A lot of the usual tropes are trotted out for this one, but it gets old explaining how copying is not theft and downloads do not directly equal lost sales. Instead I’d like to focus on the fact that whether or not people download this unfinished copy of the game is essentially irrelevant – for Crytek, for their publisher EA, and for PC gaming.

What has been leaked isn’t the final copy of the game, but an unfinished version that takes a bit of fiddling to get working right. Didn’t something similar happen a few years ago? Oh, that’s right, back in 2009 there was that unfinished copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Here’s the spoiler: Despite being panned by critics, the movie went on to do incredibly well at the box office. The leak certainly didn’t hurt sales, and may have actually helped build excitement. In the gaming world, the same thing happened in 2003 with Half-Life 2, which was leaked not a month and half but a full six months before release and went on to sell 12 million copies.

There’s this ridiculous idea that leaked copies of things mean something different than full final versions – I don’t get it. There are cams of movies, music leaks, DVD screeners, and every so often an in-progress beta of a PC game. These leaks are extremely low-quality compared to what is going to be available hours after release, when uploaders have access to better source material. Are the low download numbers of this game the result of the frothing rants from the likes of Destructoid’s Jim Sterling, or just because it’s a lot of effort to go through to only play the first part of the game? I’d bet on the latter. Thus, there’s not much point in getting upset – even if the leak hadn’t happened, there will be a copy, and a higher-quality copy at that, available for free on release day. If anything, the leak builds excitement for the game as people wait for the real thing.

I also continue to see support for the idea that leaks and downloading somehow justifies developers abandoning the PC for consoles or using invasive DRM schemes. Clearly, in their haste to blame “pirates,” the content industry’s favorite scapegoat, these people are abandoning all logic. I suppose they are thinking “Well, if the game is just going to be downloaded instead of purchased, we might as well not release it at all.”

This, despite the fact that Crytek and EA make tons of money from games, including PC games (they planned for a PC release, after all). This, despite the fact that if you don’t release it, you’re essentially guaranteeing that you’ll make no income – something Jim Sterling’s fails to realize when calling for EA to “pull the PC version of Crysis 2 right now.” It’s the same business model put in place by the idiots in the band Brandt Morain, who refuse to sell CDs of their music (and aren’t even popular enough to show up in a quick torrent search). This, despite  the fact that DRM has yet to protect anything. This, despite the fact that every console has already been hacked, with perfect versions of popular games available free for the downloading right now.

If Crytek and EA objectively add up their pennies and find out that sales aren’t enough to justify development for the PC, that’s their business decision. But it’s not because of the imagined boogeyman of “piracy”, since plenty of other studios are doing fine releasing primarily for computer and without cumbersome DRM schemes – even though their games also shared free online.

Then there’s the whole aspect of “supporting the studio” by buying and not downloading their game, as though one can’t do both, or wait for a while until the price decreases. It’s almost as ridiculous as buying a commercially produced music album from a retail store to “support the artist.” If creators are really interested in getting direct support from fans, why not just set up a donate link on their websites? This way, fans who actually want to support the people creating what they enjoy can do so regardless of how they choose to obtain the finished product. There could even be a whole series of incentives to donate based around the game world or the process of creating new games rather than simply the game itself. If you want the physical copy of the game (or CD, or whatever), by all means. But you shouldn’t have to purchase something you don’t want or need from a corporate middleman because that is the only way to support the creator.

There isn’t going to be a social backlash against filesharing, no matter how much the content industry and their blogosphere supporters want it to be so. When a perfect copy of something can be made available online and shared directly between fans at no cost, it makes good economic sense to participate. Leaks, rips, and copies are going to be available whether one likes it or not – and it’s okay. Successful game studios will be the ones who give their fans ways of providing financial support that continue to work in that environment – not flying off the handle because filesharing exists.

Copying others is how we learn, and while many people in modding communities are respectful, there is always somebody who reposts a mod on a different site or tries to pass another’s work off as his own. Seeing this happen is almost an indicator of a mod’s success. Unfortunately, all too often the original modder responds terribly, announcing that they will no longer work on the project or even taking the whole thing offline.

It seems that these modders fail to understand that stopping the project punishes its numerous fans for their loyalty. It even punishes the modder himself as presumably he enjoys what he’s doing. The only person this response doesn’t hurt is the copyer, filesharer, “pirate,” or “thief,” who likely doesn’t give a whit about how they feel, whereas everybody else cares deeply. If anything, that guy wins: He still has the free work, and since the original guy is packing up, he can scoop up the credit. I have to wonder if the real motivation behind this response actually is to hurt the fans, in the hopes that they’ll be upset enough to fight the modder’s “battle” for them.

In the end, who cares? The entire modding community is a series of derivative works based on a game; it’s hypocritical to make a fuss about derivative-derivative works. If somebody is trying to pretend the work is their own, it’s only going to destroy their own reputation when they get called out on it. And if they’re trying to improve, fix, or build upon a work, why not join forces?

Too often modders, like more mainstream content creators, desperately cling to a false sense of control over what they see as “their” work. The reality is that if you don’t want your stuff copied and shared, keep it on your own computer, or, better yet, do nothing.

First of all one has to understand that it is highly unlikely that the show was successful solely because of the inclusion of the song. Commercial success does not suddenly mean money is owed. While it may have been nice to get free money (royalties and the like) from repeated airings of the show, it is not that but the lack of proper attribution that is the real cause for frustration.

Assuming the network will never deign to correct its mistake, I think one of the most important things to do is use the internet connect the song and show back to the artist. If the song really brought that many people to the show, they are likely to start searching for it online. Something like a post on the artist’s website will show up clearly in search results, and it gives the artist an opportunity to direct new visitors to free downloads of the song, concert dates, and his other reasons to buy (perhaps tweaked to appeal to fans of the show). It’s also a good idea to have a way for people to send donations.

Granted, these things aren’t going to make you rich, but then neither are royalties. What it does do is save the artist tons of money in legal costs trying to fight the network, and help build his name as somebody who creates quality music and expand his fanbase – all despite the network’s “oversight” in crediting the person behind the work.

Noncommercial restrictions are unnecessary; commercial use isn’t all that different from filesharing. A lot of the potential difficulties we’re seeing are only salient because we’re in between old and new ways of doing things. Methods that work to promote yourself as a creator are valid whether or not the person sharing what you’ve done is charging for it. For example, the way the people behind the movie Ink responded to its filesharing popularity was excellent, accepting donations and selling all kinds of unique physical objects. What they’re doing works just as well if somebody is selling tickets to showings of the movie.

I’m interested to hear what budding artists think of these ideas – it’s new territory for me too.

Of course, this is a grave misunderstanding of the marketplace and the value of the secondary market, something often discussed on TechDirt (Penny-Arcade is somewhat more sympathetic). What people like Cory fail to understand is that making a purchase is an economic decision for the customer. There’s no “right” way to do it; just because selling new games throws some money to the game’s developers doesn’t mean you’re an unfeeling shell if you save money getting it secondhand. Certainly there is more involved in the decision than simply price, and wanting to support the game’s creators is a potential influencing factor; however, theatrics like this sure don’t do much to build love for THQ and their employees.

Here’s the kicker: online multiplayer is usually an incentive to buy a game instead of downloading the free version. By removing this benefit from the used games, Cory’s company has essentially made the two identical. Customers should ask themselves why they bother buying the used game at all when they could get the same benefits for free. Believe it or not there’s a competitive marketplace at work here, no matter how much folks like Cory whine about it.

People like this need to quit trying to blame others: It’s his company’s responsibility to encourage purchases of new retail versions. This should be elementary, but providing incentives for people to buy the game new needs to be about adding benefits, not taking them away. Lowering retail prices, including DLC, or deluxe editions all help give customers a reason to buy. Taking away core features and pretending it’s an extra is not.

Tim kicks it off with a statement voiced only by industry critics of free culture:

The general (vocalized) attitude these days seems to be one that suggests we shouldn’t have to pay money for anything.

It bears repeating that nobody is saying this except folks for whom a free culture threatens their business model. It’s a strawman argument, set up because it’s so easy to knock down. Of course everything isn’t going to be free, of course businesses want to make money, of course it costs money to make things. Instead, market forces have priced some things at zero cost because of their extremely low cost of reproduction, something that I think forms the basis of much of gamers’ dislike for tacked-on fees.

A great example of this is your typical MMO, where you are required to shell out $50 for a game that is one hundred percent useless without a subscription fee. They are selling you infinitely reproducible bits that are essentially a client for a paid service. Tim is being disingenuous when he says:

The concept of “shelling out cash to use stuff we’ve already bought” is nothing new

Every one of his examples involves physical objects. When you buy a car or a DVD player, you are getting a real physical object with a real marginal cost to produce. It’s easy to make the distinction between the vehicle and the gas to run it, or the DVD player and the discs.  Not so with an MMO client. Sans subscription fee, you have useless bits taking up space on your hard drive. You can’t tear it down and use it for parts, you can’t sell it to a friend, you can’t do anything with it. Being frustrated that you are double-charged like this is entirely legitimate.

It’s a sentiment easily undercut by a small change to the business operation: Give the client away for free. Making copies of it costs nothing and fans of the game will happily do it themselves. It becomes clear that the benefit comes from the subscription, not the software, and people won’t feel like they’re being ripped off. Besides, you want more people playing the game, and what better way to increase the player base then removing a $50 barrier to entry?

If a game is asking for a subscription fee…it’s because there are larger costs associated with running the game.

This is always the excuse for why MMOs need to charge subscription fees, but it’s based on the flawed reasoning that because this business model requires servers, customers are required to pay for their upkeep. Games like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 get around this by allowing players to host their own servers. But for MMOs, wouldn’t this allow users to “enter the world of hacking and mods and exploits?” Sure. But again, this is a problem easily combated in two ways: First, by providing an incentive to have your server play by the rules; second, by designing your game in such a way that shortcutting to the top isn’t necessary.

In fact, having people self-host would probably reduce the amount of cheating on “rule-following” servers. The folks who just want to jump to Level Max and play the endgame can do so, while players who want to grind it out the hard way can do that too.

I find it amusing that people will go out of their way to block every single advertisement headed toward their consciousness, throw fits about the companies sending them that way, and then still sit and drool over trailers for new games, etc.

The difference here should be clear. The best advertising is quality content that people want to view, and for many people game trailers are just that. It’s something they can share on YouTube and talk about how excited they are for the title. Advertisements “headed toward your consciousness” are a nuisance. I doubt Tim turns up his radio to hear the commercials, enjoys pop-over flash ads, and makes sure not to skip anything when he records a TV show. People not liking that kind of in-your-face advertising is entirely legitimate; the idea that you can use advertising to provide a lower-quality experience people want to pay money to improve is ridiculous. Mocking people who resent such a model is even more so.

Finally, there’s DLC. Again, the anger comes from feeling like companies have deliberately left out parts of the game so they can sell it back to you (and for some games, this is exactly the case). That’s not an “alternative source of revenue,” it’s money-grubbing. If you’re going to do DLC, it needs to feel like it is a true addition to the game, not a missing part of the experience. Better yet, throw the typical DLC model out the window in favor of something truly innovative: Promote the DLC, get people excited for it, and take pre-orders. When orders reach a predetermined monetary amount, the content is released for everybody free of charge. The fans are paying to release the DLC to the world, and by setting an amount beforehand (and accepting donations afterward) the company gets paid to do the work.

Stop pining for the days of video games where you paid $50 and you had a whole game. Those days are gone.

When people get upset about subscription fees or DLC, it isn’t because they think “everything should be free,” it’s because they feel like they aren’t getting value for their purchases. Expecting to get a complete product for a purchase is not at all unreasonable, and if those days are indeed gone, it’s the game companies who lose. You can get a complete game for a single purchase price of $0 right now, and the number of people utilizing this deal is only increasing. You need to give customers a reason to buy, and saying “but this is how our business model works” doesn’t fly.

I’m tired of people like Tim signing on to thoughtless consumerism and mocking gamers who dare oppose the poor business model decisions of game companies. As filesharing continues to flourish, game companies are going to need to actually innovate, not simply find more ways to erect toll booths on the experience. Your business model should never be about keeping things away from people; not giving customers what they want is never a good business model. If giving them what they want breaks your business, don’t mock them – fix your business.

Konrath starts out making some clearheaded observations about filesharing (”piracy”), recognizing that current technology has made copyright unenforceable, that there is no evidence that sharing hurts sales, and that free promotion is a good thing. Much to my dismay, he proceeded to append his post with the smile-erasing quote, “I’d like to make it clear that I believe piracy is stealing. I simply do not equate it with stealing something tangible.” Wait, what?

Likewise, Gerrold realizes that part of continuing to make money in a changing world involves recognizing what business you are actually in, something Mike Masnick often talks about. Much like the horse buggy industry was actually in the business of transportation, the recording industry is selling entertainment, not plastic discs. Disappointingly, Gerrold caps this off with a false axiom, saying, “Downloading what you haven’t paid for is electric shoplifting—no question.” Excuse me?

Both of these authors have undermined their otherwise intelligent pieces by buying into the notion that copying files has some kind of relationship with physical theft. One is infinite, so copying increases the amount available for all, while the other is scarce, where taking deprives somebody else of the object. Still don’t understand? Watch this simple video.

Nobody is breaking into these people’s homes and leaking artwork to the internet; nobody is depriving others of objects. Parroting the deliberate attempt to equate sharing with destructive behavior is ignorant – if you can’t parse the difference, it’s difficult to take you seriously.

Michael’s post makes use of two popular arguments: Somebody can buy a theme and give it to somebody else for free, and third parties can bundle a bunch of other themes together and sell those.

The first:

“…you can do anything you want with your theme, so long as you don’t sell it on or give it to someone else.”

This is an example of someone attempting to apply the rules of scarce physical goods to an infinite digital good. Obviously, it’s very easy for somebody to resell a theme or give it away; people do this with physical stuff all the time. The difference in this case is that after the selling and giving is done, Person A still has his own copy. Conceivably, he could buy a theme from Michael once and share it with the whole world, perhaps even suckering a few bucks out of folks in the process.

Pragmatically speaking, it doesn’t matter if you license under the GPL, Creative Commons, or copyright, people are going to share it with each other. It’s not dishonest, it’s not “wrong,” it’s just natural.The lesson here is that if one purchase is enough for everyone (always the case with infinite goods), you’re selling the wrong thing. Instead of trying to force people to pay for an infinite good, you need to sell them something scarce.

I hinted at one golden opportunity to sell a scarce item in the previous two paragraphs. If one sale is enough for everybody, that first sale is a key scarcity. Sure, people could take Michael’s previous themes and hack them into something different, but the whole reason people pay for Wordpress themes is because they don’t want to have to do that.

One way of making this work would be to release a theme or two for free to demonstrate how powerful and easy to use they were, and set a reasonable price I wanted to be paid for each subsequent one. People who were interested in using it could contribute, Kickstarter-style, until that amount was met, after which they would all get the theme and it would be released online.

The contributors would be the first adopters of the new theme, putting them ahead of the inevitable clones that would appear later. They might also get other bonuses, like the opportunity to suggest features or beta-test the theme while it is in development, or free or discounted support afterward.

This leads nicely to the second point:

“I’ve seen a load of sites pop up selling bundles of themes…There are a dozen places now that you can *legally* get every single theme they have, for less than $20.”

My response to this is always “So what?” From the customer’s perspective, it’s actually a pretty good deal. Sure they could probably find most of those themes online somewhere (certainly if they’re popular), but for $20 somebody else has done all the collecting for you. That being said, a theme developer can hamstring these businesses by releasing their own themes on their site free of charge. Why pay when you can get it straight from the source for free?

There’s also a second key scarcity that nobody but the original developer can offer, support. He has unique insight into how the theme is designed to operate, and depending on how much assistance a customer wants or needs, stands to reap significant financial benefits from his expertise.

When people get caught up trying to treat copyable digital goods like scarce physical items, they tend to forget that what’s really worth paying for can only be offered by them: The creation of new things, and support for the old ones. Working on a business model that effectively uses these two scarcities will go a lot further than hoping people won’t trade your files or bemoaning the fact that the GPL doesn’t allow you to claim copyright-style privileges.

Ironically, premium themers develop for a platform that has taken off largely because of its openness. It’s more than a little bit irksome that people are all too willing to take something they’ve been given both gratis and libre, and turn around and attempt to shackle it with anachronistic restrictions.

One of the most egregious examples is more or less the entire deviantART community. Nowhere else can you find so many amateur artists attaching inane restrictions and “licensing” restrictions to their work – so much so that the “stock” section of the community is essentially useless for use as actual stock. Unless, I suppose, you’re of the breed whose creations are limited to compiling a few images to blend with brushes and filter effects – a specimen found in profusion on dA.

I’ve seen people discontinue work on beloved community projects like game mods or apps because some nitwit did something or other with the content that the author didn’t like. And of course, there’s the Lego community and its artisans who attempt to assert some kind of “right” over their models,  ranging from overall designs and instructions to specific techniques. I even saw that on the entirely safe for work (seriously) YouTube video for “Batman XXX,” the commentariat was arguing over whether or not the parody violated copyrights and trademarks.

It’s as though these people, indiscriminately abused by major industries, can’t wait to turn around and heap the same abuse on others. What the no-name deviantArtists, modders, and builders fail to realize is that sharing their creations is about the best thing they could do for themselves – creating fans, expanding reputation, and establishing themselves as valuable members of their respective communities.

This is why I can’t stand the Creative Commons. The various licensing schemes available reinforce the same flawed idea articulated so well by “gambort” on The Brothers Brick: that “the whole basis of IP law is that the creator (or those who are granted permission) has control.” No, that isn’t at all what it was about. It’s ostensibly about promoting cultural progress, as set forth in the US Constitution, and in actuality, the purpose of copyright and other monopolies is simply to reward whoever the monopoly is granted to.

The message for today’s artists is simple: stop worrying about what other people are doing with your stuff and work on improving your own operational model. If somebody copying what you do is devastating, you’re doing it wrong.

Jack Valenti brilliantly set the course during his 1982 Congressional testimony when he said that in any discussion of IP, “reasonable people” would return to one central theme: “Creative property owners must be accorded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners in the nation.” A statement like this has powerful surface validity; it seems to make sense. Yet it is this gross distortion of creative work that forms the basis of the irrational and dangerous “ownership culture” individuals now struggle against on a daily basis.

Controlling Culture

Content creators already have ultimate control over their work: whether or not they share it with anybody. IP insidiously purports go even further, giving content creators the ability to control how their content is used with surgical precision. This kind of micromanagement behavior isn’t limited to traditional copyright or patent either. Even Creative Commons licenses attempt to lay down a mosaic of dos and don’ts.

If “intellectual property” is just like physical property, how are these additional privileges justified? Imagine the ridiculousness of a copyrighted chair, where “duplicating” it with wood in your garage or even via digital pictures could be considered infringement. How about a Creative Commons car? “You are free to share this vehicle with others and modify it, but only as long as you don’t make any money doing so.”

The rules of ownership applied to physical property are relatively straightforward. You are free to do what you want with a chair or a car, modifying, selling, and sharing. If somebody steals it, you don’t have it anymore. I could set up a lawnmower-sharing website for my neighborhood without issue. My friends and I could look at a swingset and duplicate it with materials from Home Depot. That’s not what IP apologists want at all – if I buy a CD and decide to share it with others, there’s a problem. If I make a copy, they want to call it theft. In truth, they want the benefits of  selling scarce physical  property (if you want another, you need to buy it) while ceding none to the buyer (no sharing with others, arcane restrictions on usage).

The result is a locked-down culture where buying content is actually more like renting it, and the artwork, music, and inventions that define our lives are kept firmly in the grip of the private domain. I shouldn’t need to point out that this wasn’t the intent behind IP at all.

Owning Ideas

IP restrictions perpetuate the myth that ideas are something that can be owned when in reality, they are a collectively shared experience. When somebody sees a painting or hears a song, the idea cannot be “unseen” or “unheard.” Is that person not free to transcribe what is stored in their own brain? Can they not tell their friend about what they saw or sing the song from memory? These kinds of activities are natural rights belonging to individuals that cannot be abridged – yet IP attempts to do just that. Duplicate a picture via photograph (or photographic memory)? Infringement. Sing a song to a group of people without paying performance fees? Infringement.

Telling content creators that they have the ability to construct toll booths on natural sharing of ideas was the very concern Thomas Jefferson had when crafting the “IP” section of the US Constitution:

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.”

From Thoughts to Bits

Over the past decade, computers have essentially converted any digitizable data into an idea. A digital file can be rapidly spread throughout the world with perfect accuracy. Yet the behaviors themselves are simply digital analogs of reflexive sharing activities. If instead of loaning your lawnmower to your neighbor, you could give him one free of charge, would it not make sense?

IP apologists ludicrously claim that these activities are “just wrong” when they are anything but. Content has been constantly shared across time and throughout life, from bacteria exchanging plasmids to bards performing epic poetry. Today, with our collective digitally-enhanced memories, we do the same thing with content we like.

The rest of the pro-IP arguments are specious. Claiming IP is the only way new content will be funded and bemoaning how sharing breaks old business models is irrelevant when one realizes the entire core of IP is rotten. A few businesses were able to exploit the artificial restrictions granted by IP when natural sharing behavior was curtailed by physical limitations, but even then it was a mirage. Now that sharing is “so easy a caveman could do it” there’s no stopping it. Telling people they should forfeit their natural right to share because it hurts a particular business model just doesn’t make sense.

Imaginary Property deceives content creators into thinking they can restrict what people do with their own culture, that ideas are something that can be “owned” and that widespread sharing is unnatural. These non-rights have always been erroneous, but modern digital technologies have acutely highlighted their fallacy. Ideas flow freely from person to person by their very nature; Imaginary Property simply does not exist. There are no “IP rights;” To pretend otherwise is to believe in a fairy tale.

Amidst an industry segment in its death throes, Pink Floyd just took the cake for futility. While the rest of the recording industry dinosaurs beg and plead people to pay money for free digital files, they are trying to ensure that people who do want to spend are as inconvenienced as possible. It’s as though they don’t realize that people have been getting whatever tracks they wanted, however they wanted for the past decade.

This has nothing to do with “artistic vision,” it’s a simple moneygrab to try and overlay a long-outdated scarcity model on an environment of abundance. Instead of giving potential new fans the opportunity to impulse-buy a track and potentially return to buy the album as a whole piece, they’ve made it an “all or nothing choice” and further reduced the utility of a product with plummeting market value.

Instead of attempting to reach out and connect with new fans (or enjoying their fortune), Pink Floyd spends its time in court fighting over how they can continue squeezing money out of work they did more than thirty years ago. Despite incredible talent and musical artistry, artists behaving like this is reprehensible.