Piracy and ways to fight it

[Emprisk]

Then there's more legitimate issues with a product that isn't even in your language or locale.

If the Fate/Stay Night VN ever came out in an official english translation I'd probably buy that as well.

I don't think I've ever been so relieved when the info was leaked from the FGO stream that the Tsukihime Remake was getting an english translation next year.

Here's to finishing Mahoyo before it comes out.

 

[Nitramy]

Quoth our Great Lord Gaben: "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

 

[f0Ri5]

Wow, I'm quite surprised to find myself on that site. I considered the issue of piracy in the past, but always felt I was to small for people to care. As it is, my profile doesn't have a ton of favorites, which is good(?), I guess. I am switching over to subscribestar, and I'm aware they have a piracy protection feature, but I didn't think I'd need it. I don't know how helpful it is, since it's just a 'click to confirm you're not a bot' thingy.

 

[Selias]

Giving the name of the website is probably a bit counterproductive if you're trying to prevent piracy. You might as well have said, "Hey guys, make sure you don't use Kemono Party to access paywalled content from your favorite authors! *wink*"

I had never heard of this website before reading your post, but I found it in two seconds by googling the name.

 

[jadecriminal]

Eh... I thought this thread would be about someone stealing content and posting it under their own way.

So, I thought the pateron author model was advanced chapters and the people who pay are "this guy writes good shit, let me toss some money their way so they can do that" I know ravensdagger has a great business model. Though they are also a machine headed for burnout writing multiple stories. Or an Asian doing the normal salaryman hours.



In my opinion, Piracy is advertisement.

Some of the pirates who enjoy the game, and would not have ordinarily paid for it do buy it. I may hypothetically know several rimrims that bought Rimworld just to throw money to the dev... and then promptly never installed it, continuing to use their pirate version because "they had the mods installed just right"

This person is not me because I am law abiding and well adjusted, sane, member of society who never did anything wrong, especially not any war-crimes.

Where was I going with this? Ah yes!

Heck I know exactly one game that has a significant section of their steam reviews refer to the pirated edition. IE, they have a steam version and a pirated edition that the author made and personally asked pirate groups to release sans DRM.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1008860/Repella_Fella/

The only difference between the edition is this catch ditty of an intro:

 

[Z3r0Sama]

Quoth our Great Lord Gaben: "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

Click to shrink...

This is the quote I was waiting for. I sailed the highsea's regularly as a poor student back in the 00's, then steam sales happened when I started earning good money so I just bought cheap instead.

 

[fluxoid]

This seems to be pretty effective way to combat piracy, though very work intensive.

Click to shrink...

You probably don't want to hear this, but research suggests that as long as you're alive, still producing new work, and not famous enough to be a household name, then the free advertising you get from some freeloader reading something you wrote is almost certainly more valuable than the tiny fraction of a sale you lost.

Unless you're a world-famous author hiding behind an obscure username, your best financial strategy is just to do whatever you can to ensure that people reading your stuff for free know that you wrote it and where to get more.

If you have fewer than 100,000,000 active readers, the cost:benefit ratio is probably better than 1:100 (i.e. the odds of a free read leading to a future subscription are significantly higher than the odds that the same would-be reader, being denied free access, would have paid).

EDIT: Originally I said subscribers. That was an error, I meant readers. If you had that many subscribers you would be famous enough to probably be losing money on piracy.

A few things I think you should consider:
1. Piracy and sales are always positively correlated, in every study, no-matter how you group your data: More-pirated things sell better, more popular things become more-pirated, and the people who pirate the most stuff are exactly the same people who buy the most of the same sort of stuff.

2. Every person who reads your material without paying isn't just a potential future customer, they're also a source of word-of-mouth advertising. Especially with social media the way it is these days, one influential pirate can lead to thousands of paying customers. This only stops being a worthwhile trade-off when you stop producing new material for them to pay for, or when you're so famous that everybody already knows your work (e.g. J.K. Rowling probably loses money on piracy, but Neil Gaiman doesn't). As long as you can prevent your work from being pirated in an instant and systemic manner, you can always attract new customers simply by being the best (fastest, most convenient) source of your new works.

3. Preventing illegal copying of material that needs to be presented in a human-readable form on a machine you don't fully control isn't just difficult, it's literally impossible (this is a formally proven fact, which e.g. HDCP tried and utterly failed to address by taking away user's control over their hardware). At "best" you can raise additional barriers, which brings me to:

4. Every technological anti-piracy measure ever studied has been shown in the long term to reduce sales by at least as much as it reduces piracy (harkens back to point 1). The more barriers you put before readers, the more of them will turn to piracy or just give up on reading your stories.

5. There is one anti-piracy measure that does work, a bit. You'll still have piracy (if your writing is any good), and pirates will still outnumber paying readers, but percentage of paying readers should improve: Stop using Patreon/Subscribestar/whatever as a distribution platform. Instead build a community where you engage with your readers (especially, but not exclusively, your paying readers) and make them feel involved in your future work. Human interaction is unpiratable, and positive reinforcement is a much better way to modify people's behaviour than lashing out at the people who you most need to like you (odds are that free-readers make up well over 90% of your audience, ergo most of your new paying readers likely either started as non-paying, or heard about you from a non-paying reader).

6. Human beings are deuterostomes: We start out as tiny little assholes and develop from there. Some people develop beyond being just an asshole, others aren't
so lucky: They go through life as they began it. The underdeveloped ones can stand out, due to their oft-brazen assholery, but please never forget that just being highly visible anuses does not make them representative of either humanity as a whole, or of any group unfortunate enough to have an asshole attach themselves to it: Very, very few of the people who read your non-free work without paying bear you any ill-will. They have their reasons, good or bad; poverty, distrust, curiosity, laziness, sometimes simple inertia, but only very rarely malice. These readers are not your enemies, and nothing good will come from trying to change that.


p.s. IANAL, but the act of intentionally destroying content on somebody else's website (legally published or not) would be cause for an open-and-shut criminal conviction in the UK. I'm led to believe that similar standards apply in many other countries. Wanting revenge is not a mitigating factor, neither is wanting to stop them from pirating your work: Modern justice systems were literally created to put a stop to that sort of private reprisal (they were more concerned about murders and multi-generational feuds than about vandalizing websites, but the point still stands).

If you're planning to do that, then talking about your plan before-hand on a public message board may turn out be a really bad idea (in terms of doing the prosecutor's job for them). For your sake I hope you're either just venting, or accessing QQ through a VPN with really solid privacy protection. If not, please consult a qualified lawyer before doing anything you might spend the next few years in jail for.

 

[orbitaldrop]

DRM benifits no one. While it makes it harder for pirates it also makes it harder for legitimate customers. Just look at Denuvo. Back in 2021 they forgot to renew the domain to their auth servers and all games with Denuvo in it was unplayable for a weekend.

Implementing anti piracy stratagies is also a good way to make your legit customers hate you. Just look at Puredark, dude started escalating and his reputation in the modding community vanished like dust in the wind.