- on Sat 20 July 2013
The piracy fallacy
I love how most right holders, majors, and other various crappy companies tend to label their customers (e.g. me) as “pirates”, despite the facts that those are probably the same as their biggest customers.
I mean, entertainment is probably the area in which I waste the most money, be it kickstarters, boxed games, digital games, digital music, audio cds, or even boxed tv shows; but I try to avoid digitally buying from large companies, because while I cannot deny that I like lots of things they do, their processes are mostly shit.
What I also really can’t stand is their attempts to destroy my freedom in the vague hope that I will give them more money after that. Or their other attempts to pollute the open web. I have no way of understanding what is going on in their heads and honestly, I have given up trying.
Solutions
The thing they don’t understand is that there are simple ways to make me buy more, but they are way too narrow-minded to even consider them:
Be global
I don’t care if your show is only being released in the UK while I am French. I want to watch it ASAP, and if I can’t do it legally, I’ll download it through other means, but you won’t get money that way.
In the digital age, it makes no sense to make foreign customers wait for months to get products.
No bullshit
When I pay for something digital, I want the highest quality available, and I want it to fucking work. It means no DRM, no crap silverlight or flash player, standard and documented formats (and I’m not even touchy about their patents), and preferably an efficient download method (think bittorent).
In all seriousness, I can count the websites selling “mainstream” FLAC albums on half of my fingers, and there isn’t even a hundredth of the limited subset of artists I could want to buy from on them. The Pirate Bay has them, even though they are not actively lamenting about not getting enough money from me.
Everything should be easy
Why should I have to register on a website that will probably send me tons of crap spams if I only want to get a book? Why do you want me to install your silverlight spyware to watch a movie? Why would I even want to use itunes to get low-quality music for an expensive price? No, you don’t have to know my postal address to email me a link to a song.
This point is highly correlated with the one above. Having to register and/or to install software is a bad idea. Anything mandatory that goes beyond “select product → buy → receive product” is not a good idea, except if you have lots of things people might want to aggregate there, in which case it’s mostly ok to have people create an account.
Reasonable pricing
Actually, the price is a very minor factor for people who have a steady income, if I like what you do, I’ll buy it as long as it doesn’t seem too expensive, hey, I even buy €40 games those days.
The argument that legal platforms cannot compete with “pirate” platforms because they will not put they stuff to download for free is completely stupid, because most people torrent out of habit, and because it fits well with the other above points: you search → select → download → enjoy, nothing more. Free as in beer is only a side effect (though I would rather have it free than giving money to people that didn’t actually produce the work).
Feasibility
Of course, what I mention here is only a vague dream, as most big businesses have their minds stuck into decades-old schemes, and they probably won’t deviate from that until their comfy revenues start to crumble, and by then it will be too late.
But there are a few examples of nice services having the forementioned qualities:
Humble store
That happened somehow by accident, but after successfully running a few Humble Indie Bundles, those guys put together a simple service letting indie developers sell their games. It accepts several payment methods, which is always a good thing, and lets you see easily which platforms are supported, not to mention that there is a bittorent download option.
It’s a really simple idea, “provide a platform for game developers to put their game on, and don’t let it be crap”, but that didn’t exist before.
The downside is that AFAIK, there is no standard procedure to get your games in, but as this table shows it, there are already more than two hundred games on it. The store provides a small widget to the developers, who can then put it on their website.
Bandcamp
Bancdamp is a platform for music artists, that lets them upload and sell their music for a price (which can be $0 or any starting price) and lets people decide to give them more or not. When you buy, you select the price, you pay, and you download in any format you want (you also receive a permalink for later downloads). The openness of the prices also leads to reasonable pricing, and to people giving more than that.
You can also play samples of the music in low quality, but it uses flash and having to look at the source code to obtain the file URLs is not that nice.
Others
In the game world, there is also gog and desura but I never used them so I can’t judge; I didn’t include steam, though it sure succeeds in getting people spend money, but it has DRM, no matter how unobtrusive it might be, and the games are tied to it.
However, this shows that most indies have gotten the gist of the “no bullshit” principle, so the product is clearly labelled, and the worse restriction is often only an initial activation code.
I can also mention Bragelonne, which is a French SF/Fantasy book editor, which sells all of its ebooks without DRM, and most are at a reasonable price (5-10€). The funny thing is that more often than not, the original, untranslated ebook, from the original editor, is more expensive than the one edited by Bragelonne, and has DRM.
You may have noticed that I mentioned stores and content managers without much distinction, that’s because bad policies and stupid restrictions from content managers often end up creating bad stores.
At the end of the day…
I am the customer, I decide what I do with my money, so if they don’t want it, that is a problem for them to solve.
As it has been shown, it is not that hard to get people to give you money, you only have to provide them a decent service. This is sadly not the path taken by the content managers.
PS: Of course, Free Software and CC-licenced stuff is outside the scope of this post, as it already has all the good properties by design. The only Free game I know that has public data on money is ToME, and it gets more than 1k€ in donations each month, which is not bad for a very niche game.