Hello mateys,
There’s a lot of discussion recently about the ethics of piracy. A lot of good points have been made out of a handful bad ones. The most compelling one is of course the data preservation one, that piracy is the only way to mass preserve digital media in a medium that is prone to error.
However, sometimes discussions about the ethical justification to privacy often lead to rationalizing. Pirating, as others have exclaimed, is at best morally grey, and there are some cases, namely pirating works of small creators, where it is actively harmful and wrong.
I would like to share my perspective on it. I studied some game theory in college and that course made me look at the world in a different way. I believe piracy is a perfect example of a game theory concept known as the prisoner’s dilemma and evolutionary game theory, if you all haven’t heard about it. My essay is less of a justification of piracy, but more of an explanation of why piracy happens and grounding it in theory.
As a background for this concept, here’s a scenario. Let’s say you’re a criminal faced with two options: snitch or stay silent. There is also another criminal, your accomplice, who is also in jail and faced with the same option. Depending on your response and your accomplice’s response there are different payouts:
I stay silent and accomplice stays silent: 2 years of jail for both of us
I stay silent and accomplice snitches: 5 years of jail for me, 1 year of jail for the accomplice
I snitch and accomplice stays silent: 1 year of jail for me, 5 years of jail for my accomplice
We botch snitch on each other: 3 years of jail time for both of us
Most of you probably know where this is going, but bear with me because i’m gonna go further. The quick analysis of the situation is that there is a best-case scenario, which is both of us staying silent. But this best-case scenario can only happen with the result of cooperation. This is because if one of us flips, the other will have to serves longer sentence. The best case scenario can only happen if we both agree before the game that we will stay silent so we can guarantee the outcome, or else we will serve the longer sentence if the other betrays us.
So, what if we play this game without cooperating beforehand? Well, looking at my options:
if i stay silent, i can either get 2 years or 5 years of jail time
if i snitch, i can get either 1 year or 3 years of jail time
when faced with both these options, which strategy will you choose? of course, I do not want to got to jail for 5 years. Snitching definitely looks mad appealing to me when looking at it from this perspective. That’s why, in game theory, snitching is what’s called a nash equilibrium. Staying silent is not a nash equilibrium, because if the other snitches then I get a resulting jailtime which is worse off than if i just stayed silent.
Note that this does not mean that everybody should snitch. It’s just that, given the choices handed to us, snitching is the one that will result in the least bad jail sentences. As with life, there may be other factors at play, such as the fact that if I snitch, the gang boss might kill me when I get out, which will definitely affect my decisions whether I should snitch or stay silent.
Okay. So how does this relate to piracy? What if we now play this game at a massive scale. Each and every one of us is faced with two options: pirate or buy. Currently, the majority of people actually buy software and media!
But wait. If buying is analogous to staying silent, and pirating is analogous to snitching, why aren’t we at Nash equilibrium? why isn’t everyone pirating software? My sweet summer child, I present to you the concept of law. The purpose of the law is precisely to coordinate people so we don’t fall into our shitty Nash equilibriums and ruin everything, and it does it precisely by attaching a more negative result to snitching (pirating). That’s why we have stoplights (seriously, we talk about stoplights a lot in my game theory class) and why (mostly) everyone follows stoplight laws. (before you say tRagEdY oF tHE cOMmONs!!! the guy Garrett Hardin who coined the term was a hardline eugenicist and his intellectual contributions is a shitstain in academia so shut the fuck up.)
(for people that are curious, this is the realm of Evolutionary game theory. It studies the scenarios where each individual pair off in a population and play a game, and studies stable populations and stable strategies under this model. Ironically, i learned this from Game Theory, Alive by Anna R. Karlin and Yuval Peres. which i got from libgen XD)
So, as we have it, we have a majority of people buying software, with a minority of pirates who are getting that software or media for free. We aren’t at nash equilibrium!! More technically, piracy is stable strategy under the parameters of the system. We pirates know that buying all the software we interact with will just make us poorer and sad in the end, and we’ll be stuck with all the DRM. But on the other hand, it’s untenable if everyone just pirates everything all the time! We pirates profit so long as the majority of people keep buying software. This puts us, pirates, at a very precarious position. It is dangerous when the population of pirates to increase, because this will cause things and create domino effects which will put us at nash equilibrium due to more regulation of piracy and a crackdown of piracy, leaving us worse off and needing to adapt to these changes.
My advice:the most stable strategy right now is buying software whenever you can spare the coin and if you think the value of the software to you matches its price, but pirating if it’s convenient or unaffordable.
Too long, didn’t read: piracy is a stable strategy under the current parameters of the system. If everybody pirates it fucks everything up. So, be as sneaky as you can. Also, read up on your evolutionary game theory you pleb
As a cool sidenote: evolutionary game theory is, unsurprisingly, rooted in biology. It was used to model the populations of various species of animals by quantifying the payouts of their behavior in relation to other animals in the ecosystem. Here’s a quote from Game Theory, Alive:
“A new perspective was proposed by John Maynard Smith and George Price in 1973: Each player could be an organism whose pure strategy is encoded in its genes”
The model isn’t too far off from what happens in reality. Some species of animals actually follow the expected behavior of what will happen when individuals in a population play a game of “rock-paper-scissors”
The side-blotched lizard Uta stansburiana has three distinct types of male: orange-throat, blue-throat, and yellow-striped. All females of the species are yellow- striped. The orange-throated males are violently aggressive, keep large harems of females, and defend large territories. The yellow-striped males are docile and look like receptive females. In fact, the orange-throats can’t distinguish between the yellow-striped males and females. This enables the yellow-striped males to sneak into their territory and secretly copulate with the females. The blue-throats are less aggressive than the orange-throats, keep smaller harems (small enough to distinguish their females from yellow-striped males), and defend small territories. Researchers have observed a six-year cycle starting with domination, say, by the orange-throats. Eventually, the orange-throats amass territories and harems so large that they can no longer be guarded effectively against the sneaky yellow- striped males, who are able to secure a majority of copulations and produce the largest number of offspring. When the yellow-striped lizards become very com- mon, however, the males of the blue-throated variety get an edge: Since they have small harems, they can detect yellow-striped males and prevent them from invad- ing their harems. Thus, a period when the blue-throats become dominant follows. However, the aggressive orange-throats do comparatively well against blue-throats since they can challenge them and acquire their harems and territories, thus prop- agating themselves. In this manner, the population frequencies eventually return to the original ones, and the cycle begins anew. When John Maynard Smith learned that Uta stansburia were “playing” Rock- Paper-Scissors, he reportedly exclaimed, “They have read my book!”
Hope you liked my unhinged post guys :-)
I sure did! :) Thanks for sharing with us.