Piracy and Shoplifting
A common talking point you hear from the RIAA/MPAA and the media corporations is that piracy is stealing. You wouldn’t steal a DVD movie, so why would you download a DVD rip from a torrent site?
Well, the obvious problem with this is that piracy isn’t stealing. Under the law, piracy is “copyright infringement” — stealing implies depriving another of a possession or property, and piracy does not take anything away from the owners of the copyright, other than an abstract loss of potential profit. In other words, when a DVD is copied, the original DVD remains intact.
A less obvious difference between copyright infringement and stealing is the amount of trouble you’ll be in for committing each of them, respectively. This woman was fined 2.4 million dollars for downloading 24 songs, or about two albums worth of music. What do you think would have happened if she had just been caught attempting to steal two albums from a record store? Her punishment would have been much less harsh, at the very least.
This seems very counter-intuitive. Stealing obviously and directly harms another person, by depriving them of property. Piracy does no such thing. As a trend, perhaps, piracy is harmful to copyright holders (I contend that it is not nearly as harmful as it is made out to be in this respect, but for sake of argument I’ll concede this point here), but it’s absurd to claim that, on an individual level, copying a CD deserves orders of magnitude more punishment than stealing a CD.
There’s still room for disagreement here — I’m only pointing out that the rhetoric on the side of the copyright holders is hollow and misleading. There’s a legitimate case to be made on their side, but they aren’t making it — to me, that says something important. I’m not here to play the part of the anarchist, calling for the abolition of copyright. There are two extremes on this issue, and I don’t belong to either one. I do, however, think that piracy can be acceptable. Or, said in a more pessimistic way: piracy is unstoppable. Whether it’s morally defensible or not, it isn’t going away, and calling pirates “thieves” won’t change a damn thing. Actually, it might change one thing — it’ll drive those on our side to be more and more extreme in their opposition to copyright. When I bought an e-book and found that the DRM would prevent me from reading it on my device, I pirated it — and, importantly, I felt doing so was morally justified. The more draconian the DRM, the more people will pirate. The more media companies pull Youtube videos and send take-down letters, the more people will pirate. We’re watching corporations actively participating in their own demise.
In the words of Lawrence Lessig: they criminalize our culture. I’m sure everyone reading this article can think of some funny, original, creative Youtube video that was removed because it contained some copyrighted material. Is it any surprise that we fight back?
I can’t really say I believe downloading an album is “fine,” morally, but I do it anyway. I still buy albums I like (as I do with games, movies, etc), but that comes out of a need to give back to the artists. I never buy media just to have it, because simply having the CD means nothing to me; I could have just downloaded it. The only thing the propaganda and rhetoric does is make me feel less and less guilty about piracy.
This article was originally published on my personal blog a few months ago.
Mike Vollmer
npc82
It’s a witch hunt plain and simple. Giant corporations fucking average people over just because they can. Their illogical policy goes against common sense. How can you own blocks of data?
That's an interesting question.
Legend goes that the Native American Indians had no concept of property or ownership of land. There were probably valid reasons for that at the time, but in our modern world it is unthinkable that we would give up the ability to "own" land. Of course, I think it's also unthinkable that we'd give up the ability to "share" land as well; a right that we too often don't have when it comes to copyright.
A computer cannot differentiate between two sets of identical data even if their sources are different, but that does not mean a difference does not exist. Where the data came from matters greatly in the eyes of the law.
Whether a block of data is "legal" or not is essentially an abstract attribute of that data that isn't necessarily represented by that block of data. In other words, it may be impossible to tell simply by looking at the data whether it is legal in origin or not. But that does not mean the attribute of "legal" cannot be associated with the data; it just becomes a slightly more complex problem. In fact, some platforms and programming languages reserve a sort-of "meta-data" information, which is used to contain such abstract information that is not represented purely by the data itself.
[...] course, shoplifting the CDs would have ended up landing them even lesser [...]
[...] don’t like the word “steal” in this context, for reasons I’ve explained before. He (the above friend of a friend) isn’t losing anything when someone pirates his music. If [...]