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
Then yerr a pirate matey!
The world can handle a stable population of pirates. And you’re one of them, and also me. But what if we grow? What if more people pirate? We will feel the effects in terms of regulation, either through dns blocking indexer sites or more copyright trolls, regardless if we harm corporations profits or not. I say we need to prepare for that, decentralize as much as we can, and be more resilient so that when that time comes we’ll be prepared
Good. Unlimited piracy on media and software corporations.
I’m a communist first and foremost. Private property is wrong in all its forms, this wrongness is just most obvious when talking about intellectual property, because intellectual property can be easily copied and isn’t something physical like the tools in a factory. Of course corporations will always try to clamp down on piracy, they’ve been trying to do so my entire adult life. It doesn’t really matter how many pirates there are, because corporations don’t just want money, they want all the money. If even one person pirates, corporations will try to make piracy difficult.
I guess I fundamentally disagree with your statement that “The world can handle a stable population of pirates.” I don’t think that’s a meaningful statement. It’s not like there’s some “carrying capacity” for piracy after which point the intellectual property ecosystem will tip out of equilibrium and cause pirates to become an endangered species.
I do believe there is a carrying capacity, but not because they might put regulation. they already try as hard as they can to limit piracy, just look at new DRM softwares.
But the problem is if piracy become too big, the corporation s will no longer have enough incentive to make the product/servixe at all, and at that point they will just stop. For example, gaming. None of the main company has a passion to make more games despite what they say, and the moment they feel it’s not worth it, They’ll just kill the whole industry.
So piracy is dangerous in which it might act as a de incentivsor to large corporations, because they care only about money.
You make some great points, but I can’t help but think I’m okay with fewer triple-a studios. Chasing profit doesn’t breed innovation, that’s why every fast food restaurant sells the same damn chicken sandwich and live service games all feel so soulless.
Then let it not be corporations who create. In the end, it is artists who create. People were pretty fine create things in the 1050s, after or before the Arbitrary Christian Epoch, without big corpos around.
People like buying things and then owning the thing they bought. Steam does a really good job giving the illusion of ownership to the buyer while still giving the money to the seller. But, as they say, Piracy is a service problem. Signing up for a Netflix was no-brainer back in the day, but the price went up and now there are over $100/month of options to consider or rotate between. Piracy cuts through all the bullshit and gives users almost all content worth watching on their schedule.
Piracy will grow as anti-user practices grow. Prices are going up regularly anyways, but the services will claim (almost always a greed driven lie) they need to raise them because of piracy. We’re entering the dark ages of microtransactions, low effort DLCs, greedflation. The user bends the knee to the corporation, the corporation flogs the user, the user rates the app 5 stars for the pleasure. The corporation will raise their prices again, because they can. The user that remain may cover the lost revenue of the users that remain. MBA driven greedflation, decorated with happy emoji marketing emails, will define this era.