| Pirates Suck |
| Saturday, 22 April 2006 | |||||
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I don't like pirates or piracy. When people steal content it discourages creators from making more. My guiding principle when dealing with pirates has been to shut them out and to avoid linking to them. As an example, there are two web sites that have pirated my writing in the last ten years, and I don't deal with either of them today. When people ask about them, I don't hold back in sharing my experience. There's a principle in U.S. (and Phillipine) law called fair use; some other common law countries have a similar legal principle called fair dealing. I'm not a lawyer and I encourage lawyers to chime in here, but the basic idea is that for certain purposes, such as discussion or criticism, people can excerpt and distribute material that is the copyright of other persons. One of the limitations of fair use is when copying begins to undermine the value of the original work. For example, if I copied a book and published it at no charge online, I would naturally diminish the ability of the publisher and author to sell their legitimately printed copies of the book. (Criticism of the work might also diminish the value, but criticism enjoys strong protection under the First Amendment in the U.S. If I were to reprint more than was necessary to criticize or discuss the work, I'd be in trouble.) Video piracy on sites like YouTube is something different than the normal variety, because the pirate can disappear and then do it again under a different username. He is unlikely to face a penalty unless someone strenuously makes an issue of it. That is an unsatisfactory outcome. If people steal and repost video from pay sites, interested persons will be less likely to subscribe to pay sites. If interested persons are less likely to subscribe, then fewer pay sites will survive, and fewer will be started as going concerns. That is also an unsatisfactory outcome. You may ask that if you don't subscribe to pay sites, why should you care? And the answer is that most of the legitimate free content you see online is provided by pay site operators as part of their online marketing initiatives. So as the pay content goes, so goes the free content. Before writing this I took the time to notify several pay site owners of piracy of their content at YouTube. As rightful owners of video footage they will contact YouTube and demand that their footage be taken down. But for reasons described above, I believe that such an outcome is alone not likely to be satisfactory. Below are the screen names of some of the pirates at YouTube. If you know the actual identities of any of these persons, I ask that you please contact me privately and provide them to me. I aim to provide the names of these persons to the wronged pay site operators, so that they can file civil or criminal charges against them in court. I will be adding names over time, but these are the ones I'm choosing to pursue now:Because I'm a nice guy, I won't really start turning the screws on these guys until Monday. So I would advise them to delete the videos they've posted illegally, and I'll step off. Video piracy is unacceptable and so I will not accept it. And besides, why would anyone want to be a pirate when they could be a ninja instead? Related Items:
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