, since (through some shocking oversight) lawyers haven't managed to totally screw up the fashion industry yet. I don't have to take your fancy clothes. I can make near-perfect facsimiles and sell them for profit without any regard for anyone's intellectual property. This of course is a disaster for the fashion indust--wait, what's that? The fashion industry is thriving?
I think I don't have the right to take your clothes, but I certainly have the right to copy your clothes and make my own. How do you think this scenario applies to digital goods/content?
N.B.
I don't like the use of "right" here I think it's ambiguous. Are we talking about laws, morals etc.? For simplicities sake I'll use "right" in my reply.
I also don't like the idea of trying to force digital goods to act like physical goods.
Please do not equate the deprivation of rivalrous goods with permission to reconfigure one's own computer.
A better comparison: should the parent have the option to copy the clothing style when making their own clothes? As it happens, the limits of copyright permit that, though that constitutes less of a metaphor and more of just different parts of the same copyright law.
I see no moral argument against piracy in the specific case that the content provider will never allow you to legally watch the show in your area. There is zero marginal cost to the provider (as in all cases of piracy) and, in this special case, there is also zero lost revenue potential. You are better off and the content provider is no worse off; this is Pareto optimal. Nobody is being hurt in any way by this specific instance of piracy.
The problem is that there are things that never are going to eventually become available, for example:
- Culture specific or non-mainstream programming - Reality TV from other countries
Given that you're never going to even be given the option to pay for something, I think the argument breaks down.