Sé and I go back a while, so when she asked me if I’d like to come on WPwatercooler and talk about Piracy and the GPL, I said sure! I’m including the video at the end so you can see the whole conversation but … What got me interested was that she didn’t ask me about what I thought she would!
The Hill I Die On Is Theft
I always get people pissed off when I say this, but you absolutely 100%, without question, can steal GPL code if you mess with copyright law.
I even went and asked ChatGPT for some fun:
It would be considered unethical and potentially illegal to take GPL-licensed code and release it as your own work. The GPL requires you to respect copyright laws and the rights of the original authors. By claiming GPL-licensed code as your own without proper attribution or acknowledgment of the original authors, you would be violating both the terms of the GPL and copyright law.
The GPL allows you to use, modify, and distribute the code, but it also requires that you maintain the integrity of the original license and give appropriate credit to the original authors. Failure to do so could lead to legal consequences, including potential copyright infringement claims. It’s essential to adhere to the principles of open source licensing and respect the contributions of others in the software development community.
I expected the chat to be about that. It wasn’t. It was about the lovely grey area I spent a decade and a half in.
Piracy is/n’t Theft
The crux of Sé’s question was this: Is it piracy to get a copy of a premium plugin (one you have to buy to get) from someone else.
The initial answer is ‘yes’ but then Sé laid out some amazing nuance.
- She’d already bought the code before
- She couldn’t buy the upgrade because the devs are in Russia (and sanctions)
- There was a workaround to pay an intermediary, but she felt it was sketchy
- She intended to migrate off the plugin, but needed the latest version to do so
- Someone she knew offered to give her a copy of the latest version
Now, I worked for a bank before WP, and I can tell you that her workaround is what you do when you launder money. And if you did use that workaround, you run the risk of ending up on the FBIs sniff-list and they do not have any sense of humor about ignorance of the law.
So now, would I still call it piracy? Actually … yes. I would. But it’s small scale and not actually a huge issue and really depends on the intent of the person who gave it to her, and what Sé did with it in the end.
The Scale of Piracy
There’s a constant battle going on between consumers and corporations. I’ll use an example close to my heart. The TV show Willow was a fun fantasy romp with silly flashbacks and messy magic. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t the greatest thing ever, but it was fun. Shortly after it got mid-to-low reviews, it was removed from streaming.
There is no way to watch the TV series, except for piracy.
Is it piracy if I had managed to download the videos beforehand and kept them for my own entertainment? Yes. Yes it would be. The same as how all of our mix tapes were technically piracy. Mixtape artists have been arrested under RICO charges for that!
But the reality is that no one was going to waste time and kick in your door for making a mixtape and giving it to your sweetheart. They didn’t really care that much about it (and in some cases, like The Grateful Dead, encouraged it). It was incredibly hard to make money off mix tapes. I made copies of a CD I had bought in high school for friends, never sold ’em.
Then came the internet and suddenly I could copy that CD into files and send them across the world! And you know what? People did. Suddenly the scale of what could be done with a pirated copy of a CD had skyrocketed.
Obscure Monetization
I pause here to quote from Cory Doctorow’s interview back in 2010, when he was asked why does he give all his books away for free?
I give away all of my books. [The publisher] Tim O’Reilly once said that the problem for artists isn’t piracy – it’s obscurity. I think that’s true. A lot of people have commented: “You can’t eat page views, so how does being well-known help you earn a living as a writer?” It’s true; however, it’s very hard to monetise fame, but impossible to monetise obscurity. It doesn’t really matter how great your work is; if no one’s ever heard of it, you’ll never make any money from it. That’s not to say that if everyone’s heard of it, you’ll make a fortune, but it is a necessary precursor that your work be well-known to earn you a living. As far as I can tell, these themes apply very widely, across all media.
As a practical matter, we live in the 21st century and anything anybody wants to copy they will be able to copy. If you are building a business model that says that people can only copy things with your permission, your business is going to fail because whether or not you like it, people will be able to copy your product without your permission. The question is: what are you going to do about that? Are you going call them thieves or are you going to find a way to make money from them?
The only people who really think that it’s plausible to reduce copying in the future seem to be the analogue economy, the people who built their business on the idea that copying only happens occasionally and usually involves a giant machine and some lawyers. People who are actually doing digital things have the intuitive knowledge that there’s no way you’re going to stop people from copying and they’ve made peace with it.
Cory Doctorow: Publish books free online
There’s Piracy and There’s Piracy
On the podcast, I mentioned a book I’d bought for school that was over $100 (this was in the mid 1990s) and, having bought it, I worked with a friend in the print shop to make copies for classmates and sold them at enough for me to break even. I think it was $5 a pop, and I would accept lunch instead.
Piracy? Oh you betcha.
Illegal? Again, yeppers!
Immoral? ….
Oooh now I brought up a dirty word.
But it ties in to that intent I mentioned when I was describing Sé’s situation.
If Sé or I took the copies of the book/plugin and sold them with the intent of making a profit, then yeah, we’re immoral shitbags. But that isn’t the case. I was trying to not go broke because of that stupid college textbook scam that’s only worse with DRM. Sé wanted to properly move off a plugin that she cannot use anymore.
It’s all about that intent. As I said on the podcast, if you see someone sleeping in their car and it’s illegal where you live? No, you did not see anyone sleeping in their car. Did you see someone shoplifting diapers? No you did not. And if I have to explain why you didn’t see those things, you may be following the wrong blog.
Those GPL Avenger/Nulled Shops
I have to loop back to the GPL.
Officially, technically, 100% the GPL says that the code you write and release under the GPL is free for anyone to do whatever they want. And if you make changes, you have to release it under the same license.
Now, if you’ve spent any time in the WP world, you’ve run into sites that offer the same expensive plugins as you’ve seen for sale, but cheaper and ‘nulled’ (which means they no longer phone home to momma for your license). And technically under the GPL, that’s allowed. But I argue this:
- The intent here is to circumvent legitimate, available purchasing
- There is no assurance the code has not been tampered with
- It’s a dick move
Can plugins been overly expensive? Yes, absolutely. I saw one for over $500 and it was not worth it. But you’re not paying for the plugin itself, you’re paying for security, support, and maintenance.
(Off Topic: I mentioned how cool it is when someone releases free back ported security fixes for premium plugins – I wish it was easier to do and everyone could do it, but it’s really freakin’ hard! Still, the easiest way would be “find all people with expired licenses and email them the latest release of the last branch they paid for, free of charge”. Easier said than done.)
The other problem is that by giving away the plugin, you may have broken the purchasing agreement. You know the one? Don’t rip off the tags on this mattress? Well first of all, the GPL actually supports people selling code (they’re not stupid, people gotta earn a living), and they’re of the Doctorow approach — watch your price point, convert the free users to paying one with value.
The value most plugin shops offer is support and updates. They’ll patch your plugin until they go out of business. And they’re clear about how you’re not paying for software, you’re paying to have it sent to you:
You can charge people a fee to get a copy from you. You can’t require people to pay you when they get a copy from someone else.
Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses
So what do I mean by a purchasing agreement? Well it’s your license agreement. I pay for YoastSEO, and from them I get a license. If I break the terms of that agreement, they have the right to sever my license and no more updates for me.
Those nulled/GPL Avenger sites are regularly playing with fire, and most have to make purchases with disposable credit cards and shuffle things around in order to not get caught. Once they’re caught, they’re banned and blocked and someone figures out how to catch them ahead of time next time and prevent sales in the first place.
Piracy is Nuanced
The reality of all this is piracy is an incredibly nuanced situation.
Pirate Radio Stations use airwaves they didn’t pay for and play music they have no license to. But at the same time, they might be the first way you hear a certain song that inspires you to go out and buy the album.
Sharing Cory Doctorow’s books for free takes money from him, but how is that different than using the library or loaning your favorite book to a friend? The goal isn’t to make money, it’s to share joy.
Asking a good friend for a copy of a premium plugin so you can test it out is, in my eyes, much the same. Asking for a copy so you can update and move off it is also fine.
When you start working at scale to actively block people from making a living (like if I took all of Doctorow’s books, printed, and resold them) then you’ve crossed my line about what is ethical piracy and what is just being a jerk.
Don’t be a jerk.
And remember, they’re more like guidelines.
WPwatercooler
Watch me on the world’s most influential WordPress Podcast, talking about piracy, GPL, copying books, and money laundering.
