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.
(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. We definitely don’t want more people to pirate, because this will cause things and create domino effects which will put us at nash equilibrium, leaving us worse off.
My advice: the most stable strategy right now is buying software whenever you can spare the coin, 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
Everybody should pirate, everything should be fucked up
Definitely not a stable strategy if everyone adopts it! Just be safe out there in the oceans matey.
although, you do bring up a theoretical point that’s interesting: how can we make pirating both the nash equilibrium and the best-case scenario? How can we restructure the system in a way where software and media is free for all to take without impunity.
Isn’t that roughly the overall vision of the Free Software movement? We can all build software that’s open and free, as long as that is pushed forward in perpetuity to all subsequent versions/forks.
Your compensation for providing code for free, is that you also get access to all other code for free too. I have paid for lots of FOSS software over the years, or at least donated to their projects and creators/maintainers.
I’ve actually paid for more FOSS software and services than proprietary software and services overall. Because I want to support the kind of ecosystem I believe should exist.
I favor a pay-what-you-can model personally. Some take for free, some pay a pittance, some pay at cost, and a few pay well over asking price. It’s actually the same model that modern free-to-play games use. Most players spend little to no money on the game, just playing for free and keeping everything stock.
But a small amount of players are dolphins and whales, people who happily spend hundreds, in some cases, thousands of dollars on in-game features, items, skins, etc.
That gives me some hope that the model can work, we just need a culture of end users that believe in that sort of thing. That’s the kind of pirate ethos I advocate for. Pay for stuff that deserves your money. Pay for things that respect you as a user, respect your privacy, right to repair, right to copy and remix, right to self-host and mod, etc. Those are the kinds of products and services that get my money.
Giant media conglomerates and super-rich entertainers with private yachts and jets, they don’t get a cent of my money. I pirate their stuff with the wind at my back, sun on my skin, and a smile on my face.
Well written
Thanks!
To engage a bit less glibly: Capitalism is very bad, private property (as distinct from personal property) is very bad, and intellectual property is an especially nonsensical form of private property which urgently needs to be destroyed. All software should be Free in the FSF Four Freedoms sense.