Can Software Piracy Be Justified?

hey guys how's it going if you couldn't tell by what i'm laying on i'm about to build myself a new computer for my recording studio it's going to be a fresh start and i got a lot of software installing to do but it got me thinking can piracy be justified [Music] that now comedically famous advertisement or psas from an organization called brain and brain wanted to use prodigies no man's army as the edgy background music but they didn't actually want to pay prodigy for the music license so they hired a composer named melchior rietveld to write a song almost exactly like no man's army but not close enough to get sued by the way this is a very common occurrence in the ad music world but when hiring melchior to write this music the organization told him that it would only be used for a small local film festival and within a year they had put this on over 70 different dvds that were distributed around the world so melchior found out about this and he went to his royalty management organization buma stemraw which is kind of like ascap or bmi in the netherlands instead of doing their job and helping him they tried to get him to sign his rights to the song over to a record label that would keep the majority of his royalties and any money that he would get in a settlement melchior wisely declined the offer and buma stemra continually tried to pay him a sum of 15 000 euros knowing that it was worth much more in fact it was worth 165 000 euros in the settlement that melchior eventually won all of this behind a simple public service announcement preaching at you to always pay for your intellectual property it's the perfect example for the message that i want to give to you before we kick things off here ria and the motion picture association and so on have used plenty of lame and cringy emotional manipulation tactics in their anti-piracy message but these jag-offs have built this multi-billion dollar industry on the back of profiting off of intellectual property that they themselves did not create don't think for a second that they're coming to the defense of musicians or screenwriters or cinematographers they're coming to the defense of their shareholders who i give not a about yar ria or the recording industry of america says things like music piracy costs the u.s economy 12 billion dollars and 71 060 jobs like yeah 71 060 they've actually calculated the exact number of nonexistent jobs in the usa to make up or get this data they've cited a 15 year old policy report citing potential industry review and what it leads to in other unrelated industries so by this logic if some of my viewers didn't use an ad blocker on this video i'd use the increased revenue to buy tennis lessons i'd become so successful at tennis that i'd make millions of dollars and open my own restaurant for dogs that lead to it becoming a global franchise which would lead to some of my employees starting their own casinos therefore using an ad blocker on this video costs 593 319 american jobs you son of a bit i've personally had my own run in with filthy music pirates in 2006 i had a lot of music up on itunes it was selling quite well but i was not receiving a penny and so i contacted apple repeatedly over the course of a year asking them to either take it down or pay me and i never got a response so i sued them only then did i find out that a digital distributor called iota was collecting royalties on my behalf without my consent or permission and right around that time sony bought iota and restructured into a company called the orchard and in that process all of the money and records of the transactions vanished oops in the meantime i had left all of my record labels and bought all of my licenses back and i just released all of my music on what cd which was a popular music torrent site at the time and in the torrents that i uploaded i included a little html file that said thanks for listening and had a link to my paypal in case you wanted to support me i didn't expect it at the time but i gained a lot of fans from doing this and i made more money off of that album than i did from every other album that i had released previously combined i just cannot make myself care about a fan illegally downloading an mp3 when the legit side of the music industry isn't treating or paying musicians anywhere close to fairly and that's where i'll leave music piracy in this video so if you've pirated my music thanks for listening now naturally an extension of the software industry has plenty of emotional manipulation tactics to try and prevent piracy too many of them become memes while others are straight up scams you may have seen one of these ads from the bsa or software alliance i have no idea what the b stands for i assume ass they try to get you to knark on software pirates by luring you in with everything from beach trips to ski trips to pots of gold by the way if you do a reverse image search that pot of gold image seems to be owned by cake central and it turns out that the bsa actually didn't acquire a license to use it in their facebook ads they'll even give you a million dollars to knock on someone for pirating software of course if you can make it to the fine print it says that if the bsa makes 10 000 or more off litigation and fines you'll be considered for a reward of 500 maybe even a million which of course nobody has ever received meanwhile it seems like the bsa almost exclusively targets small to moderate-sized businesses that don't have a legal team or the means to legally defend themselves and most of the tips that are coming in are actually from former i.t employees who may have actually installed the pirated software themselves in a lot of cases the piracy will be the business using microsoft office family or something which is prohibited for business use somewhere in the 2000 page license agreement the bullying in litigation goes on and on trying to ring out as much money as possible from these businesses often times resulting in employee downsizing or the business closing entirely so where does the money go the bsa is a non-profit and when pulling their tax records i see that they've made about 30 million dollars from settlements alone in 2019 then companies like adobe and microsoft paid them about 10 million dollars in membership dues and where does this money go the ceo of this nonprofit victoria espinel pays herself a meager 2 million dollars annually does she look familiar if so it's probably because until 2013 she was the intellectual property enforcement coordinator for the white house and in her time there absolutely insane draconian copyright legislation like sopo was introduced and fortunately died in congress she then spent your time getting internet service providers large software companies and media conglomerates to work together to force in strict copyright policies like the six strike rule which allows isps to monitor your internet behavior and send you like this speaking of legislation passing let's have a round of applause for the freedom of information act which allows one to request a copy of mrs espinel's emails when she was at the white house she tended to get along really well and have a lot of meetings with people like alec french nbc universal's top lobbyist but didn't have a chance to respond to digital rights groups or any of the people that would be affected by these policies it's also worth mentioning that the bsa takes these dues that they're taking from the software companies and then donate it to places like the orangey hatch foundation which as an adobe and microsoft customer myself is just a little troubling i didn't expect this rabbit hole to lead me seeing my own money being funneled into an ultra-christian conservative lobbyist group founded by a man who once fought to have the death penalty expanded to drug offenses while still claiming to be pro-life this puts us in a pretty tough spot morally with everything that i just told you does this mean that pirating microsoft or adobe products is actually the ethical thing to do because it prevents your money from going to organizations like the bsa well maybe but you could also just not use microsoft or adobe products and buy their competitors products but these two companies in particular have both fought really hard at making it difficult for you to be creative or run a business outside of their ecosystems to the point where the government brought anti-trust lawsuits against them but software piracy is a real issue and it has certainly killed off a whole lot of developers that would otherwise be making the tools that i would be using as a musician or content creator and it's a really difficult topic to navigate because the majority of the data and stats about software piracy has such poor methodology that you might as well just make it up on the other side of things you can only hear so many stories about grammars being sued for downloading an mp3 before every last drop of empathy for intellectual property owners dries up but not every single company is like that in fact most of them aren't pro tools used to only be able to run on their own proprietary hardware and a pro tools hd core system in 2003 would set you back thirteen thousand dollars that's twenty one thousand dollars in today's inflation bucks and over the next ten years keeping that software up to date would cost you an additional three thousand dollars since you couldn't run pro tools without avid or digidesigns hardware not only was piracy not a big concern but it actually kept a lot of recording studios in business because recording professional sounding music at home was something that only wealthy people could do in the early days avid had built themselves a lucrative monopoly in both digital audio recording and video editing in 2003 fl studio released version 4.0 which would probably be the first version that would be considered a daw because it had a mixer plug-in support and direct-to-disk recording it cost a hundred dollars and if you were heard comparing fl studio to pro tools inside a music store everybody within earshot would laugh at you but i was a very poor musician at the time and i wasn't laughing at all i was really really excited to finally be able to use a computer to make music and i did so excessively fl studio's low price meant that people wouldn't take it seriously as a professional piece of software and so i kept it a secret over the next five years when i exclusively used it to write music for television and award-winning advertisements some other artists only slightly more popular than myself also noticed fl studio and started making music with it during this period in the early 2000s fl studios user base was growing like wildfire and even though it was a small company with only a few employees in belgium it was actually losing money due to software piracy in fact the only reason that image line was able to stay afloat over these years is because they had some games and invoice management software that paid the bills while fl studio was losing money around this time a lot of other music software was using things like usb dongles and ilock to circumvent piracy but imageline did something really ahead of the curve that worked very well for them they simply made it more convenient to buy the software than it was to pirate it by keeping the price relatively low and giving you lifetime free updates and a constantly growing set of features so while pro tools had a decent amount of dedicated customers who paid a fortune for their software fl studio was getting downloaded tens of thousands of times per day because it was so much more accessible to beginner musicians as a new generation of musicians started populating the pro audio space pro tools brand recognition and power started losing its value and software sales started declining and it wouldn't be long before fl studio had eclipsed pro tools there's no way to know this for sure but from the research i did in this video i'm pretty confident in saying that fl studio is by far the most installed music creation software in history fl studio was downloaded over 30 000 times a day on average and they achieved this with little to no advertising it probably sounds like i'm describing image line as having some sort of passive ultra enlightened view on software piracy they do not in fact i would probably consider them hostile maybe even spiteful toward software pirates they take it personally and they actively take down videos and social media posts offering or even featuring a cracked version of fl studio that could be a bit much depending on how effective or not it is at preventing software piracy but my opinion on the matter personally i bought fl studio like 15 years ago and have been riding that free upgrade train ever since so i don't even really think about it and i can't imagine how many cracked installers i would have had to download it just would have been a pain in the butt and what about avid and pro tools well i can't compare them directly to another music software company as nobody else is publicly traded but adobe is a competitor that was much more affordable and didn't require proprietary hardware for their audio or video editing software we're looking at this logarithmically and avid peaked with a 66 stock price in 2005 by 2016 it dipped below four dollars since 2005 adobe's stock grew by so much that when you look at this graph in linear form avid appears to be a straight line in july of 2013 despite huge criticism from their customers adobe stopped selling software licenses and instead forced all customers to enter into a subscription-based model while it sucks not owning your own software photoshop no longer costs 700 now hobbyists can afford professional tools and zoom when adobe stock in 2018 three highly reputable chinese economists and philosophers published a long-term study on finding the perfect algorithm to make money selling software amidst piracy and continually updated it after peer review within their impressive methodology they found that a fairly valued pure bundling subscription alongside the existence of piracy is the perfect recipe for profit in economics pure bundling is what cable companies traditionally did if you wanted the documentary channel you'd also have to pay for the sports channel even though you didn't want it mixed bundling on the other hand is what mcdonald's does you arrive wanting mcnuggets but the combo menu is presented to you first and you're more likely to add on fries and a drink knowing that it costs less than ordering everything separately even though you may have not wanted a drink in the first place mixed bundling works really well for software subscriptions but not nearly as well as pure bundling alongside piracy the idea is that the transition from being a software pirate to a legitimate subscriber is pretty painless just like spotify or netflix subscriptions make music or software piracy seem like too much of a hassle for a lot of people adobe avid microsoft and taryus to name a few have already adopted exclusive subscription models and a lot of people are really unhappy about it i'm personally not all that grumpy about it if it's priced fairly and managed well the idea of being able to install and update things of the click and no further expenses really simplifies my life and workflow and i do really like the idea of something like photoshop being legally accessible to anybody who can cough up 20 bucks what i don't like is that adobe will then give your money to the bsa which will continually try to make our lives worse whether we're pirates or paying customers did you know that the world's largest collection of both scientific articles and ebooks exists as a result of a large coordinated piracy effort organizations like z library were not founded to rip off authors they were founded to make educational scientific and culturally significant data available to everyone this is actually really important in a world where for example there's a lot of pressure to suppress climate change data or where libraries are ordered to destroy books earlier this year a school board in eastern tennessee voted 10-0 to ban this book mouse is an important and brilliant graphic novel about the human psychology of holocaust survivors it is the only graphic novel to ever win a pulitzer prize but it talks about a bad thing that happened in history and the school district is in a southern baptist theocracy so they banned it which is ironic because only one third of high school students in mckinnon county are functionally literate that's not a joke by the way that's a deplorable fact now entire states are actively continuously trying to ban books that mention homosexuality or critical race theory so that would make piracy good right because it would free up the information even though those brave authors and publishers who are the most deserving of financial incentive won't be compensated so you might ask should we prioritize history and culture and journalism over money well of course but if you take away a publisher's compensation then you're changing history the ethical line keeps moving and i don't know where it belongs piracy can be an antagonist or a protagonist and we are all a victim to confirmation bias and a lot of times we will just see it as a protagonist if we just don't feel like paying for intellectual property i've read stuff suggesting that those hosting or cracking or supplying pirated software are sometimes associated with everything from espionage to sex trafficking and i don't know how true that is because pretty much everything that anti-piracy groups publish or commission to be published is a lie and it's really hard to build any foundation of trust with anti-piracy groups as long as they're participating in political lobbying and extortion but there really is an uneasy level of trust that some people have with public torrent trackers particularly recently rue tracker which is a russian torrent host or torrent tracker that has existed for over a decade a lot of people brag about how safe it is and when you ask why they claim that the moderators check all of the executable files for viruses well i talk to a moderator and they don't checked just means that the torrent matches the description so i downloaded some well-seeded popular torrents of pro audio software and it took a total of four before malwarebytes and virustotal told me that there was something malicious someone actually mentioned that virus scanners were detecting a problem with this particular file in the comments and they were told that it's just a false positive well in this case this false positive tried to take over my discord account when i ran it in a sandbox another misconception that you'll hear a lot from the torrent community is that if you want to stay safe use common sense and only download torrents with a lot of seeds or other users hosting it however malware and botnets false seed torrents to get you to trust them and if you really want to be careful and prioritize safety always run a pirated executable file in a virtual machine first before installing it on the system you use well maybe at that point paying for the thing has a higher cost benefit for the amount of work you're going to be putting into subverting bad actors when pirating it you can always expect bad actors in an environment where there's no accountability by design if you downloaded the ableton demo and it put a virus on your machine they would be liable in a civil suit i know plenty of people who despise the existence of crypto and nfts and say that the lack of accountability and centralization means that it can never be a good thing and will always be a big pyramid scheme or scam and those same people will then use a public torrent tracker and again i'm not saying that the world of software piracy or torrent sites are a bad thing i'm just saying that you can always expect bad actors in an environment like that and i wish that i had a more popular opinion on the subject but a lot of this video is me recognizing my own confirmation biases so reflecting back on the last two decades of being an electronic musician that uses music software i'd like to present to you nonsense that i've said to justify piracy [Music] subscription nope i don't do subscription services good job adobe it just lost another customer to piracy or you could just not use the software i mean if i start making money using the software i will totally pay for it didn't you just sell like 20 albums on bandcamp this month yeah no i mean like real money it is a nice plug-in but 100 yeah i'll just pirate it and buy it when it's on sale or you could just wait until it's on sale information is intangible my friend it is free me taking a copy costs the creator nothing are you gonna stop monetizing your youtube videos that's different splice allows you to rent to own which gives you the immediate affordability of subscription services but once you've paid for the full license the software license is permanently yours i would like to hear their statistics regarding how many users follow through to the end of term and own the software but regardless this is a pretty consumer friendly approach that i would like to see more companies offering tim exiles endless was initially an incredibly creative music collaboration app that has now become more of a daw mixed with the option of collaboration and remixing initially a license for endless studio would cost you 200 but tim has instead decided to roll out a different monetization model where the software is now free but every song created would use proof of stake tokens to fairly pay royalties to collaborators and a small percentage of those royalties would pay for endless's development and maintenance expenses the much aforementioned fl studio has an unlimited free trial version that allows you to use just about everything the software has to offer with the limitation that you cannot open a file that you previously saved this at first struck me as pretty weird but then i realized that this could be really helpful when mentoring or teaching musicians as well as generally creating a unique setting for collaboration in 2022 there is a whole lot more software than there was five years ago 10 years ago or especially 20 years ago and if i'm being totally real with myself i can't really justify pirating software unless it was for something like exporting stems using software that used to be a subscription that had expired on my current machine there are some software suites or plugins that i paid for but ilock or the online activation nagging me has actually interrupted my workflow enough to where i just downloaded a cracked copy on this new machine i think that if i see some software that i want that has some copy protection that would get in my way or otherwise annoy me i think i'll let the company know why i'm not buying it and then i'll support a competitor who doesn't use copy protection like that of course these things i just told you come from a very privileged position and i do very much remember being a baroque musician who had to choose between replacing a piece of music gear that i needed to tour or buy a piece of software that being said it is important to point out that when half of the pro audio software industry sends you free licenses you get optional paralysis and you don't really learn how to master anything and the same thing comes with piracy it's not a new feeling with piracy for the most part music software is available to you instantly for free this is just my own experience and i don't have any data to back this up but i would assume that if you were a new musician and if you spent a thousand dollars on some very carefully picked out software like a digital audio workstation that you thought would work the best for you and some plug-ins that you thought that resonated with the kind of music you wanted to make you would spend the next couple months working on those things and learning those things to justify the amount of money that you paid for them whereas a software pirate might spend those next months continually downloading and trying more things without ever diving deep into them and therefore maybe not ever really getting anything done and again i am not saying don't pirate software and it is not my place nor am i judging anybody for pirating software i'm just saying that sometimes less is more people really dig their heels in on these things and i fully understand that it's very unlikely that there will be one person who agrees with every single take that i've had in this video and that's fine in fact that's beautiful i love discourse especially about something that's quite philosophical after all i just spent an absurd amount of time in research trying to answer one of my own questions to myself can something that is intangible and without limits be stolen hey if you like this video subscribe to my channel and click that notification bell down there to see my up to date content if you have any weird audio or science rabbit hole questions i read all of my comments finally this video has no paid sponsorships and it took quite a long time to make but it was made possible due to my patreon members i personally don't care if you use an ad blocker but if you want to access a community with audio assets unreleased music ambisonic field recordings monthly songwriting challenges and game servers then my patreon is for you and you can join for as little as a dollar okay bye

Channel: Benn Jordan

Views: 129,749

Keywords: piracy, is piracy wrong, is piracy illegal, anti piracy, is piracy stealing, is piracy actually bad, is piracy immoral, the morality of piracy, is piracy bad, ethics of piracy, piracy is a crime, content creator, the pirate bay, drm, software as a service, copyright infringement, piracy news, as a service, software piracy, is piracy moral, riaa, business software alliance, bsa, adobe, cracks, keygen, audio software, warez, music production, vst, fl studio crack, ableton crack, mpaa

Id: L7EHRpnJICQ

Length: 25min 25sec (1525 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 16 2022