Content theft is damaging

I was reading The Times at lunchtime today when I noticed a piece by Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing.net. The article (which can be read here) is largely about the UK Government, in the shape and form of Peter Mandelson, suggesting that people who illegally file share copyrighted items could have their internet connections terminated. The proposal itself is almost certainly unworkable and has met with a frosty reception.

However there's a wider issue to all of this, that is with regard to the concept of content theft. Cory Doctorow writes in The Times article:

"The net is full of artists thriving on copies. My latest novel, Makers, came out this week from HarperVoyager, and is also available as a free, freely copyable download (as was my last book, Little Brother, which also sold well)."

Cory seems to be of the belief that freebies don't do any damage because the person who downloads the freebie would probably not have been a customer anyway. This ideology doesn't just apply to Cory's licensed freebies, it also applies to illegal downloads, which are technically freebies. This theme seems to also be prevalent in Hamlet Au's content theft challenge over at New World Notes. Hamlet posts graphs showing a rising spending figure within the Second Life economy and asks:

"In this chart, where is the evidence that in-world content theft is having a substantial impact on the Second Life economy?"

The answer is obviously "The chart shows no evidence." but the chart itself falls into the lies, damned lies and statistics category. The chart also shows no evidence that inworld content theft isn't having a substantial impact on the Second Life economy, without a parallel world where content theft isn't rife, we have no barometer.

If we follow Cory Doctorow's beliefs we could come to the conclusion that those who are stealing content don't hit the content creators, because they wouldn't have purchased the items in the first place. However, this philosophy misses another point, those who buy cheap items are often getting better quality items than their spending power warrants when they buy stolen content. This in itself means that people who could possibly be competing at that end of the market, now can't do so. For example Stroker uses a mocap suit for some of his animations (I saw this in a documentary), they don't come cheap. His products are priced accordingly. Someone new, who doesn't have such resources, now finds he's competing with Stroker for customers because Strokers wares have been ripped and are being sold at the cheap end of the market. This is collateral damage. That person therefore doesn't grow and without growth, the market as a whole suffers because growth leads to new ideas, new concepts and attracting other new customers.

There is only so much money to go around, if someone can't afford one of Stroker's beds, they can't afford it and no amount of copy protection will change that fact. However when trying to attract new users they need to be able to find a fair level to compete at and content theft damages that level of competition. User to user transactions will increase with more users, that's what the chart Hamlet displays shows us, it doesn't show us the effect of damage.

There could also be some users who could afford the stolen content, but choose not to purchase it because they can find the ripped items. These people are almost certainly a minority of the spend, but even if one consumer is attracted to a stolen item when they would have been willing to pay for the full priced item, that damages the content creators income, this may not be substantial damage, althought I'd wager it could add up to quite a sizeable sum of lost money when spread across the world as a whole.

Freebies have their place and if Cory Doctorow wants to release his books for free in the hope that they will attract custom from other sources then fair play to him, I have no argument there at all, that's his choice but it should be the choice of the content creator agreeing to that, not finding the items in an illicit box of goodies.

Content theft damages the world we operate in, just because someone can do something doesn't mean they should. Let's get more users into Second Life, more spending but let's also have more respect for the wishes of content creators.