Hello mateys,
There’s a lot of discussion recently about the ethics of piracy. A lot of good points have been made out of a handful bad ones. The most compelling one is of course the data preservation one, that piracy is the only way to mass preserve digital media in a medium that is prone to error.
However, sometimes discussions about the ethical justification to privacy often lead to rationalizing. Pirating, as others have exclaimed, is at best morally grey, and there are some cases, namely pirating works of small creators, where it is actively harmful and wrong.
I would like to share my perspective on it. I studied some game theory in college and that course made me look at the world in a different way. I believe piracy is a perfect example of a game theory concept known as the prisoner’s dilemma and evolutionary game theory, if you all haven’t heard about it. My essay is less of a justification of piracy, but more of an explanation of why piracy happens and grounding it in theory.
As a background for this concept, here’s a scenario. Let’s say you’re a criminal faced with two options: snitch or stay silent. There is also another criminal, your accomplice, who is also in jail and faced with the same option. Depending on your response and your accomplice’s response there are different payouts:
I stay silent and accomplice stays silent: 2 years of jail for both of us
I stay silent and accomplice snitches: 5 years of jail for me, 1 year of jail for the accomplice
I snitch and accomplice stays silent: 1 year of jail for me, 5 years of jail for my accomplice
We botch snitch on each other: 3 years of jail time for both of us
Most of you probably know where this is going, but bear with me because i’m gonna go further. The quick analysis of the situation is that there is a best-case scenario, which is both of us staying silent. But this best-case scenario can only happen with the result of cooperation. This is because if one of us flips, the other will have to serves longer sentence. The best case scenario can only happen if we both agree before the game that we will stay silent so we can guarantee the outcome, or else we will serve the longer sentence if the other betrays us.
So, what if we play this game without cooperating beforehand? Well, looking at my options:
if i stay silent, i can either get 2 years or 5 years of jail time
if i snitch, i can get either 1 year or 3 years of jail time
when faced with both these options, which strategy will you choose? of course, I do not want to got to jail for 5 years. Snitching definitely looks mad appealing to me when looking at it from this perspective. That’s why, in game theory, snitching is what’s called a nash equilibrium. Staying silent is not a nash equilibrium, because if the other snitches then I get a resulting jailtime which is worse off than if i just stayed silent.
Note that this does not mean that everybody should snitch. It’s just that, given the choices handed to us, snitching is the one that will result in the least bad jail sentences. As with life, there may be other factors at play, such as the fact that if I snitch, the gang boss might kill me when I get out, which will definitely affect my decisions whether I should snitch or stay silent.
Okay. So how does this relate to piracy? What if we now play this game at a massive scale. Each and every one of us is faced with two options: pirate or buy. Currently, the majority of people actually buy software and media!
But wait. If buying is analogous to staying silent, and pirating is analogous to snitching, why aren’t we at Nash equilibrium? why isn’t everyone pirating software? My sweet summer child, I present to you the concept of law. The purpose of the law is precisely to coordinate people so we don’t fall into our shitty Nash equilibriums and ruin everything, and it does it precisely by attaching a more negative result to snitching (pirating). That’s why we have stoplights (seriously, we talk about stoplights a lot in my game theory class) and why (mostly) everyone follows stoplight laws. (before you say tRagEdY oF tHE cOMmONs!!! the guy Garrett Hardin who coined the term was a hardline eugenicist and his intellectual contributions is a shitstain in academia so shut the fuck up.)
(for people that are curious, this is the realm of Evolutionary game theory. It studies the scenarios where each individual pair off in a population and play a game, and studies stable populations and stable strategies under this model. Ironically, i learned this from Game Theory, Alive by Anna R. Karlin and Yuval Peres. which i got from libgen XD)
So, as we have it, we have a majority of people buying software, with a minority of pirates who are getting that software or media for free. We aren’t at nash equilibrium!! More technically, piracy is stable strategy under the parameters of the system. We pirates know that buying all the software we interact with will just make us poorer and sad in the end, and we’ll be stuck with all the DRM. But on the other hand, it’s untenable if everyone just pirates everything all the time! We pirates profit so long as the majority of people keep buying software. This puts us, pirates, at a very precarious position. It is dangerous when the population of pirates to increase, because this will cause things and create domino effects which will put us at nash equilibrium due to more regulation of piracy and a crackdown of piracy, leaving us worse off and needing to adapt to these changes.
My advice:the most stable strategy right now is buying software whenever you can spare the coin and if you think the value of the software to you matches its price, but pirating if it’s convenient or unaffordable.
Too long, didn’t read: piracy is a stable strategy under the current parameters of the system. If everybody pirates it fucks everything up. So, be as sneaky as you can. Also, read up on your evolutionary game theory you pleb
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We definitely don’t want more people to pirate
Many of us do. Why would we seed torrents, donate to crackers and repackers, offer useful advice etc. if we did not? Personally I would prefer for everyone to stop paying money for software and media entirely, and for the industries that produce those things to collapse, and the legal structures protecting them to be dismantled, because I think we would create better stuff without financial incentives. Not everyone is operating under your idea of a rational perspective here.
Yes, I agree, we definitely want the piracy community to be stronger. That’s one way to increase the payout of the strategy of piracy. If they can’t take us down even if the big guys want to, that allows more people to pirate. I misspoke when I said “We definitely don’t want more people to pirate”
I was thinking of it more as a game: if somehow the population of pirates increases, that will lead to maybe tighter controls on piracy or a more global crackdown of piracy. This will lead to us needing to adapt and recover to these controls. And yes, one way to combat this is to be resilient: that means using and improving the technology of DHT crawlers to decentralize centralized indexers (such as Bitmagnet, it looks promising). Piracy is a hydra.
And yes: let’s not forget to seed ppl
if somehow the population of pirates increases, that will lead to maybe tighter controls on piracy or a more global crackdown of piracy
Yes, I think most people accept that this is how it would likely work. And it actually is the case that many pirates do not agree with what I am saying, and see this as something to be avoided by keeping piracy niche, and would like to preserve their own access that way, and use this reasoning to argue against greater accessibility. But it’s kind of like voting; any action you can take as an individual affecting the broader society is unlikely to make much difference in determining outcomes that affect you personally. It’s possible to mistakenly imagine that they do, it’s possible to not be thinking about it at all, and it’s possible to have different ideas about what you would like to affect; for instance a person wanting to keep piracy niche might have some idea of a group identity of more technically literate and connected insiders like themselves, and want to act to protect the interests of maintaining media access for that group.
To me, this subjectivity of goals and the relative absence of direct personal consequences make these choices very unlike a game of prisoner’s dilemma, in which you can expect the consequences of your choices to be unambiguous, tangible, and personally experienced. Instead of working out an optimization problem for clearly defined personal interests that are the same for all actors, the task is one of empathy and imagination - what can the world look like, what should it look like, who do we care about and what do we want for them? How do different visions of the world weigh against each other?
This only really works in cases where people are making a free choice. But since people don’t live in a vacuum where consumerism, capitalism, advertising, greed, power imbalances, class divides, poverty, platform decay, planned obsolescence, geoblocking, price gouging, etc. don’t exist, a significant portion of piracy comes from either having little choice (I’m poor and I either pirate or I miss out) or making a choice based on ethical considerations (such as not giving money to a corporation that is known to engage in unethical behaviour). Or that we’ve had decades, if not hundreds of years of elites/corporate propaganda telling us that poor people are poor because they’re bad and we must listen with zero critical thinking to our capitalist overlords who are wealthy because they’re smart and know what’s best for us stupid plebs and here you go, have some bread and a circus so you can ignore your long work hours for pittance pay which is totally your fault for being dumb and not because the system is rigged against you, also don’t ever cross us because we control the politicians that make the laws that say piracy is worse than corporate fraud, even though corporate fraud and tax evasion costs countries and communities infinitely more than piracy ever did…
Yeah, piracy isn’t simple.
Your analogy doesn’t separate the facts that paying for content to the platform is not the same as paying for it directly to the creator. You, and many people, assume that a high % of what they pay really goes to the creator. That’s rarely the case
Also, it’s morally wrong that a platform charges you for content they didn’t create. Yet, know one seems to question that. I’m a bit pissed at people calling piracy morally questionable without looking into the concrete ‘harm’… Hence my post last week, copying is not theft.
Platforms charge for streaming/delivery, arguably. The source material already exists (though platforms have been making their own too).
Let’s be clear about the elements we find repulsive, we don’t need to muddy the waters by being disingenuous with this argument.
As a cool sidenote: evolutionary game theory is, unsurprisingly, rooted in biology. It was used to model the populations of various species of animals by quantifying the payouts of their behavior in relation to other animals in the ecosystem. Here’s a quote from Game Theory, Alive:
“A new perspective was proposed by John Maynard Smith and George Price in 1973: Each player could be an organism whose pure strategy is encoded in its genes”
The model isn’t too far off from what happens in reality. Some species of animals actually follow the expected behavior of what will happen when individuals in a population play a game of “rock-paper-scissors”
The side-blotched lizard Uta stansburiana has three distinct types of male: orange-throat, blue-throat, and yellow-striped. All females of the species are yellow- striped. The orange-throated males are violently aggressive, keep large harems of females, and defend large territories. The yellow-striped males are docile and look like receptive females. In fact, the orange-throats can’t distinguish between the yellow-striped males and females. This enables the yellow-striped males to sneak into their territory and secretly copulate with the females. The blue-throats are less aggressive than the orange-throats, keep smaller harems (small enough to distinguish their females from yellow-striped males), and defend small territories. Researchers have observed a six-year cycle starting with domination, say, by the orange-throats. Eventually, the orange-throats amass territories and harems so large that they can no longer be guarded effectively against the sneaky yellow- striped males, who are able to secure a majority of copulations and produce the largest number of offspring. When the yellow-striped lizards become very com- mon, however, the males of the blue-throated variety get an edge: Since they have small harems, they can detect yellow-striped males and prevent them from invad- ing their harems. Thus, a period when the blue-throats become dominant follows. However, the aggressive orange-throats do comparatively well against blue-throats since they can challenge them and acquire their harems and territories, thus prop- agating themselves. In this manner, the population frequencies eventually return to the original ones, and the cycle begins anew. When John Maynard Smith learned that Uta stansburia were “playing” Rock- Paper-Scissors, he reportedly exclaimed, “They have read my book!”
Hope you liked my unhinged post guys :-)
I sure did! :) Thanks for sharing with us.
I think the grand majority of software license purchases are corporate, where companies are willing to shell out a premium to free up labour (and wages) on stuff like in-house tech support.
Even many freelancers shell out for an Adobe subscription, simply because the time they spend on having to learn how to pirate software, how to fix it, and the risk of being sued far outweigh the monetary benefits of piracy.
Even I, with my good amount of experience using pirated software, am slowly making the switch over to FOSS software just to avoid all the delicate details in piracy.
I know downloading/torrenting copies of movies that you don’t own or have a license for is illegal in most countries, but I’m not sure on how legal it is to simply just view them for free on a site like Flixwave.
I really should look more into game theory; that was a fantastic read!
As many OTT platforms are popping up, the tendency to pirate content rises. Why should you pirate exclusive content instead of subscribing to OTTs? Look at Showmax, an OTT platform owned by the South Africa-based main shareholder of Tencent. It’s worth pirating exclusive Showmax content instead of subscribing to. An adult themed OTT platform based in my country (will not mention the name for fear of repercussion from its owners) is literally cringe as expected.
My interest in entering the cinema is losing as inflation rises. Latest titles are literally losing quality, the same for AAA video games. Indie titles are worth spending.
How do you draw your conclusion that you should buy software if you can? Just because I can spend 100 bucks on a game 2024 that is exactly like the game of 2023 but with different names, doesn’t mean I should buy it. If more and more people start pirating it, they have to lower the price in order to reach more people. This is microeconomics.
There is no single reason for an individual to buy it apart from convenience or too little knowledge.
Moreover, as long as the people in movies are getting paid more than governers, there’s no reason to give them any penny. Adjust the broken monetary system, and I’ll pay. But not right now.
Why would I want to give Katy Perry 3 cents per listen? The system is broken.
You may buy a game if it’s made by an independent person.
Granted, “if you can” maybe wasn’t the best phrasing. Maybe I should replace it with “buy it if you think the value of the software matches its price.” Also, you said the bad word “should” here. We’re discussing this purely economically and not morally or ethically as that has been done before. Maybe that can put us at a stable strategy, but who knows. Just don’t be too greedy
It is dangerous when the population of pirates to increase, because this will cause things and create domino effects which will put us at nash equilibrium due to more regulation of piracy and a crackdown of piracy,
Nuh-uh. DRM and draconian laws were already being passed own without piracy, or when piracy was at a low. This also falls into the fallacy that DRM and laws on that line are exclusively the result of piracy - they are not, they come from military / corporate authoritarianism, see for example the effects of 9/11 (the US one, not the Chilean one, although they do also are related in this respect).
tl;dr: Everyone benefits if more people pirate.
Adult explanation: It’s a dog-eat-dog world.