The Money Pirates Steal From Magicians

A few years ago, I was added to a secret group chat with magic publishers who work together to fight magic piracy.

While it's almost impossible to get magic brands to be candid on details like marketing, manufacturing and sales, the magic publishers in this secret group chat are remarkably frank and collaborative in how they try to end piracy.

For the past few years, I have sat on the sidelines, quietly cheering on their efforts, pretending I care much more than I do – spending most of my time in the group looking for good reasons to write about it.

Then, someone called Chris Wasshuber sent a message to the group that changed everything. He'd figured out something that put magic piracy into a new perspective. It made me care a lot more.

You see, Wasshuber had run a secret experiment on one of the biggest magic pirate sites on the internet – and you won't believe his findings.

But first, why I don't think most magicians care at all:

Every magician pirates magic tricks.

At one point or another, we've all shared a tutorial with a friend instead of encouraging said friend to buy it and support the creator. Many of us have searched YouTube videos for reveal videos or scoured The Magic Cafe forums, hoping a magician on there clumsy enough to have tipped the method.

When I was a teen, I mainly watched Penn and Petty review magic on YouTube because the things they said and their uncut performances helped me work out the method without supporting the creator.

Yes, that's not strictly piracy, but it's a symptom of an industry that encourages the hoarding of secrets, and if I had any pocket money to spend at that age, I'm sure I would have bought a cheaper pirate copy of the tricks.

There are a lot of different reasons behind piracy thriving alongside our desire to hoard secrets – the size of our niche makes it hard to produce products that cost more than a dollar to make, and the very fact that most magicians get into magic by being stubborn enough to find and learn a method after seeing a magic trick.

As it stands, magicians like to buy and sell secrets.

They also like to steal, download and pirate products.

And no one cares, do they?

I know I don't.

It's hard to care about piracy unless you're losing out.

One thing that I think about a lot is that someone in our industry is very vocal about ending magic product piracy. At the same time, their business partner has Pirate Bay pinned to their web browser bookmarks (it was visible in a story post they shared that ended up getting screenshotted and sent around a bunch).

Doesn't that sum up how hard it is to get people to care about piracy?

I often wonder if we should spend less time putting out the fires of piracy and more time rewarding people who buy directly from publishers. Imagine if every trick had a public ledger, such that if you purchase a trick, your name gets added to a coveted public list of people who can perform it.

There's a lot of research into how when police shut down lots of small drug gangs, the net result is that you end up with one much larger, powerful drug gang that's very difficult to police but supplies the same number of drugs to citizens as all the smaller gangs.

Anyway – the magic publishers do pretty well putting out the fires.

It's a fun game of whack-a-mole I've seen in this group chat.

• They band together to report pirate websites to Google for their copyright infringement and get them banned from search results.

• Reporting the pirate sites' PayPal accounts for their illegal behaviour.

• They are sharing the banking information of possible pirates so they can blocklist them from their magic shops.

• They write clever SEO articles that appear alongside the pirate sites on Google and warn browsers of the risks of buying from a pirate site.

• They exchange an endless list of new names of magicians found to be file-sharing.

Yep, that's right. There's a list with every last of you whose magic tutorial purchase has ended up on a pirate site. What's that? You only sent the video to one friend – well, that's awkward because they sent it to one friend, who did the same, and then it ended up on a pirate site, and because you were the original purchaser, your name ended up to blame and in this secret group chat.

You'd be surprised how often a well-known name appears on the blocklist.

And then, one day, Chris Wasshuber messaged the group with some findings of a new experiment he'd run. Wasshuber has long been a very active group member, encouraging others to help him shut down the magic pirates who steal purchases from his business.

Wasshuber runs lybrary.com, a rather outstanding achievement of a site that sells 9,000+ magic ebooks ripe for piracy. The site is the world's largest ebook retailer and publisher in magic. He pays authors royalties and gives them a 10% discount on any purchases they make on the site.

If you've ever shared a file you shouldn't have, it was probably a PDF. Wasshuber's entire business is ebook PDFs, so he's pretty motivated to fix this whole piracy thingamajig.

To understand Wasshuber's experiment, you must wrap your head around the concept of how piracy plays out in magic. Many magicians reading this newsletter will have ordered from pirate shops without even releasing it.

Or at least, that's the excuse you'll use when I tell you how to know if your friends have bought from pirate sites later in this article.

You might see a new magic tutorial download you'd like to purchase for $14.99. You decide that $14.99 is too much to pay Christian Grace, perhaps because you're a teenager restricted to pocket money or an adult who hasn't even considered the consequences of saving a few bucks by shopping around – you find that same trick by Christian Grace, with the same trailer on a magic shop with a random name like Magic Shop Online Fun. It's only $2.99 on there – a bargain! – so you buy it.

What you've just done, perhaps without realising, is pay a pirate $2.99, and it could be argued that you've taken away $14.99 from Christian Grace and perhaps more by funding a pirate and boosting their business and search rankings.

You go to the download section on the site and watch the tutorial just as you would any other. You might not even realise the lower quality is because it's a screen-recorded private version of the original tutorial.

When I was first added to the magic piracy group chat, my brain lit up with creative ideas to help the publishers. That ledger idea I mentioned earlier in this article was one of them. The other funny idea I had was to create a website where you can type in any of your friends' email addresses – when you press a button, it'll tell you if your friend uses magic pirate sites.

In the backend, the tool would try to log in to all of the known pirate sites and depending on whether the pirate site said "account not found" or "wrong password", we'd be able to tell you if they'd ever created an account.

But then, just for fun, I tried it manually with one of my friend's email addresses.

They had an account on the pirate site.

Well, shit.

Then I tried another – they did, too.

The first three friends' emails I tried had accounts on the pirate site, probably meaning they'd placed orders with the site.

There is one pirate site that is more popular than the rest.

Publishers often debate whether it's good to mention them by name, and though Wasshuber likes to, I've decided not to (because I worry far too much about upsetting the other publishers and because I see their point).

It could be problematic to tell thousands of newsletter subscribers about a place where they can buy every trick for $2.99. Let's be honest; you seem like a lovely lot, but I'm willing to bet good money many of you would then buy tricks from the pirate site to save a few bucks at the creator's expense.

But it's only $2.99; I hear some of you cry (and also the part of my brain that, even now, still doesn't care enough about this pirate thing). And that is another big reason this plays out – we all assume everyone else is paying full price and that no harm can be done by just a couple of bad apples spending $2.99.

But here's the problem: a fuck ton of magicians are bad apples.

Wasshuber set out to discover how much money one of the pirate sites made by stealing from creators. He ran an experiment and shared his findings with the group.

And it's worth quickly noting that what this pirate site does is illegal. Your thoughts on magic trick ownership regarding creator rights don't matter much here – magicians have long debated who owns the rights to methods. The pirate is stealing the video itself, regardless of its content, and selling the video tutorials and magic book PDFs – and so they are infringing on the copyright of the creators.

If they were summarising the work of the magic publishers, like Blinklist does for books or Ekaterina does in her Instagram Reels, then it gets more complicated and much less illegal.

Wasshuber placed three orders on one of the pirate magic sites in one week. He timed them precisely so he could use them to calculate the average number of illegal orders the site receives. - Order ID 97633 on Jan 20th- Order ID 98009 on Jan 24th- Order ID 98483 on Jan 27th

Based on the order IDs, Wasshuber concluded that just this one pirate site pulls in an average of 120 daily orders.

It's hard to calculate the average order size, but Wasshuber told the group chat that if you imagined it was a mere $10, it would mean that the pirate site makes $1,200 per day or $438,000 per year. The prices on this pirate site are, on average, 5x lower than the retail price, so Wasshuber also concluded this represented a loss to magic creators and publishers of about $6,000 per day, or $2.19 million per year.

Wasshuber's math relies on the idea that the magicians who spent money with the pirate would have otherwise spent the higher purchase price with the creator. It also relies on a high average purchase price.

Just looking today, the average price of a product on the home page of that particular pirate site is $2.99. I'd suggest this low price creates an impulse buy incentive, such that at least 50% of the people who buy the trick for $2.99 would never buy the $14.99 original from the creator. After all, people who buy from pirate sites are looking around for a cheaper price.

But still – assuming 50% of those sales could have been a $14.99 purchase, this one magic pirate site represents an annual loss to magic creators of around $328,000. It is a sad fact that most magic creators I meet aren't exactly making much money sharing their material with magicians.

And that's the issue – that's why we should care. Imagine if magic creators could make way more money-sharing tricks with magicians. We wouldn't have to put up with shops like Penguin Magic endlessly pumping out cheap flatpack products featuring paper gimmicks they can print in their backroom somewhere. We'd get the good shit – great long-form tutorials and well-made props and tricks.

The 52 to 1 deck is a brilliant trick and a best seller. But the key reason it exists as a product is it passes all these anti-piracy hurdles magic publishers need to meet before they even publish a trick – it's cheap to produce (a custom printed deck), and it's hard to pirate (you need to gimmicks).

You have no idea how often big publishers decide not to publish world-class impossible magic tricks simply because it doesn't tick a bunch of boxes that make it difficult for people to pirate easily.

Last year, Ellusionist sold a trick that could have easily been a download but made it a physical product and provided the perfect pencil to use with it. I like Ellusionist a lot, and I really love that trick, but you can't tell me that this product and all of the latest Penguin tricks that customers could have easily printed at home themselves don't illustrate the ways piracy is impacting the magic market.

So there it is; that's your incentive to buy directly from creators and support what they're doing if and when you like the look of it. The tricks they produce will get better, and then you'll look like a better magician when you pretend you invented them and perform them for friends, family and clients.

It's just like what the Motion Picture Association once told me – You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a handbag. You wouldn't steal a television. Downloading pirated magic is stealing. Stealing is against the law. Piracy. It's a crime.