Piracy is progressive taxation, and other thoughts on the evolution of online distribution

webmaven · 2022-03-05 · Original thread

I made no claim about the relative morality of piracy vs. license violations.

But I will note that you are (by using the framing of "stealing") implying that piracy results in lost sales, which is largely not the case, except possibly for the most popular works. See "Piracy is Progressive Taxation":

https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...

webmaven · 2021-09-04 · Original thread

> It is my opinion that piracy has helped that book much more than it has hurt it. It is very widely pirated in torrents in non-us countries from what I can tell from google searches and a longstanding history of emails to the effect "hey your book is being pirated [here]". I sincerely doubt that the overwhelming majority of people who pirate that work did so instead of purchasing it.

Tim O'Reilly agrees with you:

https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...

webmaven · 2020-12-09 · Original thread

> I’m sure our perspective will shift over time, but from where we’re standing, having a cloud provider launch a competing service would be a sign of enormous success. (And this is not to say that the cloud providers’ parasitic approach to OSS projects is not a genuine problem, it simply acknowledges that you have to be a widely used OSS project before it becomes* a problem).*

Interesting. This seems to be the licensing equivalent of "Piracy is Progressive Taxation", which is an angle on software licensing I hadn't considered before (and it should have, since these are copyright licenses, and similar popularity-based dynamics regarding violation of norms ought not to be surprising):

https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...

webmaven · 2020-10-03 · Original thread

> This is obviously anecdotal, but it's always seemed to me that piracy is almost free advertising in some cases (though obviously not universally.)

Tim O'Reilly wrote a post in 2002 titled "Piracy is Progressive Taxation"[0]. Basically, the conclusion he came to after analyzing the data is that on average, piracy stimulates demand enough for net gain in sales for publishers, but it isn't distributed evenly: works in the fat head (eg. bestsellers, blockbusters, etc.) see a very small net loss (ie. for the most popular content piracy may displace sales a bit), but for everyone else it is a net gain, and the gain is bigger the less popular the content is.

[0] https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...

noch · 2020-05-26 · Original thread

> Still doesn't matter. Folks like the OP won't support writers.

For what it's worth, Tim O'Reilly notes, in "Piracy is progressive taxation"[0], that:

>> Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

[0]: https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...

ISBN: None