copyright and piracy
Lately, the Discover page has seen multiple posts in reply to each other about copyright and the legitimacy of piracy. From Herman sparking the initial wave, to Pirate posting a sort of reply on the Gazette, and then Cris voicing his view there as well, I now feel the need to compose my unwieldy thoughts that I’ve been gathering in my notes through this exchange which in their turn have been partially sparked by this month’s book club pick Algospeak, weirdly enough. I recommend reading the posts I linked before reading this one as they aide in contextualizing it.
But before I dive into my arguments, I would like to define what I understand copyright to be so it’s clear where I stand. Copyright is a system of ownership that extends the logic of hoarding physical items to the intellectual realm. Among other things, copyright is a byproduct of capitalism, a mode of production that has as its aim the utmost extraction of any possible resource for material gain. This kind of system does not belong in a so-called free society like the ones we live in. I intentionally say “so-called” because these societies are not free, with copyright’s existence being one of the main reasons for that. As more knowledge workers began earning their livelihoods through knowledge work, copyright was essential in securing the revenue generated by the fleeting nature of their produce to them. Yet if we zoom out for a moment, the only reason copyright was necessary for these knowledge workers was because we understand labor as a prerequisite for securing one’s basic needs, another byproduct of extractive economic systems like capitalism or really any system that uses money. You can only own what your hands can hold and your body can protect. Copyright and intellectual property laws expand that to the realm of the intangible in order to create a class of owners and a class of renters. The owners have control over art and knowledge while the renters have to ask for permission to enjoy the fruits of otherwise freely accessible knowledge. The barriers are artificial and so is their enforcement.
Now let’s move onto piracy, a phenomenon that is often discussed whenever copyright is brought up, so let me not break custom. Piracy as it’s used today is the act of defying the social and economic barriers put in place to control the flow of intellectual creations like literature, visual arts, games, etc. It is probably less boring if I defined piracy as a natural reaction to copyright, albeit never comparable to theft. This is how Pirate distinguished piracy from theft:
Piracy also isn't theft, it's copyright infringement. Unless you're stealing the physical data (i.e. the USB the code is housed on), you're not committing theft. That's why if you get caught pirating you get a Cease & Desist letter mailed to you not felony theft charges.
Pirate chose to extend his comparison by illustrating the difference in the legal system’s reactions to each action which I find interesting but won’t lament on any longer. My relationship with piracy as with copyright is varied. While I support pirating rich people’s art and knowledge because they have no right to withhold knowledge in addition to their lavish, environment-destroying lifestyles, I’m more reserved when it comes to smaller, less resourced artists.
As Cris argues, piracy is actually very inconvenient. For me, it all comes down to how (in)convenient the initial acquisition and continued access is compared to the cost of the medium. With games, I’ve given up on pirating them. If the game is not appealing enough for me to splurge on it, I just don’t buy it. I play on consoles which make it hard to load externally acquired content outside the intended channels anyway, so that already bars me from pirating them. Beyond games, I was too poor to buy the books I read for a very long time. Compared to games, books are there for you to read and don't change once you've downloaded them so that was the easiest piracy ever was for me. Nowadays, I rarely pirate a book unless it’s an author I do not want to give money to.
Even though I buy books for my recreational reading, I avoid buying course books like the plague. They're simply overpriced. I'm just a student living with my parents to save money, so I'm not going to pay a minimum of 50€ for a book I will likely not need a semester later. Especially since finding out that few academics actually earn much of anything from their publishing under their name, I justify this with "stealing" rich people's yacht money (=not stealing in my books [pun not intended]). Thankfully my university is so generous and offers PDF downloads of most things I need so I rarely pirate. However, they don't make that clear to students so many still check Amazon or equivalent bookshops for those books (I know that from taking quick glances at people’s laptops during the first couple of lectures lmao). The prices are egregious more times than not. if it's not in my university's library or supplied as course materials by the professor, Anna's Archive is where I check first before buying.
On the other hand, I have no reason to pirate music since streaming was a good enough antidote for that (for the most part). I still buy CDs now that I can afford it, but those are more of a backup in case an album I love is eventually taken down for copyright reasons and sometimes to support the artists. Since streaming is the prevalent vessel for listening to music and subscribing to one service is usually enough to access almost every piece of music out there (except for very niche indie or niche and/or old stuff), the various avenues for pirating music have dwindled, but some are still around. I still don't use them because I have no reason to. Here, I have to agree with Gabe Newell's quote in Pirate's post in this case: Music piracy was and still is in some cases a service problem more than anything.
When it comes to TV shows and movies is where things get interesting because of the insane fragmentation in this space. I have subscriptions to Disney+ and Apple TV+ (both shared). This is for convenience reasons so I can watch them on my PlayStation that is connected to a 27" monitor that I don't connect my Mac to. As for anime, I've considered subscribing to Crunchyroll so many times in the pasts but never went through with it because of Crunchyroll not having the series I'd like to watch. So I used aniwave.to until it got shutdown, though these days I don't watch anime anymore.
A few days ago I wanted to watch The Shining with the family1 which I knew for a fact was on Disney+ because I had seen it on there literally a week before, but it wasn't on there that evening because it had moved to Prime Video. This is an instance where I would go watch it on a piracy streaming site just because of how bullshit all this is. Bad service combined with copyright forces the consumer to defy it by pirating. It's just natural and logical. I'm not gonna pay for a movie almost as old as my parents that I could've watched a week ago legally. Maybe I won't watch it over this, who knows. Sometimes there simply isn't a legal way to watch a show, like Euphoria for instance. It is HBO Max exclusive which is not available in Austria (where I live) or anywhere else in Europe last time I checked. So a piracy streaming site came to the rescue.
Here is where I relate to Cris' stance on piracy, particularly this part:
On my death bed, you can be sure that I won't regret not having spent the majority of my time alive making sure that I listen to and watch everything that society tells me to. I think that this obsession with "being in the know" and the FOMO that comes with it, is what pushes a lot of people into piracy, even when they're not particularly fond of it. (Emphasis in the original)
Like Cris, I've been chronically overwhelmed with options. Recently, I've dumped some of the lists I kept of things to watch or listen to, be it YouTube videos, podcasts or new music to check out. I just have too much to do besides media consumption for me to create a sort of to-do list for my free time. So the limits on what I can do are sometimes a feature that helps me focus on a limited what's possible and accessible instead of an incomputable amount of options.
Nonetheless, that does not justify the existence of copyright and the fragmentation of media access. In every case in which I pirate (except books for recreational reading), it's because the thing I'm looking for is not available legally or the legal alternative is just so bonkers that I'm not going to spend money on the legal alternative (like The Shining). If people are pirating your stuff, maybe, just maybe, it’s on you to make them not do it. Not through DRM, but by making the product more attractive to them. Herman’s solution of a discount code was both smart and very telling of why people pirate: because they’re poor, dammit. If I have to choose between spending a fifty dollars on a tool and buying groceries, my choice is clear. But if there is a way for me to get this tool for less—or even nothing—the choice is easier to make. Most people are not sitting on piles of money to spend on art. They’re barely scraping by. So secondary or tertiary necessities of life have to be priced accordingly, meaning not prohibitively unaffordable to them. But as long as copyright exists, we deal with money and basic necessities are not taken for granted like the air we breathe, piracy will continue to exist and we’ll have to live with it.
Best family movie ever, am I right? It would've been everyone's first time seeing it, too.↩