Nonprofit Piracy Should be Legal

I know that’s a bold claim and a click-bait title, but at the same time, it is a topic I have been very passionate about for quite a while. There are two main reasons I decided to write about it now. One is the recent news of Gary Bowser released from prison and having to keep paying 25-30% of his monthly income to Nintendo for the rest of his life (I simplified it here – just google it if you’re curious or click on the link). The other one is related to the capstone project that I’m planning to work on for Data Science bootcamp (more on that later).

When I say nonprofit piracy, I mean people pirating stuff for personal use with no financial gain. For the rest of this blog post, I’ll just refer to it as ‘piracy’ for simplicity. That said, if someone ends up earning money from pirating software, I do think they should need to pay back in some capacity. I think that could be done similarly to what a lot of the online software service providers do! For example, google dev gives you $200 credits a month to spend on their APIs and stuff, and if you need more, you pay for it. That is great for testing and personal use, as well as scalable for larger operations (and businesses).

Being a complex issue, I split the rest of the blog in three parts.

All Piracy Should Remain Illegal

Let me start this by saying that if anybody has an actually good argument against all forms of piracy, I’d love to hear it. As I understand it, people who are against piracy will tell you that it’s equivalent to stealing and should therefore continue to be illegal (you wouldn’t download a car, would you??). Except that’s not really accurate. When you steal a physical object from somewhere, that thing is now in your possession. You have it and the other person doesn’t. When it comes to pirating digital content however, the owner still retains it and the hacker/pirate/whatever simply gets a copy of it.

Where it gets more complicated is if someone pirates a product and then uses that knowledge to create something similar but different enough to evade various copyright laws. If that new product is free, versus the original version costing money, is that acceptable? Personally, I think so, because then the original product can also be improved by what this person developed, making it even better and retaining their customers. In fact, the spin-off pirated free version might attract more people to it.

The only other reason that I’ve seen floated around against all forms of piracy, even just for personal use, is that it’s costing the company money. Reason being, if someone pirates something – like a video game – they won’t buy it. I’ve never seen any proof of that claim. Rather, any research that I’m aware of points in the other direction (pirates buy more stuff) and I’ll talk about this some more in the next few paragraphs.

Why Even be a Pirate?

A pirate I was meant to be … or, if you prefer meme metal from Scotland instead (be warned as it’s NSFW), Alestorm – Pirate Metal Drinking Crew, or the superb memeing memes from Italy, Nanowar of Steel – Sober.

Joking aside, it is a legitimate question to ask – why would anyone resort to piracy in the first place? Gabe Newell understood years ago that piracy is only a problem when your own service offerings are terrible (my midcourse project in Data Science was on Steam Games btw, Valve’s incredibly successful digital distribution software).

In my view, people tend to pirate for two main reasons:

1. When they’re (typically) young and don’t have any, or very limited, income
2. When the software in question is impossible or extremely costly to obtain in certain regions or countries of the World.

I’ll share a personal experience with one of my favorite bands, Sabaton. Years ago (cca. 2007), a friend of mine sent me a link to this iconic song, which at the time was not from the official channel and set over a montage of “Saving Private Ryan”. At the time, Sabaton was not yet incredibly known, but have since become one of the most recognized names in metal. Besides that song, I don’t think there were (m)any other Sabaton songs Youtube at the time.

So I did what most poor students in Europe do: pirate their discography up until that point to see if the song is a one-off or if I actually enjoyed the band. Well, 3 T-shirts, later, 4 concerts on 2 different continents (even dragging my wife to 2 of them!), a hoodie, several albums (one collector’s edition), one of them signed by the band and recently a whole lot of listening to them on apple music, I think it is safe to say that I am somewhat of a fan of the band. Possibly, maybe. I feel like that could be the case. I undoubtedly spent way more on Sabaton and their merchandise than I ever pirated. I also tell anyone who’s willing to listen about Sabaton – and over the last couple of years, the awesome historian Indy Neidell as well, who does some collaboration work with them.

Sabaton are amazing – but I probably wouldn’t have listened to them at all if it weren’t for piracy.

You see, power metal is only the beginning of the metal journey for many metal heads. For a lot of metal heads, that is merely where you start your transition from hard and classical rock into heavy metal. Before you know it, you’re listening to KVLT black metal songs with growling that vaguely resembles human voices, recorded on a $5 knockoff audio recorder from China, produced in a Norwegian forest under a blood moon…

Here’s the thing. If I didn’t get a chance to hear more from Sabaton other than their Primo Victoria song, I’d have moved on. Sabaton is in the only power metal band I consistently listen to, excluding meme bands. Here’s some examples, much more of an acquired taste – Arkona, Eluveitie, Skálmöld, Ex Deo, Insomnium, Wintersun, Gojira, etc.

Nowadays of course it’s much easier to simply hear more of the music on youtube, apple music, spotify and other offerings. Piracy has been beaten by great service at affordable price (mostly, it unfortunately still depends on which country you live in).

This isn’t some kind of crazy hyperbole by the way. I haven’t pirated anything in years now, because I can afford to support the artists. So to me, piracy is nothing else but free promotional material. If you make a good product, you’ll end up with loyal customers for years to come – and you didn’t even have to pay for a commercial, pirates did it for you!

Machine Learning and Access to Information

This last point is something I’ve only been thinking a lot about recently. For my capstone project in the Data Science bootcamp I’ll be applying machine learning models to writing and attempting to figure out if/how it is possible to identify writing styles between different authors. This is a fun project, with ultimately no financial goals in mind (besides of course me getting better at understanding Natural Language Processing – which is undoubtedly going to be useful in my career in the future).

Ideally, I’d want to get access to all the English books that have been published in the last few decades. Sadly, I can’t afford to do that. I can’t even fathom how much money I’d have to spend to do something like that – more than I’ll earn in my lifetime.

So my capstone is instead entirely based on what is free – in this case Project Gutenberg. I’m extremely grateful for that website’s existence. The downside is, I won’t be able to analyze any modern authors. This is a case where pirating some books would be fantastic for the scope of my project and could potentially even help me develop an algorithm to recommend authors with similar writing styles.

This circles back to a blog post that I’ve written last year, about free (affordable) education. Just imagine how many people could use the prowess of data analysis, predictive modeling and machine learning to make the world a better place if we could access recent and accurate data! Alas, often that is behind a paywall or two or three.

Lastly, I want to touch on the problem that arises by hiding the data of all kinds. It leads to various biases in machine learning models. For example, going back to my capstone project. Say that I were to make an absolutely phenomenal model for recommending books based on the Gutenberg Project and publish it online for anyone to use … it is very likely it would suck for any currently alive authors! Because you see, the machine learning “learns” from the data it is given. So there is a potential issue that the algorithm would keep recommending old stuff from people who’ve been dead and buried.

As a result, that would actually end up hurting current authors. Ironically, by not having their works pirated and used for training the model, it is possible it would end up damaging their sales in the long run (again, this is a hypothetical and if that would be the result of my model, I’d never publish it for others to use – I always encourage people to support artists who are currently alive, they’re the ones who need all the love and help).

X Marks the Spot

Unlike classical piracy, I don’t really care about modern ‘piracy’ continuing to exist or not. As a matter of fact, I wish we’d have no need for it and as much information would be shared between people as possible. For the time being however, I think legalizing or at least decriminalizing nonprofit piracy would be a great start.

Ultimately, this is also just one of the reasons as to why all of my writing is available on my webpage for free for anyone to enjoy – in hopes that those who appreciate it end up buying my book(s). Sharing is caring.