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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.
Personally, I don't really think of piracy as an ethical issue at all. Intellectual property is a legal fiction that exists for the purpose of incentivizing people to create more and better works of art and inventions, for the betterment of society. This is accomplished by restricting most people's right to speech - their right to transmit certain strings of 0s and 1s to others (which are usually representations of certain strings of letters or certain grid-arrangements of pixels) - while granting other people (i.e. the rights holders) the privilege to express that speech. Like all rights, the right to free speech isn't absolute, and this, like true threats or slander, is one of those exceptions that exist as a compromise to make society more functional and generally better for everyone. But I don't believe there's some sort of natural right that is ethically granted to creators and rights holders to restrict the types of 0s and 1s that 3rd parties are allowed to tell each other.
I do think there are more general ethical issues about simply following along with the prevailing legal norms in society; breaking those, no matter what they are, involve some level of unethical behavior, due to its degradation of the structure that keeps society running. But most people do agree that laws and ethics aren't the exact same thing, and sometimes breaking the law can be ethical; I think most times, piracy doesn't have a sufficient counterbalance to make it, on net, ethical, but sometimes it could. But either way, I don't think the ethical right for rights holders to restrict how 3rd parties transmit 0s and 1s to each other is part of it.
I do think the mainstreaming of digital media over the past couple decades has made it so that the younger generations of today take intellectual property rights as a sort of default correct thing more than younger generations of before. Of course, books, cassettes, and CDs were all real and all copy-able before the 90s, but they were still generally considered physical objects that needed physical action to copy. But the internet has caused the concept of entertainment media to be almost completely decoupled from physical material, and so kids have grown up in an environment where "intellectual property" exists as a concept and is enforced through restricting how 3rd parties communicate to each other is the norm. It'd be natural for them to come to believe in the ethical right to that in such an environment.
For my personal behavior, I used to pirate heavily 10+ years ago for basically all of my digital entertainment. The advent of Steam and more specifically its improved ease-of-use with its central marketplace and library, along with its cloud saving, made it so that I basically don't pirate video games anymore. I also personally get a little value out of knowing that I helped, even in some minor near-imperceptible way, incentivize the creation of more video games similar to the one I purchased. For films and TV shows, I still primarily pirate through torrents, though I try to watch through my Netflix subscription when it's available that way; it's usually just more convenient, and I keep my Netflix subscription primarily due to momentum. For music, I don't listen to music for the most part anyway, and the advent of YouTube as a near limitless free music resource has meant that the few times I do want to listen to music, I can freely access whatever I want. I do think the bit about convenience being the solution to piracy has a lot of truth to it in my behavior.
Something else to add: If by "piracy" you mean "things involving intellectual property that are against the law", remember that the list of things that are illegal is far beyond just "copying a video" and includes such things as derivative works (fanfiction is illegal), and breaking technological protection measures. Many intellectual property laws are hard to defend from any point of view other than just maximizing profits. We're at the point where "you should obey the law, so don't pirate" is a dead letter and at most you can try to figure out for yourself which laws you should violate and which ones you shouldn't.
The Organization for Transformative Works would disagree. That's the non-profit that runs AO3 and was pretty explicitly created to make sure AO3 can be run as a non-profit legally. The community is pretty aggressive about making sure fanfic they host is not even getting close to edge of "not for profit" (e.g. I see posts telling people to not mention on AO3 if a particular piece was commissioned and not to explicitly mention accepting donations), but they're pretty sure fanfic is legal even if charging for fanfic is not. Of course, there's plenty of sites that host derivative works that have ads that haven't gotten sued, so who knows where the courts would actually draw the line.
I think with the legal concept of derivative works, they're clearly in the wrong. I also don't agree with modern copyright law on derivative works.
I'm fine with a regime where, say, "Star Wars" is a trademark, and where the specific, fixed form of the movies and books is intellectual property of Lucas Films or Disney or whoever. But I believe very strongly that someone who writes a 500 page book with Han Solo should be legally able to profit from their creation. The world doesn't benefit at all if a 500 page Star Wars fan fiction, becomes a 501 page work where all references to Star Wars IP have been scrubbed, and one page of boilerplate has been added trying to establish who San Holo our completely unique main character is.
The problem there is that you end up with a bunch of competing products that dilute the brand. Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars if the film's initial success spurred the creation of 500 "Star Wars" films ranging from big studio productions to low-budget garbage. Studios already try to leech of of other projects by putting out similar movies as other studios to beat them to the box office (Volcano and Dante's Peak, the two Capote movies, etc.); could you imagine what would have happened if Columbia put out a different Episode 5 in 1979 without George Lucas's involvement? Do you think audiences at the time (who were mostly children) would have cared that the film wasn't an "official" release? Your scenario probably wouldn't happen without copyright protection because Star Wars would have been a successful film from 1977 that spurred a number of cash-ins and was quickly forgotten after Fox couldn't make any money off of it due to the brisk competition in Star Wars products, not to mention the oversaturation of inferior media. The idea of Star Wars fan fiction existing today would be akin to the idea of Ice Station Zebra fan fiction existing today.
Combine this with the Coming AI Apocalypse™ by way of deepfakes. The normal version of this concern is manufactured scandal. But what about manufactured bootlegs?
It’s going to get easier and easier to make high-quality imitations of media. Official channels will credibly have the original, unedited versions, but pirates and secondhand purchasers are more likely to end up with changes, unauthorized sequels, who knows? Intentionally seeding with subtle variants would be hilarious. Imagine Stars War, except for every movie. “The torrent claimed it was the Disney+ version, I don’t know why they let George Lucas do another round of edits!”
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