{"id":485,"date":"2006-08-06T15:59:08","date_gmt":"2006-08-06T21:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=485"},"modified":"2006-08-06T15:59:08","modified_gmt":"2006-08-06T21:59:08","slug":"yo_ho_yo_ho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=485","title":{"rendered":"Yo ho, yo ho"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been having a little <a href=\"http:\/\/radar.oreilly.com\/archives\/2006\/08\/piracy_is_progressive_taxation.html\">discussion about piracy<\/a> with Tim O&#8217;Reilly over at his blog. O&#8217;Reilly argues that piracy (of digital goods) is on balance a good thing. I don&#8217;t disagree with that. As is the case with black and grey markets in general, digital piracy probably does provide some economic benefits, and it may even, as O&#8217;Reilly suggests, increase net revenues in a given market by increasing awareness of underpromoted goods (though I&#8217;d like to see hard evidence on that). But I think it&#8217;s critical to point out that piracy is only good so long as it&#8217;s bad. In other words, there have to be real costs (social, legal, technological) to taking the pirate route in order to prevent it from displacing too many sales. As soon as piracy becomes legitimate, the balance tips way over to the bad side. By lending legitimacy to piracy, O&#8217;Reilly may, unintentionally, end up promoting the ill effects of piracy and hence weakening his own argument.<\/p>\n<p>A fascinating question is: What is the optimal cost for piracy? What&#8217;s the point at which, if you increase the penalties, you diminish beneficial awareness-building, and, if you decrease the penalties, you promote too much cannibalization of legitimate sales? I imagine economists have looked at this question for digital piracy. Anybody know of any studies?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been having a little discussion about piracy with Tim O&#8217;Reilly over at his blog. O&#8217;Reilly argues that piracy (of digital goods) is on balance a good thing. I don&#8217;t disagree with that. As is the case with black and grey markets in general, digital piracy probably does provide some economic benefits, and it may [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}