Victim of Culture

The fallacy of piracy

No, not the “bottle of rum” kind of pirates, but pirates of media online.  This is probably a destined to be hated topic to write about online, but important nonetheless.  You see, too few denizens of the world of blogs and tweets are willing to say that piracy is wrong, or at least for the important reasons.

Anytime you start to talk about an issue like this you get hit with the same standard arguments, so let’s address some of them right off the bat.

1. Piracy of media is not theft, because you are not depriving anyone of something they own.

We’ll use the Meriam-Webster Dictionary definition of theft to address this issue.

1 a: the act of stealing ; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b: an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property

So, the first part of that definition would seem to fit with piracy, but the specific part does not.  Okay, so theft is not the best term for piracy of media.

2. Intellectual property is a misnomer—ideas can not be owned.

Well, legally they can be owned.  Whether you agree with that idea is a whole other argument, but as it stands they can be owned.

Intellectual property is divided into two categories: Industrial property, which includes inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications of source; and Copyright, which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs. Rights related to copyright include those of performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms in their recordings, and those of broadcasters in their radio and television programs.

Without such rules, basically no one’s ideas would be worth anything as they could instantly be copied.  What’s the point of an R&D department if your competition can instantly copy whatever you produce?  Imagine NBC instantly showing episodes of Family Guy minutes after they air on Fox.  TV would consist of about six hit shows airing in a constant loop on every channel.

3. Piracy leads to the purchase of more media.

The argument here is that people who pirate media do so to “test it out” and find out what they like.  If you pirate a bunch of Metallica MP3s you may discover that you actually like them, and in turn buy something of theirs down the road. 

This would hold water if there weren’t already so many ways to expose yourself to media without purchasing it.  With movies you can rent them, or simply wait until they hit cable television (for most).  With music there is the radio, music videos (both online and on TV), and web sites like Napster’s free listening site.  Almost every title released for the Xbox 360 and PS3 have free demos online.

So, what was the need to try before you buy again?  The few pieces of media you can’t find a trial version of first?

4. People who pirate wouldn’t buy the media anyway, so they’re really not hurting anyone.

Really?  Is this true for all pirates?  If torrents did not exist, am I to believe that no one would buy a new computer game anymore, or new CD?  Funny, because plenty of people did before the advent of the digital age.  Such arguments are akin to someone shoplifting a CD and saying they never would have purchased it anyway.

5. Piracy only hurts greedy corporations.

Piracy hurts both businesses and consumers.  From the business perspective, less income means the ability to employ fewer people.  Fewer employees likely means fewer media projects.  Fewer media projects means fewer choices for consumers.

Think of it this way, if everyone pirates Transformers 2 this summer, and no one bothers to see it in the theaters, what are the odds of a third film being made?  In television you can see this effect as many Internet users pirates copies of their favorite shows instead of watching them on broadcast television or buying the season DVD sets.  The end result?  Good shows get cancelled because the networks can’t afford to produce shows no one watches.

6. Companies shoot themselves in the foot with DRM (digital rights management).

This is sort of a chicken or the egg type argument.  Where did DRM on music come from?  People were ripping CDs and file-swapping it with one another.  They cried that if only the record companies would adapt, there would be no need for them to steal the music.  So the record companies went online, and put restrictions on the music to stop such sharing.  Sharing continued, often of the music bought and then stripped of its DRM.

Consumers cried out that if only they would remove the DRM, then they wouldn’t have to steal DRM-free copies.  So Amazon.com, iTunes, and others introduced DRM-free music, while Stardock and others introduced DRM-free games.  Guess what?  People are still file-sharing.

7. Prices are too high on media.

I often hear crazy prices like $18 quoted for CDs.  Where are people purchasing their CDs?  Stop by Amazon.com and you’ll find the top ten selling albums all sell for under $11.99, with most at $9.99.  This is actually cheaper than they have sold in the past, when adjusted for inflation.

Even with this video game console generation’s prices increasing by $10, the games still sell cheaper at $60 than many did during the 16-bit era when prices of $70 or more were not unheard of.  Adjust those prices for inflation and they creep even higher.

So, media prices are actually dropping, or at worst holding steady.  Perhaps some might feel they are too high to begin with, but really how much is several hours of entertainment worth?  Many will happily spend $30-50 on a concert ticket for a show that will last two hours.  Most CDs contain an hour of music and will be listened to at least twice through, making them the far better deal.  The logic simply doesn’t hold up.

A happy medium

Pirates have got to drop the self-righteous justification of stealing media, but at the same time trade groups such as the RIAA have got to approach the issue from a more reasoned perspective.  You don’t want to return to the days of Napster where it was so easy to steal that grandmothers could do it, but neither do you want to drive away your paying customers with crazy DRM schemes.

Consumers have got to be willing to be fair to artists producing media and realize that pirating one song might not be the end of the world, but paying for no media will eventually lead to the death of so much of what they love.  Both sides need one another, whether they like it or not.

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