Rob Pegoraro, the Post’s technology columnist, is looking for alternative names for software theft that aren’t associated with, ahem, maritime terrorism:
The NYT’s always-interesting Freakonomics blog raised that question yesterday. Stephen J. Dubner wrote that “as real-life pirate attacks have gained in intensity, violence, and geopolitical meaning, talking about digital thieves as pirates has come to seem clever to a fault, and inaccurate too.”
The Business Software Alliance, a trade group devoted to stopping people from using commercial software without paying for it first, does not agree. Also yesterday, the CNet tech-news site reported that a BSA publicist sent an e-mail explicitly comparing thugs hijacking supertankers to software thieves: “Piracy takes many forms, some more violent than others.”
(Writer Gordon Haff called that e-mail “one of the most tone-deaf and cynically opportunistic PR pitches I’ve seen for quite some time.”)
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Blogger John Gruber suggests the term “bootlegging,” but I’m not sure about that noun either. To me (a one-time concert reviewer for the Post), it evokes homemade recordings from concerts, an activity that demands individual initiative and, when done right, creativity. Installing a copy of a program on two computers doesn’t require much of those qualities.
“Software theft” itself suffers the problem that theft, by definition, involves the victims losing the stolen property [...] That doesn’t happen with digital media, where somebody installing a not-paid-for copy of Office doesn’t stop your copy, mine or Steve Ballmer’s from working. Rather, the key concept here is that somebody has short-circuited a normal business transaction through deceit or trickery. And for that, the most apt definition appears to be “fraud”
Fraud is not a good term for this, as the software consumer is not misrepresenting his or herself, and in fact generally has no interaction at all with the software vendor. “Fraud” implies that the victimized party has been manipulated into surrendering something of value under false pretenses. That doesn’t really apply to these cases.
Gruber’s suggestion of “bootleggers” is better than “fraud”, but it’s unfortunately normative in that most people now consider Prohibition (which is what most people think of when they hear “bootlegging”) to have been an unreasonable imposition by the government — as a result, in this case the terminology would imply that software appropriation is legitimate.
A better description would be “freeloaders”, as users of unlicensed proprietary software are extracting value from a system without supporting it themselves. It also has a pun in it, since they’re “loading” the software on their machines! Obviously this should count as a major strike against it.
Even though I couldn’t resist leaving in an irrelevant quote beating up on them, in the end I have to side with the BSA. Not because “piracy” is a great term for software theft — it’s manipulative and inaccurate — but because that’s what we have been and will continue to call it.
I don’t mean to just rail against the evolution of language in a reflexive, let’s-bitch-about-political-correctness sort of way. But the fact that some people are suddenly feeling guilty for previously having a whimsical attitude toward all things piratical strikes me as pretty silly. Surprise: there are a lot of idioms with horrific literal meanings that we regularly deploy lightheartedly — “highway robbery”, “scared to death”, “thrown under the bus” — these would all be unpleasant things to experience! Tragedy + time = comedy and all that. Enjoying the amusing caricature of piracy that we’ve developed over the last several decades is not the same thing as dismissing the horrors of real-life piracy.
Now: who wants to play some Halo 3 tonight? I promise to feel at least little bad when I use the sniper rifle.
I think it was Straczynski, the guy who created Babylon V, who addressed a fan group as “copyright infringers”. He was joking. His point was that he was pleased that his fans were reusing and rethinking his creations, but maybe we should just refer to people who steal music and video as fans or customers.
The term hacker used to have positive connotations though now hackers are the bad guys. Why not a similar transformation for fans or customers?
I came here thinking someone was slighting my religion. As a Pastafarian I always seek to be touched by the noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I thought you were slighting our religious text… But “aarrg” Here you are debating what you should be calling thieves.
freeloaders is not a good term. The naming issue relates to the intangible nature of software since physical storage media are no longer used (same with music). What would you call someone who taps into cable TV without a subscription payment? A theif.