*WARNING*: Long-windedness ahead.
I suspect no one's likely to care about my two cents' worth, but I always enjoy expounding on my feelings about IP issues and the problems surrounding them.
Problem 1: No matter what people want to believe, all IP is not equal.
A computer program is a significantly different entity from a short story, which is different from a song, a movie, a poem, a news article, sheet music, etc. The sale of programming IP very rarely, I suspect, has anything to do with performance rights and roalties.
The RIAA would tend to have you believe that all IP is the same and ought to be protected in exactly the same manner. But see my comments on the RIAA later.
Problem 2: So-called "Fair Use" isn't. And the reason it isn't fair is that it's basically a moral issue, rather than a legal one, and as several people have noted, you can't legislate morality.
Is it Fair Use for me to install SE4 on a friend's computer so I can play multiplayer against him? What about just to demonstrate the game to him? Neither of these is legal, but it's tough to determine whether either is moral.
In the same sense, if I write a short story and it's published in (I'm dreaming here, indulge me) Fantasy and Science Fiction, is it Fair Use for a reader of F&SF to copy his magazine to hand the story to a friend? Is it Fair Use to quote significant portions of the story for literary crticism?
Problem 3: Everybody wants a slice of the pie.
The companies that make up the RIAA are probably the largest culprits here. Let's face it: musicians earn something like ten cents out of the $15 you pay for their CD at Best Buy. Sure, if it goes gold, they start to make some money, but more of their income has to be derived from ticket sales to concerts... and even then, they're splitting the proceeds with how many others?
The same sort of thing is true in other industries, though. On that same short story sale to F&SF (indulge my dreaming another moment), I would earn 6 cents a word--call it $300. The magazine has a circulation of around 100k at $3 a copy--$300,000 gross an issue. You do the math.
Programming has actually done all right in this respect. While self-publishing is severely frowned upon in the fiction world (generally considered career suicide), and the RIAA continually looks to defeat music self-publishing, self-publishing of computer programs has exploded with the advent of the internet. Shrapnel is an example of what I might call "coordinated self-publishing"--while Shrapnel may be the publisher of the game, unlike most "publishers", they aren't taking the largest slice of the incoming money.
Problem 4: Piracy is never going away.
This is a simple fact that anyone who deals with IP is going to have to get accustomed to. You can create ridiculously complex copy-protection schemes, and *someone* out there is going to break them.
Personally, I'd rather do what Shrapnel has done: refrain from spending the money on the copy protection, and accept the piracy as a loss to be dealt with... if it is, in fact, a loss. Because it's imposible to track how many pirated copies of SE4 were downloaded simply *because they could be*, played once by some script kiddie who understands FPS but has never played a game of chess in his life, then deleted.
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All of these are issue which will likely never be resolved. I'm firmly against piracy, being a small-time creator of IP myself. But all the RIAA's, the
Harlan Ellisons,
the Tasini decisions, and the copy protection are, in the end, *not going to stop it*.
OK. I'll shut up now.
Eric Snyder II
(LazarusLong42)
Re: Disturbing Facts
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