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I’d like to solicit themotte’s thoughts on the ethics of piracy. Specificlly movies, software, and music.
Sharing copyrighted data has been a part of the internet landscape for as long as there has been networked computers. I know it traces back to the bbs days and likely even earlier than that.
Back in the early aughts I was involved in a forum where we would scan for unsecured FTP servers and then fill them with the latest movie music and software releases straight from the groups who actually created and distributed the files. The beauty of this is that you were transferring between commercial networks so the speeds were ludicrous.
This was not long after Napster popularized file sharing and typical online user was very much of the opinion that copying data and sharing it was not equivalent to stealing. Maybe it was the circles I traveled in and my age at the time, but nearly everyone was ethically fine with downloading media. The only reason one wouldn’t do it was that there you needed some minimal level of technical know how to find more than just music on p2p networks. The only folks opposed to it were media corporations, some artists, and a small amount of corporate shills.
Once iTunes, steam, Netflix’s, Spotify, and other commercial options became available, most people stopped file sharing and simply bought media. It was a common to hear the refrain that piracy was a result of lack of access to media online. If there was ease of access and a fair price, most people would be happy to purchase software. This sentiment is still common but I sense it’s become less prominent over the last few years. The streaming environment has become quite fracutured and has impaired both the ease of access and price point for legally consuming media online.
The point of this post is to suggest that people’s opinion on the ethics of media piracy is diametrically opposed to where it was for most of the internets history. The median online opinion that I see is that piracy = theft. Many of these people are young and have been thought from an early age that piracy is not ethical. I suspect that many have also changed their opinion as they age and perhaps are not working at software/medi companies where piracy not affects them directly.
From a personal perspective, I stopped pirating media when iTunes and steam hit the market because it was in fact easier to obtain things legally and I was happy to pay.
That changed about 4 years ago when I realized that I could not in good conscience pay money to Hollywood and leftist game developers. I am happy to pirate their software and steal their movies because the alternative is so distasteful to me. I will occasionally really enjoy something and find the creators to be acceptable enough to support. In those cases I will purchase something after the fact to support people that I agree with. I encourage everyone to do the same. Enforcement of file sharing these days is non-existent. You can pretty much use the the pirate bay without worry and ignore the occasional email from you isp asking you to stop. Though there are many other alternatives out there that don’t take long to find.
I should have noted that I’m mainly curious about the meta commentary on normies changing opinion on piracy.
Commercial interests seemed to have convinced the median online person that piracy is not ethical. Given that pirating media is quite easy to do and quite easy to rationalize, how were they so successful? We’re they successful, or is it just that social media moderation is so tight that any pro piracy voices are silenced.
Let me throw in another possibility: Young people today are used to everything being easy to access. Piracy can insert a little bit of a learning curve. Us Gen Xers had to figure out the internet and we learned enough about how our computers work and how to configure our routers and tinker around with Napster/eMule/Limewire to figure out how to get the good quality files as opposed to the shitty files... Nowadays, kids just look at what's on Netflix and click. I have three teenage kids. I think only one of them would bother to figure out how to set up a Roku, which is comparatively easy. If I showed them how my torrent system works, their eyes would glaze over in seconds.
Yeah, the decline (and possible revival) of piracy can be summed up as "Newell Was Right:" ease of service makes piracy less attractive. However, put up too many barriers and the effort-dollars of piracy look less intimidating.
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I think a big part of it was that internet piracy (as opposed to, say, buying bootleg VHS tapes) was pretty new. Just look at the debate above on whether piracy is stealing on not: everybody was in that boat, and for teenagers with limited funds piracy looked pretty great so most of them didn't try to settle the question too much.
Now we've had several decades to culturally digest the idea of digital piracy, and we're starting to develop mores and ethical norms. In 2002 if you asked me whether the cracked copy of Giants: Citizen Kabuto I copied off of some guy at a LAN party was stolen goods or not, I would have not known what to say. It didn't feel like stealing, it felt like a friend sharing something with me. But it is illegal. But are all illegal actions immoral? At this point, your average teenager would shrug their shoulders and forget about it. I know I did.
Now it seems that the culture as a whole is coming down on the side of piracy being stealing, or at least morally wrong. So younguns today get taught by their elders that they shouldn't pirate, just as they get taught that they shouldn't steal. So for them it's less of a moral conundrum.
So I would say that the lack of novelty is certainly driving some of the change.
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At least as of about 10 years ago, the classic example (by commons/piracy advocates) of rights-holders starting to target propaganda to children was the MPAA working with the LA Boy Scouts to make an anti-piracy merit badge, the "Respect Copyrights Activity Patch" around 2005/2006.
I haven't really followed the arguments in some time, but definitely noticed the same shift in younger normies on reddit over the years. It's hard to imagine that dorky propaganda was so effective, but I'd guess it makes a difference what you're hearing from a young age.
edit: And almost surely the huge victory was successfully getting people to lump copyright/patent/trademark law together under the name "Intellectual Property" since the nineties, which completely does change how you think of these. Thinking of 'property' gives people an intuition about stealing, whereas 'temporary government-granted monopoly publishing rights' doesn't. Seems like when broken down, most people strongly favor trademarks, strongly disfavor patents, and have mixed feelings about copyright.
As an aside, having multiple of my first 10 comments on this site related to Richard Stallman...well that was unexpected.
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I would suggest that rather than people changing their minds, it's that the pool of people acquiring software and media online has changed. When it was kind of tricky and not much more effort to pirate than acquire legally, the pool consisted of tech-savvy youth that were more likely to think pirating was a pretty good idea. With it being easier to buy things legally, the pool of downloaders and streamers has expanded massively and now consists of people that treat downloading the game as similar to buy a CD from a store.
I agree. Copying a cracked video game from a friend during a LAN party sure felt a lot different than going down to GameSpot and buying it. It seemed unrelated: you wouldn't shoplift the game from a brick and mortar, after all. Now that you download games when you buy them, pirating games seems like an apples to apples comparison.
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