In the latest incident, the site put together a collection of images that were created using the long-exposure function on some cameras. But it wasn’t just a regular post — the collection was created for Samsung as part of BuzzFeed’s “native advertising” or sponsored content program, where the site creates a post and tries to get it shared by users in the same viral way that its regular posts are (the post, entitled “14 Amazing Photos That Were Totally Not Photoshopped,” appears to have been removed but there’s a Google cache version here).

Creating sponsored content with borrowed images

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has made it clear that he sees this kind of native advertising content as the future of digital-media monetization (something he will be talking about as part of our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York City). But if the site continues to run into allegations of copyright infringement based on the pictures or other content it uses in these sponsored posts, that could make it somewhat harder to sell clients on the idea — and with its recent venture funding, the pressure on the company to toe the line is only likely to increase.

Web sites should start with the notion that if they cannot find a photographer's contact info for a picture, it is unavailable for use.

—
Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) January 11, 2013

The problem for BuzzFeed, and for plenty of other online-media players, is that the line they need to toe when it comes to copyright infringement is so blurry. Particularly when it comes to photos, the difference between blatant infringement and “fair use” is not easy to define — although many armchair legal scholars (including many of BuzzFeed’s critics) would like to pretend that it is. When it takes a court more than three years to determine whether Google’s use of thumbnails in an image search qualifies as fair use, it’s safe to say the issue is complicated.

To some, it seems obvious that taking someone’s photo from another source and using it without permission is infringement. But what if that photo is a slightly modified version of a photo that has appeared elsewhere? Who owns the rights? In some cases, the pictures BuzzFeed uses can be easily traced to their creators — as Wired pointed out in a previous incident involving a professional photographer, who later settled with the site over the use of her photo. In other cases, it’s not obvious. (BuzzFeed has also been sued for using celebrity photos without permission, as my colleague Jeff Roberts has pointed out).

BuzzFeed says it is trying to improve

Peretti told me in an email the same thing he said to Mashable: that is, he regrets any offence caused by using some of the photos that came from Reddit in the campaign, and agrees the site should try to track down the original posters (one of the criticisms that is often levelled at BuzzFeed is that it provides links to the photo itself on a third-party hosting provider like Imgur rather than to the original source). In his email message, he said:

“We were very concerned that we upset people in the photography subreddit. We immediately addressed the complaint… and posted an update in the reddit thread. The BuzzFeed post was designed to show how cool that sort of photography is so we regret making these awesome, creative people upset. We’d be happy to talk to any of them directly to figure out how to work together with photographers active on imgur.”

So how hard should BuzzFeed have to try in order to find the original creator? And if it can’t find them, should it be allowed to use the photo or not? It’s easy to see the site as the bad guy, taking people’s photos without asking and trying to make money from them — but the reality is that “remix culture” or whatever we choose to call it has become commonplace online, for better or worse. Photos and videos are edited, remixed, combined and uploaded thousands of times until the original owner of the various parts may be almost impossible to determine. Why is using such a photo not fair use?

The biggest issue is that “fair use” itself is such a thorny concept. Everyone thinks they know it when they see it, but definitions are all over the map. In part, that’s because it is a horrendously complex legal principle that is based on four often conflicting factors (purpose of the original work, amount of the original that is used, the purpose of the infringing work and the effect on the market for the original). But as complex as it is, it’s also a crucial part of the foundation of the social web, whether we choose to admit that or not.

These are not easy questions to answer, by any means — but they are becoming increasingly important for sites like BuzzFeed (and even Reddit itself) to grapple with head-on, especially since so much of their financial future depends on making sense of whose content they are using and how.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/mtkang and Shutterstock/Lightpoet

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In addition to opening up the platform, the company has updated the core product and navigation to make it more visual, tablet-optimized and to lay down the groundwork for a more social experience. In refreshing the platform, co-founder and CEO Ariel Diaz said they took their cue from student feedback.

“We respond completely to students. That’s really our core driver, which is different from a lot of educational products because they’re selling to institutions or professors,” he said.

The new version is easier to navigate with photo thumbnails for each chapter in the table of contents, and it also includes an improved search feature to help students more quickly find relevant content. Students can also highlight sections and take notes, and, Diaz said, they plan to release a notebook feature in the near future that includes all of a student’s notes and highlights, organized by chapter, so that they can have instant study guides.

New version lays groundwork for social

While Boundless isn’t social now (Diaz said some students are apprehensive about sharing in a learning environment because of potential honor code violations), the updated platform provides the foundation for future community features — with an activity feed, for example.

“We’re starting to think about how the community and social features will play into it,” he said. “We’re making sure that they’re helpful, not social just for the sake of being social.”

As the platform progresses, Diaz said, they plan to make the content more “modular” so that teachers will ultimately be able to assign the same section on neurons, for example, whether the class is on psychology or biology or neuroscience.

For every course, Boundless cites the original source, both to be compliant with Open Educational Resources standards and to provide students with a richer experience. “With textbooks, you don’t see any sources – the textbook becomes the de facto authority which is silly because if you do deeper research, material is sourced in a research paper or other documents,” he said.

Publishers allege copyright infringement, unfair competition, false advertising

In April, Boundless Learning announced that it had raised $8 million from investors, including Venrock, NextView Ventures, Kepha Partners, Founder Collective and SV Angel, just as three major publishers filed a lawsuit against the company. In the suit, Pearson, Cengage and Macmillan alleged several violations, including copyright infringement, unfair competition and false advertising. Last month, Boundless filed a motion to dismiss the latter two claims and, while it didn’t argue to dismiss the copyright infringement claim, it said it’s without merit.

The company said it’s currently in use by students at more than 1,000 universities and plans to file a formal response to the full complaint, including the copyright claims.

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The case centers on the search engine’s autocomplete feature — the suggestions for commonly-used search terms that pop up when users start typing something on Google. While they are generally seen as a way to make search more efficient (and provide some amusement when the results behave strangely), not everyone is amused: in fact the French music royalties society SNEP has been campaigning for several years to force Google to stop associating musical terms with terms like “torrent” or the names of filesharing services like RapidShare or MegaUpload.

The group argued that Google was promoting piracy by associating the two terms in public, making it easier for users to infringe copyright of the artists it represents.

But the French courts disagreed, rejecting those claims in 2010 and concluding that making commonly-used search terms transparent in this was was not the same as encouraging unauthorized copying. When SNEP appealed in 2011 and failed again, it looked like the case was over.

Now, however, the Court de Cassation, France’s court of last resort, has said it will set aside the verdict because of a technicality.

In a ruling made on Thursday, the Supreme Court said that the Court of Appeal had actually violated a key clause of the country’s rules on intellectual property in its interpretation of the legal arguments.

The rule states that collection societies like SNEP are within their rights to demand that the court take “all measures to prevent or stop such an attack on a copyright or related rights.” This, said the Supreme Court, was something ignored by the previous ruling: it has now referred the case back to the lower circuit, specifically the Court of Appeal in Versailles, for another go-round:

“CASSE ET ANNULE, dans toutes ses dispositions, l’arrêt rendu le 3 mai 2011, entre les parties, par la cour d’appel de Paris ; remet, en conséquence, la cause et les parties dans l’état où elles se trouvaient avant ledit arrêt et, pour être fait droit, les renvoie devant la cour d’appel de Versailles.”

Although the decision is not really a victory for anyone yet, it does open the door for a different decision. As such, it was welcomed by SNEP, whose CEO David El Sayegh said:

“This decision showing that search engines should be responsible for regulating the internet is a first in France”.

Google France, meanwhile, reiterated its argument by saying that, while it “takes very seriously” online infringement, autosuggest is simply an automatic display reflecting the searches completed by other internet users.

But here’s what’s even more peculiar: even though SNEP’s case failed in the court, it actually had the desired impact in the real world: Google did start filtering some phrases voluntarily after the initial appeal, despite the fact that it had won.

As The Register reported some 18 months ago:

“The company said in December that it would play nice with the big name record labels, TV networks, and movie studios, by providing better protection against piracy on the interwebs.

“Accordingly, various search terms and file-sharing websites have now been erased from Google’s not-altogether spotless mind.”

That means SNEP appears to be trying to make sure that this approach is not merely voluntary, but covers all sorts of copyright material and enshrined in law. That would put it in accordance with some other censorship activity in France, such as the rules that force internet companies to censor pro-Nazi material, for example.

And it also adds to the complicated situation around France’s three strikes law known as Hadopi, which has been in force since 2010 but has had questionable impact on filesharing. New president Francois Hollande has already suggested that he’s considering overturning the law.

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MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom may fit the larger-than-life image most people have of an internet pirate — after all, he is huge and wears black, and drives cars with license plates that say “Guilty” on them. Richard O’Dwyer is the polar opposite: he is a soft-spoken 24-year-old who started a website based in Britain called TV Shack that consisted only of links. Despite their differences, however, the U.S. government is trying to extradite O’Dwyer to the United States to face charges of criminal copyright infringement. While Dotcom hosted terabytes worth of infringing files, O’Dwyer simply linked to them — but in the eyes of the U.S. Justice Department, these two things are virtually equivalent. If the case proceeds, it could force us to change the way we think about some of the fundamental underpinnings of the web.

There are several elements that make the O’Dwyer case particularly important, factors that have led some prominent technology players to mount a protest over his potential extradition, including a petition started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (which my colleague Bobbie Johnson wrote about) that now has more than 200,000 signatures. In an opinion piece he wrote recently for The Guardian‘s comment section, Wales — who is now also an advisor to the British government — said that while he is in favor of strong copyright protection for content creators of all kinds, that commitment only goes so far. As he put it:

It does not mean that we should abandon time-honoured moral and legal principles to allow endless encroachments on our civil liberties in the interests of the moguls of Hollywood.

The U.S. wants O’Dwyer extradited for linking

By way of background, O’Dwyer started the TVShack.net website in 2007 as a resource for those who were looking for either live-streaming video versions of television shows or for downloads. A disclaimer on the site at the time it launched said: “TV Shack is a simple resource site. All content visible on this site is located at 3rd party websites. TV Shack is not responsible for any content linked to or referred from these pages.” The U.S. government disagreed, however: in 2010, officials with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department (ICE) seized O’Dwyer’s domain and shut the site down. O’Dwyer then moved to a different domain and that was seized as well.

The British government considered mounting a case against O’Dwyer for linking to copyright-infringing material, but decided not to — in part because an earlier case against a similar website that also linked to streams and downloads of TV shows was thrown out, after the judge decided that linking to copyright infringing videos is not a crime. There have been similar cases in other jurisdictions, including a recent ruling by the Federal Court of Canada that said linking to a photo was not considered copyright infringement for the purposes of that country’s criminal code.

The U.S. wasn’t willing to give up so easily, however: the government started an extradition case against O’Dwyer, arguing that he should be sent to the United States to face a trial that could put him in prison for up to 10 years. In March, the Home Secretary ruled that the extradition could proceed — despite the fact that extradition to the U.S. is only supposed to occur when the acts involved are considered to be a crime in both Britain and the United States. O’Dwyer is now appealing that ruling (a news story on Tuesday said the Home Office had decided to back the extradition despite the protests and petitions in his favor, but Wales said on Twitter that this isn’t true).

@MadBennett HO has not responded. I expect them to respond positively soon to meeting with me. Low-level spokesman wrong.

—
Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) July 03, 2012

The O’Dwyer case has no connection to the U.S.

As Wales notes in his Guardian op-ed, the O’Dwyer case is just another example of the impulses that drove U.S. legislators to push forward both SOPA and PIPA — the anti-piracy laws that sparked a massive outcry online last year and led to both of the proposed bills ultimately being shelved. In both of those pieces of legislation, websites could be removed from the internet and subjected to prosecution if their “primary purpose” was judged to be piracy or copyright infringement. In a similar way, the U.S. is likely to argue that since O’Dwyer linked primarily to illegal copies of TV shows, he should be guilty of secondary infringement for “inducing” others to post copyrighted content.

The concept of “inducing” infringement by others is also a centerpiece of the MegaUpload case, but at least that involves files being uploaded to servers owned by Dotcom’s company — O’Dwyer simply linked to things, just as Google or any other search engine does, and he also took down links whenever a rights-holder asked him to, which is one of the tests for when a company should be entitled to “safe harbor” under U.S. copyright laws. Not only that, but the only connection to the United States is that U.S. citizens presumably accessed the website, just as anyone can access a website anywhere, regardless of where they live.

Those two factors — the nature of the website as a collecter of links, and the lack of any connection to the United States that would justify an extradition — are what make the O’Dwyer case particularly troubling. With the case, the U.S. government appears to be asserting that linking to copyright infringing files under any circumstances should not only be an offence but an extraditable offence, and that the U.S. government is fully prepared to reach into other countries and extradite their citizens when there is virtually no connection whatsoever between that person’s acts and U.S. law or jurisdiction.

As media and entertainment conglomerates continue to put pressure on the U.S. government to enact or agree to legislation like SOPA and PIPA, or their international equivalents such as ACTA, cases like O’Dwyer’s should raise some troubling questions about how far the authorities are prepared to go, and what the ultimate impact will be on the web as we know it. If you’re interested in more of my thoughts on the case, I recently spoke about these issues on a CBC Radio program in which Jimmy Wales also appeared.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Keith Allison

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A chart from the report “The six business models for copyright infringement.” Click to expand.

A new Google study entitled “The six business models for copyright infringement,” just released with the UK’s PRS (Performing Right Society) for Music, finds that live TV is the fastest-growing segment of copyright infringement. (To see the others, click on the image at right.) Global pageviews of live TV sites were up 61 percent for the year ending May 2012.

Live TV sites link to illegal streams of network and paid TV. The study looked at 51 live TV sites — it doesn’t mention any of them by name, but a couple of popular ones are Sidereel.com and TVDuck.com, which feature a mixture of legal and illegal content — and found that a third of them are based in the United States.

Two-thirds of the sites are funded by advertisers, and “compared to the other segments Live TV Gateway has very high levels of direct access and referrals from social networks.” Live TV sites are more likely than the other business models to have mobile sites and social network presence “in the form of a social networking ‘action’ icon, for example Facebook ‘like’ buttons, Twitter ‘tweet’ button or similar.”

P2P sites still get the most visitors

Researchers looked at 29 P2P sites; again, while they are not mentioned by name, the largest gets 2.1 million unique UK visitors per month (compared to 1.1 million unique UK visitors at the most popular live TV site). The UK-based study didn’t track monthly U.S. visitors by site, but did look at global page views across categories, using data provided by Google.

P2P sites are the most dependent on advertising of any of the business models looked at: 86 percent of them are funded by advertising.

Overall, “both Live TV Gateway and P2P Community sites, the two largest  and fastest growing segments, tended to link to content on other sites or services rather than host the content,” the researchers found.

To fight piracy, “follow the money”

Theo Bertram, Google’s UK policy manager, said in a statement:

Our research shows there are many different business models for online infringement which can be tackled if we work together. The evidence suggests that one of the most effective ways to do this is to follow the money, targeting the advertisers who choose to make money from these sites and working with payment providers to ensure they know where their services are being used.

The research was conducted by BAE Systems Detica, and you can view the full report here.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Mehmet Dilsiz

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Under the proposals, which were published on Tuesday, Ofcom says British ISPs would have to send warning letters to those individuals pinpointed by music, film and TV companies as potential illegal downloaders. Anyone receiving three letters in a 12-month period would then have their personal data, downloading and filesharing history handed over to the copyright owners to help them prepare a legal case.

The rules are largely the same as those previously published by Ofcom in 2010, with some minor alterations. The law will apply to any ISP with more than 400,000 customers, and copyright owners must file their complaints within one month of gathering evidence of illegal activity. Those accused will get 20 days to appeal against the complaint, at a cost of £20 ($31) — which is refunded if the appeal is successful.

Despite the fact that the draft code is being published today, and is expected to be passed into law later this year, the system will not be implemented until March 1, 2014.

It’s already been a long slog for proponents of the law and its opponents. The prospect of a three strikes policy in the U.K. has been hanging over the internet industry for several years, and formed one of the most controversial elements of the Digital Economy Act in 2010.

Since then British internet providers had attempted — and failed — to get the three strikes rules quashed, largely on the grounds of expense. But the move looked inevitable following a court ruling in March.

They have won some concessions, however: under the draft code, rightsholders will meet up to 75 percent of the cost of action, but they will still have to collect and retain significant amounts of data on users.

Gavel photograph: Andrey Burmakin / Shutterstock

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Reports in the local media say that the country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs is looking to bring in fresh laws that would make service providers responsible for illegal filesharing between those using their networks.

According to Vedomosti.ru, the government is undertaking a consultation on the issue, and will report back towards the end of this month. If it goes ahead, the laws that criminalize the network could hit the statute books later this year.

The ministry is trying to document the “spread of illegal content in the local networks of Internet service providers,” Seralinov Jannat of the Ministry of Internal Affairs told Gazeta.ru.

According to him, each provider runs local file-sharing networks with which they are trying to attract users. Seralinov promised that the criminal penalties for the distribution of pirated movies and pornography to minors will affect not only subscribers, but also ISPs, but did not say how it would work precisely.

As the piece points out, it is the local filesharing networks that many Russian ISPs run that are really under scrutiny — services that officials claim allow subscribers to freely pirate and share material. This is a slightly different argument from cases that have happened in countries all over the world — such as Germany, Australia and elsewhere — which have generally ruled that ISPs are not liable.

In general, those providers accused of assisting infringement have argued that they are merely dumb pipes that push data around without discrimination. But in some countries, such as the U.K., ISPs are being co-opted (against their will) into tracking and punishing those believed to be illegal filesharers.

Still, it’s a significant move for Moscow to be making: Russia is now Europe’s largest internet market, and is growing at a rapid clip — yet still one of the cliches is that it’s a haven for crime and IP infringement of all kinds. Yes, Russia has a high incidence of online crime, and is home to a large cohort of internet fraudsters, plus the fuzzy legality of services like AllofMP3.com, a music download store which caused great consternation because it operated under a very particular interpretation of Russian law that most copyright holders thought was actually illegal.

But this has been changing over the last few years, as the country tries to legitimize itself in the eyes of other nations and organizations like the WTO.

That means the reaction of internet providers will be interesting to watch: will they shut down the offending networks, or make a stand?

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By now, most of us have grown pretty used to hearing the word “theft” used to describe what happens when someone downloads a movie or a song that isn’t theirs, and certainly media and entertainment lobby groups make heavy use of such terms — as do people like News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch when talking about what Google News does with his newspaper content. But as Rutgers law professor Stuart Green describes in a New York Times opinion piece, this terminology is fundamentally flawed, since copyright infringement is a very different thing from theft of physical property.

Why does this matter? Because seeing it as theft makes it easier to accept ridiculous court decisions and/or unreasonable government legislation that vastly over-reaches what copyright is supposed to cover.

Green notes that the Justice Department is busy prosecuting a massive legal case against MegaUpload, the file-hosting and sharing site run by the colorful German hacker Kim Dotcom. But while the documents filed by the FBI and others for the indictment included enormous estimates of the amount of digital property allegedly “stolen” by the company — just as the record industry has in cases against Napster and other sites — it isn’t clear that MegaUpload has done anything different from what YouTube and others do. And whatever other things the company might be guilty of, theft isn’t among them.

Intellectual property is unlike any other kind of property

As with the Napster and Grokster and other similar cases, the argument made by the movie and music and software industries is that all of the files that are shared on such sites represent a theft of their property — their “intellectual property,” to use another term that is filled with contradictions and actually muddies the debate even further. Obviously, all of the people who downloaded movies and software from MegaUpload did so instead of buying a physical copy, and therefore it represents theft — just like walking into a movie store and taking a DVD. Except that it doesn’t represent anything of the kind, as Green notes:

If Cyber Bob illegally downloads Digital Joe’s song from the Internet, it’s crucial to recognize that, in most cases, Joe hasn’t lost anything. Yes, one might try to argue that people who use intellectual property without paying for it steal the money they would have owed had they bought it lawfully.

But there are two basic problems with this contention. First, we ordinarily can’t know whether the downloader would have paid the purchase price had he not misappropriated the property. Second, the argument assumes the conclusion that is being argued for — that it is theft.

As Green and others too numerous to mention have pointed out, downloading or copying something doesn’t represent the loss of anything tangible at all, which is what makes “intellectual property” such a misnomer. If I take your car or your coat, you no longer have them — that represents real theft. And even the argument that the content industries fall back on, which is that downloading or copying represents the loss of a potential sale, doesn’t hold water. As Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media has noted, many of those who copy his books likely would never have paid money for them in the first place.

This is about more than just legal terminology or semantics

But this is all just semantics, right? Not really. For one thing, seeing it as theft makes it easier to steamroll right over issues like “fair use,” which is an incredibly important principle and one that is unique to copyright law (there are distinctions around public use of land in property law, but that’s a topic for another day). In a nutshell, the principle of fair use allows both individuals and corporations to take copyright content and use it in various ways without being guilty of infringement — it’s like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and it was included in copyright law to make creative use of content legally defensible.

One of the problems with fair use, however, is that it is incredibly complicated and filled with grey areas: as I described in a recent GigaOM Pro report on Pinterest (sub. req.) it is a four-factor test in which judges try to assess the original intention of the work, the nature of the infringing use, the amount of the original that is used, and the effect on the market for the original. In some cases the courts have decided that Google should be allowed to use images in search, because thumbnails are seen as a “transformative use.” Exceptions are also often made for journalistic or educational purposes.

But seeing any form of copying or unauthorized use as theft makes it virtually impossible to justify any of these actions, and makes it easier to see them as a crime.

And so we have the Authors’ Guild fighting for years to prevent Google from copying books so that they can be easily found, because the group argues that the simple act of copying them — even if only small portions of those books ever see the light of day — amounts to theft. And YouTube gets a takedown notice when a user’s video happens to have a song playing faintly on a radio in the background while her son dances. And laws like SOPA and PIPA and too many others to mention are drafted to prevent the widespread “theft” that is allegedly stealing billions from intellectual property holders.

And all the while, content industries deliberately ignore the fact that the intended purpose of copyright law is to promote innovation and creativity, not to smother it. Are there real issues around how creators get compensated for their work, and how we can accomplish that most effectively in an era of unlimited copying? Sure there are. But using terms like “theft” and “piracy” doesn’t get us any closer to solving those very real issues in any meaningful sense — it pushes us further away.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users David Goehring and Seth Anderson

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As an artist who probably makes a substantial income from licensing his music, you might think Neil Young would frown on piracy and file-sharing, but that appears not to be the case, according to an interview he gave at the Dive Into Media conference in Los Angeles. Instead of railing against file-sharers, Young called piracy “the new radio” because it’s “how music gets around.” The musician’s comment puts a lot of the hysteria about copyright infringement into perspective — as we’ve pointed out before, file-sharing and monetization aren’t mutually exclusive, and in many cases a certain amount of so-called “piracy” can actually be good for business, as authors, musicians and even game developers have come to realize.

Comparing piracy to radio is a smart way of looking at the issue: in the early days of the music business, when live performances and record sales were the main revenue generator for artists and publishers, radio itself was seen as a form of piracy (as sheet music was before that). Musicians fulminated about radio stations playing their music for free, and some record labels made their acts sign waivers saying they would not appear on the radio. In the end, of course, radio became a huge revenue driver for music — although it did so in part because record labels and publishers pushed for licensing fees.

Radio was seen as piracy too, but became a publicity engine

But more than just being a source of fees, radio was also a huge publicity engine for music, and eventually this became so obvious that at one point record labels were giving radio stations and disc jockeys “payola” under the table to promote their music. And now we have come full circle with Neil Young’s comment:

I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around.

This idea of piracy as being “how content gets around” doesn’t just apply to music either. In a videotaped comment last year about piracy, British author Neil Gaiman — who I interviewed recently about his opposition to the proposed federal anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA — said that he used to be irate about people pirating his work, but eventually came to realize that he was actually selling more copies of his physical books in those countries where piracy was the highest. Brazilian author Paulo Coelho found the same thing, and actually started uploading his own work to files-sharing sites without telling his publisher.

Some game developers — the digital-era equivalent of songwriters and authors, in many ways — have also come to see piracy as being a necessary evil, and in many cases a positive force. Markus Persson, the Swedish developer of the massively popular game Minecraft, has said that he came to see piracy of his game as a form of marketing. And at a recent music-industry conference in Europe, the CEO of superstar game company Rovio (creator of Angry Birds) said that piracy “may not be a bad thing” because it increases demand for the official version of the company’s products.

If you make it easy to get and pay for, piracy isn’t an issue

Even Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has been known to see the virtues of a little piracy, especially in developing markets like China. The Microsoft founder reportedly said of that market: “As long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” Gates clearly saw pirating as a kind of loss leader, creating eventual market demand.

We’ve described before how one of the reasons why users engage in copyright infringement is that distributors make it too cumbersome to get the official version of whatever the content is, as venture capitalist Fred Wilson complained in a recent post, admitting that he pirated a livestream of a basketball game. But the example of comedian Louis CK — who allowed anyone to download his comedy special for just $5 with no copyright protection, and made over $1 million in less than a week — shows that there is still room for creators to monetize their content, if they make it as easy as possible.

As Andrew Weissman of Union Square Ventures noted in a recent post, information wants to be free — not necessarily free meaning it costs nothing, but free in the sense of being friction-free to access. And if you don’t make it easy for your music or writing or other content to “get around,” as Neil Young puts it, then piracy will take care of that for you.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Flickr user Paul Sapiano

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