andrew martin wrote:Let's put it into perspective. I make a lot of these DVD's and rely on the royalties to help feed my kids and keep me going as a chess professional. When someone makes an illegal copy for themselves or even tries to sell it, I get no royalty payment from that. Whoever produces the DVD also gets shafted.
I am in no way condoning copying material illegally, but again - the underlying assumption is that if the person makes "an illegal copy for themselves" then they would have paid for it, had they not acquired it illegally. In my experience of talking to people who do admit to behaving this way, this is simply not the case.
Of course, if they then try to sell it on, that is another matter entirely, as the people who are buying clearly are much more likely to have paid legally were the cheaper illegal option not available to them.
Working in software technical support, this is an important topic to me. It is a tremendously tricky area, that needs a radical update of the copyright laws - which came into effect long before internet piracy became a serious issue. The recent Digital Economy Bill that was rushed through before the election has been shown to be sorely lacking in appropriate measures against internet piracy.
For instance, what is the difference between lending a music CD to a friend to copy (which in my opinion is generally acceptable by most people) and downloading that same CD illegally. Strictly speaking there is NO objective difference, yet one appears generally acceptable, and the other is deplored.
Also, the only instance (many years ago) of when I bought a chess engine disk off ebay (before I became part of the chess software business) I discovered on receipt that it was indeed a pirate copy. However, from that first disk came an interest in Chess software that sparked a considerable investment (financial and personal) in the Company that originally produced the software, and indeed the the programs the the Engine author sold personally on his website. I have since become an avid supporter of his work and purchased many of his programs direclty from him. All this came about from that one piece of software that someone had pirated and sold me on ebay. Clearly this is a case of the author losing £20 in the short term and gaining much more in the long term.
I'm not for one second suggesting that people who pirate software are all doing it out of public spirit - to publicise good programmers work - that would be ludicrous. I am merely pointing out that stating that artists/authors etc lose out to piracy simply isn't always the case.
