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Steal This Book! Please! Why software and media companies should encourage piracy (sometimes).

By Tim Harford
Posted Saturday, April 12, 2008, at 7:20 AM ET
Pirated goods

What should record labels, software giants, and other media companies do about digital piracy? There are two obvious options: Get tough and defend intellectual-property rights with every legal and technological trick in the book, or tolerate some illegal copying in the hope of generating buzz and making money in some other way.

This is a debate that generates strong opinions, and where you stand seems to depend on whether you're an industry accountant or a new-economy guru. It was Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired, who coined the phrase freeconomics to describe giving cheap things away for free in order to create buzz.

But look closer and you realize that the corporate suits aren't all adopting the same strategy. The music industry doesn't seem able to make up its mind: First it turned a blind eye to traditional mix-tape piracy, then it cracked down on illegal file-sharing while raising the price of CDs, and finally it slashed the price of CDs in an attempt to compete head-on with downloads, legal and illegal.

Even more perplexing, Microsoft seems to hold two opinions at once: doing its best to prevent piracy on the Xbox console but (as far as this outsider can tell) accepting that piracy of its Office suite of software is a fact of life.

Karen Croxson is a young economist at Oxford University who claims that there is method in the madness. In an article called "Promotional Piracy," she argues that there will never be a single correct trade-off between sales lost to piracy and sales generated by the buzz from pirated copies in circulation. That is because there are different kinds of potential consumers in different markets, or even in the same market at different times. A company's most profitable response to piracy depends on what sort of consumers it is facing.

For example, the consumers who would pay for console games if given no alternative are probably the type of consumers who are happy to use pirated copies: tech-savvy youngsters. That means that an extra pirated copy in the console market is quite likely to mean a lost sale.

But the customers who will pay most for corporate software are, well, corporations. They won't want to risk being caught and sued for piracy, so an extra pirated copy in the corporate software market probably isn't a lost sale at all. The guilty party isn't a customer, but a home user or a student who would never have stumped up full price. Thanks to piracy, though, that home user is now learning how to use Word and PowerPoint and making the legal copies of Microsoft Office more valuable.

Croxson can even make sense of the record industry's apparent volte-face with the pricing of CDs. When Napster was starting up and piracy was still a marginal activity, it made sense for record labels to write off a few cheapskate customers as a marketing expense and raise average prices to everyone else—presumably the older, more prosperous customers who were willing to pay for legal music. But as the pirated sector embraced even those customers, the best strategy was to fight back by slashing prices.

In Croxson's world, then, ''promotional piracy'' is an alternative to discounted pricing. Both approaches are a way for companies to advertise their products or expand their user base. And as with discounted pricing, promotional piracy makes sense only if there is a decent supply of customers who will eventually pay full price, which is not always true.

Corporations may be able to do more to maximize the gains or minimize the losses from piracy. It is already common for software producers to offer a free demonstration version of their products. Perhaps we should now look out for another variant on freeware. Sandwiched in between the giveaway and the maximum-security offering would go the compromise: a medium-quality product at a decent price that is not too hard to steal. If Croxson is right, for some industries, piracy is a wonderful distribution channel.

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Tim Harford is a columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of The Undercover Economist, and his latest book is The Logic of Life.
Photograph of DVDs for sale on Canal Street by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
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Comment from the Fray

Comrades, the time has come for communism. Well, not full scale communism, just digital communism, and I'm not talking about not giving profits to people who create intellectual capital, just the 'to each by their needs' part. Capitalism is based on the principle that the greed incentive will produce the most wealth for the most people, but digital property can be recreated so easily that the digital part of it costs about what air does. The trick then, is to create a structure that still encourages people to create content, by compensating them for how many people use their product (a rough gauge of it's contribution to society) while delivering it to anyone who wants to use it… [For detailed descriptioin of proposed scheme, click here.]

--Nacoran

(To reply, click here)

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