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

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