*contains graphic material

From The Age, yesterday:

Why, exactly, does the government need to fund research into something that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of startups in Australia and overseas are doubtless already doing?

[Disclosure: I work for Warner Bros and so share a parent company with HBO. In addition my company distributes HBO content in Australia]

I’ve seen this comic from The Oatmeal passed around a lot in the last couple of days:

The essence of it is that Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman was plunged into a moral quandary when he realised there was no legitimate way he could legally watch Game of Thrones (apart, that is, from paying a subscription to HBO, the show’s creators, which for some reason he didn’t fancy).

As the always-hilarious Mike Masnick from Techdirt opined, this comic demonstrated yet again that “the biggest driver of piracy is a lack of legitimate offerings”. This has become something of a refrain over the past few years when discussing copyright infringement on the internet: people ‘want to pay’, they really do, but the legal channels just aren’t there. It’s a distribution problem, not a legal problem.

Rubbish. I’m a big believer in Occam’s Razor, in that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. The biggest driver of copyright infringement is that, if given a choice, people would prefer to get something for free. It’s the free rider problem in full effect – the same reason no-one pays tax in Greece – if you can get away with something, most people will try. It’s hardly rocket science.

I can’t imagine this sort of piece getting into the trade press in the USA, UK or Europe:

I don’t know about these people (including many of the commenters under the piece) but if I lose my job, my immediate concern will be finding a new one as quickly as possible so I can continue to pay for accomodation and other responsibilities. If a recruiter addresses me directly and says “hey you! want a job?” I’m not going to worry too much about the tone of their approach.