This applies to all piracy, but I’ll just post it here since a thread on lemmy.ml’s anime board made me think about it. Just some quick thoughts on a truism that people just repeat over and over until it’s just assumed to be true. The initial sentiment that piracy is always a problem of access to commodities as opposed to other factors was initially made/said by Gabe Newell, who is literally the owner of a digital games service which makes its money almost solely from making other people’s games as available as possible across the globe. He’s also a capitalist whose shown no real positive conception of economics for the greater good, so it’d be nice if fellow leftists had some skepticism on what his motivations for this ideology might be.

I’m pro-piracy, so I’m not here saying not to pirate. What I think though is that this is mainly used as an easy deflection from what the real problem of the digital consumer economy is. Because capital seeks to constrict and control the market stuff like borders, copyright law/DRM, etc. which are enforced by the state will always exist under capitalism. Atomized capital finds it beneficial for each individual capitalist to try to squeeze as much money out of purchasers via upselling, DRM, region locking, copyright litigation, etc. rather than to pool their resources together internationally or whatever. And if the market is ever dominated internationally like that either via monopoly or cooperatively by the capitalists (a cartel, essentially) they still have the same motive to try to control consumers to make profits more dependable and attempt to extract more from them because of investors and the profit motive.

This means that the “service problem” will literally always exist as long as capitalism exists and capital will be forced to compete against piracy so long as they can’t stop it. Which is good in the sense that consumers have a outlet to still get what they want without having to pay these companies if they don’t want/need to (essentially re-cooping some of their lost surplus value form capitalists on a societal scale). But the problem of how do we get money to the people who make art is still there, even if capitalist control of digital art/software crumbles, piracy advocates just don’t realize it yet. The capitalist mode of production doesn’t mesh well with near-infinite reproduction, so they try to stifle it via the aforementioned ways. The means by which piracy even occurs is by computers and the internet which are both heavily subsidized by worker’s tax dollars and the government, so people are already contributing to making art cheaper to distribute for these people. We should be encouraging people to look at the mode of production itself rather than the symptoms of it (again it’s DRM, region locking, etc.) and socializing the production and funding of art.

“It’s a service problem” also focuses almost entirely on consumption rather than production, which is a pattern you’ll see with westerners/western leftists, so the question of #1 how to fund and facilitate production doesn’t come up and #2 ‘where do workers get their buying power from and how much of it do they have’ also never comes up. This entire thing doesn’t even question where workers get the money to pay for these goods from, it’s totally divorced from macro-economics. They just assume that if they made the market frictionless enough that prosperity would happen, which we should obviously know is false. Workers are already maxing out their means of consumption on necessities and luxuries, they’re already deep in debt, there’s no more profitability to be squeezed from them and the workers of the art too are also squeezed of most of their surplus value.

The growing issue of piracy will become more and more as profitability continues to plummet, but making it more convenient won’t make it (much) more affordable or increase profits. Making it more convenient will also never happen in the peripheries outside of the imperial core as they will never have the collective buying power or infrastructure to make it worthwhile for companies to invest in making their products available there. There are some profits lost due to inconvenience, but saying the only problem with production and economy is convenience is liberal and idealistic, it attempts to reify the supremacy of the market.

  • lemmygrabber
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    3 years ago

    The biggest reason people pirate is because they don’t want to pay for digital media, in many instances because they can’t. This is prevalent in the third world where people don’t have much disposable income usually. The reason piracy exists is because of arcane IP laws where digital commodities are treated like physical ones and because of the capitalist tendency to seek rent.

    The only hindrance which prevents artists from undertaking large scale projects independently is the capital required up front because of which publishers still continue to be a thing. With stuff like patreon, there has been some deviations from this but hopefully proper liberation will happen under socialism.

  • Dreadful WraithOPM
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    3 years ago

    I’d welcome any ideas or counter-ideas people have to sharpen my understanding of this problem though, as long as they’re marxist. I don’t think I wrote this as succinctly as I could and some terminology might be wrong here or there. I think the standard rebuttal to the issue of piracy by populist leftists falls into techno-utopianism though.

    I also should have talked more about how sites like Crunchyroll, etc. exist to generate profit for themselves and would never help funnel money to like the animators or anything. It was always naive to think that “the only way to stop a bad company that exploits its workers is to fund a good company that exploits its workers” so that they’d somehow pay money to the animators. The only case of this happening is actually Netflix with only one of its shows, EDEN, which bypassed the anime production committees, working with the animation studio directly. But even with this I don’t see the worker’s pays being equalized to being non-exploitative.

    It’s weird because Crunchyroll and Netflix use the terms entirely differently. For Netflix, it just means “You can only watch this here.” But internally, they have “Licensed Originals”, “Produced Originals” and in the case of anime: “Production Line Partnership”. In the case of anime, licensed originals are Violet Evergarden, Pokemon Journeys etc., Production Line Partnership shows (licensed shows where Netflix signed a deal with them early in production) are B: The Beginning and AICO: Incarnation, and the only produced original so far is EDEN. In fact, EDEN is the only anime they’ve directly funded.

    However, Crunchyroll has been doing co-productions for years. But suddenly there’s this new term “Crunchyroll Originals”. In the article, I included a quote from Alden Budill, but I highly recommend reading the interview in full, because it’s ridiculous. Basically, it appears like it’s 100% a marketing term that covers both Crunchyroll Studios shows (High Guardian Spice/Onyx Equinox) and the shows that used to be called “Co-productions” like Tonikawa and EX-ARM.

    So in this way, Crunchyroll focuses on co-productions that they refer to as “Originals” while Netflix focuses on exclusive licensing and “Production Line Partnerships” that they can group together as “Originals”.
    -TheCanipaEffect on ANN’s forum

    There is also the instance of places like Hong Kong or Taiwan, etc. where pirating anime was (and still is) more common than purchasing it and even when the official DVD/etc. products were sold at the same price as the pirated goods in roughly similar ease people still pirated there.