Let’s get a few things straight, downloading copyrighted music, software, games and music is NOT theft and it is not a criminal act.  It is a civil act of copyright infringement.  Now that’s out of the way I will also start by saying I do not agree or believe in piracy or copyright infringment in any way, shape or form.

Firstly, today the founders of The Pirate Bay (and I won’t link) have been found guilty of breaking copyright law and sentenced to jail. Now whilst there are lot of torrents on The Pirate Bay that contain copyrighted files that are being shared illegally, none of these files are actually stored by the pirate bay whatsoever.  They are effectually a search engine for .torrent files.

So what does the rulings in the Swedish courts today mean?  Does it mean the fact you can find illegally shared files by Google mean that Google should be shut down?  Of course it would be ludicrous to suggest such a thing, but actually is it?  Google can be used for exactly the same thing as The Pirate Bay can.  Just Google ‘casino royale avi filetype:torrent’ and I can guarantee you’ll be able to find a page with a link to a .torrent download for that movie.

Does this mean that copyright holders shouldn’t protect their property and their rights, no of course they should, I just feel they are going about it the wrong way.

DRM (Digital Rights Management)

I have no problem with DRM until it gets in my way of doing something I want to do with it.  Now this does not mean sharing the files amongst my friends.  It means if I buy something from iTunes (pre music going DRM-free) and I change from an iPod to a Zune then I shouldn’t have to re-buy all my music.  Secondly if I want to archive all my DVD’s for playback on Apple TV and then put my DVD’s in the loft I shouldn’t have to find ways around the insane corruption that Sony puts on it’s DVD’s courtesy of the Arccos software.

For the most part DRM only seeks to annoy legitimate customers, as anyone who truely wants to pirate something, will find a way to do so regardless of how ‘protected’ the studios believe DRM to be… just take a look at how quickly BD+ got cracked.

Pricing

If I want to legitimately purchase a movie from iTunes for example, and let’s take an example of  ‘Max Payne‘, this costs £10.99 from the store. I can buy that same movie from play.com for £12.99.  Heck, when Quantum of Solace came out you could buy it from Tesco for £7, yet it was still £10.99 on iTunes and they won’t even let you buy an HD version!

Can the studios please explain to me how a movie that only has to be digitised once, costs nothing in physical storage in a warehouse, has no manufacturing costs and no distribution/delivery costs can cost only slightly less or indeed even more than it does in a shop?

If they studios want to stop people downloading for free they need to radically reduce the price of legitimately buying a film online.

Software

I can also see the arguement from the angle of the copyright holder, I am a software developer.  I have written and sold software online, only a minority of which are GPL’d.

There is a small subset of people out there that think it is their god-given right to give my software away and use it without me even getting a small amount of money for my efforts in developing it (I’ve never charge mega-bucks for applications, unlike some companies out there).

I do believe that copyright holders have the right to protect their rights, and make a living from it.

If I GPL’d my code and even though I sold it, there is nothing preventing someone else taking my same code and competing with me.  I’m not a Red Hat or a Novell of this world, I can offer the value added benefits of support and protection that they offer.  I wouldn’t be able to make any money from this type of arrangement.

This is why I believe the shared source licenses.  Basically buy the software, get the source, change what you want to in the source, but have no rights to redistribute it without permission.