Anecdotes are the particles of data: what I pirate, what I spend

I read with some interest and a great deal of sympathy Coleen Doran's essay about comics piracy posted on TheHill.com. However, I was kicked out of her argument fairly quickly because of this statement:

Despite assurances that the many sites pirating my work were doing me a favor with their “free advertising” I never saw a single incoming link from them, saw no increase in traffic, and made virtually no money.

Now, I am not precisely the audience she is vituperating; I almost never download comics for reading. Of the ones I have downloaded, the overwhelming majority are comics I already have in paper form but wanted electronically as well (e.g., Watchmen) for ease of access, or are public domain. The remainder are comics that I would never, under any circumstances, have bought because I knew they were terrible. In those cases, torrenting let me see with my own eyes bad comics of which I could have read summaries (e.g., Marvel's terrible event comic Siege). I don't consider the latter significantly different from reading them in the library (which I've done) or thumbing through them in the store. I worked in a comics shop for eight years. We definitely tolerated thumbing-through, especially from customers who bought as much as I do.

There are several reasons I don't download comics. I'll confess, a large part of it is that I still do not have a satisfactory computer for reading pamphlet-formatted comics on a computer; perhaps when I get a tablet, as I'm sure I eventually will, that will change. But I am also aware of the economics of comics (and books), that a downloaded copy is a direct substitute for something that its intellectual-property-rights-holder has decided should only be available to those who hold a physical copy, and that by downloading it I'm short-circuiting their revenue model. I might think that model is doomed to failure in the near future, but that's not my decision to make for them.

None of the these deterrents applies to the main thing I do torrent, television.

I started downloading TV shows as a supplement to my extensive video-taping; it was very easy to botch an episode here or there and then fill in with a torrented copy. Now that we have a (pretty good but not great) DVR, we don't miss much. I primarily torrent tv shows to try them out--especially shows that I've heard about but missed the first season of, or that are shown erratically. I download things that were given away on tv stations that I get anyway, so I'm not bypassing the business model; and given the incredibly indirect measurements of tv viewership, I don't remove revenue because I'm not one of the people being counted. [ETA: That's much less true now than when I first wrote this--we now have a TiVo, which does report actual viewership to the "broadcasters".]

And here's the real point of this discussion.

Here are some of the TV series DVDs that I have bought because I torrented them first:

• The Big Bang Theory, seasons 1-3


• Dollhouse, seasons 1-2


• Regenesis, season 1


• Fringe, seasons 1 and 2


• Venture Brothers, seasons 1-3


• Metalocalypse, seasons 1-3


• Look Around You, season 1


• Daria, the complete


• Masters of Horror, season 1

Also, while I paid for an iTunes copy of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, I pirated it so that nellorat and I could watch it together on the TV rather than separately on our computers. (I said that I don't like watching TV on my computer; nellorat absolutely will not do it.) And we bought the DVD when it came out.

(Technically, I bought Lost Season 1 before watching any of it, and without torrenting it. nellorat watched seasons 1-5 on the DVDs while season 6 was in progress, and I did torrent the first half of season 6 to catch her up. We DVRd the remainder, and then bought the Season 6 DVD set when it came out.)

I'm sure there are others that I've bought in part or in whole because I could use the celestial jukebox as a tasting library, but that's several hundred dollars into the pockets of the rights holders right off the top of my head. So, you know, piracy can lead directly to profits, and I mildly resent being told they can't.

(Shamus Young has pointed out, in his many discussions of software piracy in the computer gaming world, that the best estimates are that 90% of the people who pirate games would never have been customers anyway--they're pirating things that they don't think would ever be worth the purchase price, just to take a look at them, or because of the thrill of the hunt. I suspect the same is true in all fields--most pirates just plain aren't lost customers, they are never-would-be customers. A not-tiny fraction of the remainder are potential customers who indulge in piracy in lieu of purchase because a pirate copy doesn't have DRM, or is not available in an authorized electronic edition. And then there are people who are actual customers for similar same reasons--cf. Watchmen above, which I have in my life purchased in two different hardcover editions, two tpbs, and I believe five full sets of the original pamphlets; or also see the fellow who wrote to the New York Times's ethicist about pirating an e-book of Under the Dome because he found his copy of the thousand-page hardcover too unwieldy.)

I also torrent some music, and I've bought a lot of albums from bands that I've discovered that way--Belle and Sebastian, Bishop Allen, The Magnetic Fields, Matt Pond PA, The New Pornographers, Fountains of Wayne*, The Apples in Stereo, Au Revoir Simone, and The Submarines particularly. (Okay, I first heard Fountains of Wayne on the radio. But getting their first couple of albums through file-sharing convinced me to buy those albums and others.) So, again: hail the celestial jukebox, driver of sales.