Pirates
The file sharing rant has raged on for years. While the media industries claim that file sharing has hurt their market share, the movie industry is seeing record sales. For many, it’s obvious what is going on. With the advent of new media, we saw a shift in how things work in our world. Once upon a time, you had to have a lot of money to record media and distribute it. This need gave rise to a collection of media industries, music and movies in particular. Now, recording and sharing media is very cheap and very easy. The MPAA and RIAA are no longer important. However, with their size and power, they will do anything and everything they can to keep the status quo.
Some would argue that we have to protect copyrights and the artists. Tell that to Nine Inch Nails or Radiohead. The RIAA and MPAA monopolized distribution channels and decided what media we consumed for decades. They took huge margins and left the original artists, most of them, with a small fraction of the green. This has all been discussed, at length, many times before.
What we have going on is a rebellion. It’s also a large scale rebellion. Before I discuss that point, I want to say something a bit harder to grasp. Intellectual property rights are dumb. I have many an artist friend from musicians to writers who do not like it when I say this. They feel their livelihood depends on these laws. Meanwhile, we have the AP going after their own members for content they, themselves, posted online for sharing. We also have the most significant figurehead against the file sharing movement, Metallica, admitting openly to downloading copyrighted content. Patents themselves don’t really protect the little guy. Who can afford to enforce them? No, patents are there as a tool in the battlefield between giants like Apple vs Palm or Microsoft vs TomTom. Empires like Walt Disney were built not from using copyright laws to protect original works, but from using them to copyright public domain works.
That isn’t to say that artists don’t deserve credit for their works. However, there’s a long running misunderstanding of the intent behind US intellectual property law. We almost had none. However, we decided to grant very short term monopolies on IP to stimulate invention. There was a clause allowing congress to extend the length of these copyrights. This power has been used and abused to the extent that there are people alive today living off of royalties for works they had nothing to do with. This is not stimulating invention, this is milking a broken system. This is hacking. This is black hat hacking. This is, also, somehow socially acceptable?
So back to the topic at hand, the Pirate Bay and the revolution. I’m overwhelmed with where to begin. It’s amazing what you can find on the Bay. It’s like the Wikipedia of the commercial media industry. It’s loaded with out of circulation media and wonderful rare finds. It’s one of the treasures of the Internet. Today, four people involved in the existence of the Pirate Bay were sentenced to jail time for copyright law violations in Sweden. Story and video can be found on the BBC and the Telegraph.
When we first started file sharing, we blatantly broke the law with applications like Napster. We were a bit surprised to find out that we did not own the music we thought we owned. Turns out, we have a limited use license. So, along comes a revolutionary technology called bit torrent. By breaking a file down into small chunks and spreading it around, bit torrent allows groups with limited resources to distribute large chunks of media without having to suffer the bandwidth charges of serving the full files to users. As a wonderful side effect, it also negates laws related to file sharing as no one is guilty of giving the file away.
And this is the game that played out over the last many years as The Pirate Bay kept changing how they did things to remain legal. The Pirate Bay contains no copyrighted materials. The copyright infringement is occurring only because of the involvement of thousands (millions?) of people working together to make it happen. There in lies a truth that needs to be seen. If IP law is right and true, why are so many people both eager and willing to violate IP law? If the majority of world citizens do not want a law, do not want to respect a law, then why does the law exist? This is absolutely crucial to examine. Knowingly or not, everyone who downloads a file is part of the revolution.
No one wants to tell an artist, of any kind, that he or she does not deserve to be acknowledged and rewarded for their contributions. This does not mean that copyrights and patents are inherently good. At best, they’re a broken system. I tend to believe their an irrelevant system. Michelangelo seemed to do just fine without IP law. However, now that we have IP law, someone scarffed up the rights to that dead artist’s work. How is this not sick and twisted?
The four “so called” founders of the Pirate Bay will now spend a year in prison for leading a revolution against the corporate giants that have monopolized our media channels. Four men will lose a year of their lives for what they believed in. How will the media portray them? As criminals who rightly deserved what they got? Wait, isn’t that the same “media” that put them there? Go figure.
I would enjoy sitting down and spending hours talking about this with anyone who’s truly curious enough to discuss it with an open mind. I would enjoy sharing this message with the world. If I were a multinational media conglomerate, I could just use my overwhelming power to quietly push my message into the minds of millions. Unfortunately, I’m not. I’m just a guy who turned off the television and picked up a mouse in the early 90’s. I spends my hours programming games that I gave away for free while listening to music that other people gave away for free. (Special thanks to Skaven, Purple Motion, and the rest of the scene btw.)
I don’t expect to change the world to my way of thinking. I don’t even expect this blog post to be read by more than maybe a few people. Chances are, most folks will scan it and utter TL;DR. I do wish that I could somehow share with the world, even for just an instant, the utter insanity I see in all of this. If I’m wrong, show me – because I’m tired of being frustrated by the idiocy and, more so, the wide acceptance and support of the idiocy.
Note: Photo taken entirely without permission from the Times Online who credit Bob Strong from Reuters but w/out link or information.
P.S. One aspect of this entire debate I failed to mention relates to the videogame industry. I’ve been active in the industry for more than a decade and have noticed that it does not operate, at all, like other media industries. While the music and movie industries are slow to change and use the law to hold their ground, the videogame industry more frequently looks to technological solutions. The game industry is largely self regulating. While the movie industry adopted a ratings system because it was legally forced to, the gaming industry developed their own rating system. Publishers all jumped on board and the system tends to work as well, if not better than the movie industry. The game industry is also constantly exploring distribution models to see what works. While I can’t cite the game industry as a positive role model, I can say that they’re doing much better than other media industries. At least they’re trying to grow and evolve. I may write a post specifically about this some time in the future – provided I’m inspired – and less upset. Enough for today.
Edit 4/21/09: Additional reference link – Study finds pirates 10 times more likely to buy music.