A Short Essay On Piracy

From the time I got my first tape recorder I remember pirating songs. But it wasn’t called piracy back then. At least not in the mainstream world, and the term certainly wasn’t thrown around the news as it is today. Yet the question still remains as to what the real difference is between taping a song off the radio and downloading a torrent.

The first songs I remember taping and making into an almost complete album was Guns ‘n Roses Appetite for Destruction. I diligently paid attention to radio listings and DJ’s comments for upcoming tracks and recorded them onto my tape, and then played it back endlessly. I was 9 years old at the time. The first copied game I played was Duke Nukem 3D which some altruistic pupil had loaded onto the school network for all to play, and copy to floppy disks. Back then I had no idea that this was “costing thousands of people their jobs”. For me it was listening to music I liked and playing a game that someone had given to me.

Time passed and I accumulated a larger collection of tapes from the radio. By this point I had purchased both Appetite for Destruction on CD and a real version of Duke Nukem. Then came Napster. Amazing. I could get all the songs that as a school boy with no allowance I had no hope of getting. I was happy.

Fast-forward to now, and I would be branded a thief. By stealing music I was stripping the artist of hard earned money and ruining their lives. I am a bad person. But really, am I?

The grey area surrounding torrents is one that needs to be laid down in plain English (or French, Italian etc.) for everyone to understand. As I have progressed through life I have heard that taping songs off the radio is actually illegal. But I have never seen this written in an obvious way and I have certainly never heard it mentioned by a DJ on any radio station. If it is indeed illegal, and has been for some time, then why have I never heard stories of police knocking on peoples doors demanding young boy’s and girl’s mix tapes to be destroyed and fines to be paid? How many parents have copied films broadcast on TV on VHS for their children to watch at a later date? Surely this is tantamount to piracy too?

And what of downloading TV series that are freely broadcast on TV? If a UK citizen is outside of the UK he is not able to watch programmes on the internet from his home country, though in all probability he is paying his TV license. So he downloads the same programme from the internet. He is now a thief. Something his friends and family watched at home, and maybe even recorded, is not accessible to him in a legal manner. What of broadening the scope, to US shows for example. They are full of product placement and internal advertising, yet even the shows broadcast for free are not allowed outside the country. Advertising is still advertising.

I fear the answer is not what we are being told. While it is obvious to all that downloading a film or a game that has not yet been released (recent examples would be Wolverine and Crysis 2) is bad behaviour and does have a negative impact on projected earnings, other material on the torrent sites is more dubious.

Many people download a film that is in the cinema in lower quality and quite happily watch it and never give any money to the companies involved in the production of the film. The same goes for music. But there is a hint of viral marketing present in torrents. Advertisers continuously talk about the advantages of word-of-mouth advertising and torrents perform this task admirably. There are many bands I would never have heard of without Napster or Limewire, and as a result of these programs I did go out and by legitimate copies of the albums. I also came across albums from bands I liked that were terrible and would have made me upset to buy. I, like many people, have a budget for how much I spend on music and films, and I always spend that money and very rarely any more. I would not spend more if torrents were unavailable. They do, however, afford you the chance to avoid buying something that you won’t like, which would in reality equate to negative advertising. If you buy something you don’t like that you have been told was good by company X, you would be a lot less likely to buy anything from company X again in the future.

Before I give my reason for why I think that piracy has become such a prevalent topic recently let me state that I agree with the idea that stealing is wrong. It is true that the same people who download from the internet would not generally speaking walk into a shop and steal the CD or DVD. Torrents have made stealing easier and no one can deny that.

I think the answer lies with how easy it has become to see who is copying what. Before, no one could monitor what you were recording at home. You could potentially tape every new release off the radio and amass a ridiculously large collection of music for free, and with the advent of digital radio it would be in comparable quality for the average listener. Now you have to go through your ISP which can track your bandwidth and as a result you would receive a threatening letter. It seems that because the record labels and film studios now have a way of detecting copying they are acting upon it to get more money. The argument that it hurts employee’s salaries in a significant manner has not yet been substantially shown. Everyone in the US will remember the writer’s strike not long back over low salaries, but there has been no executive director strike over the same issue. If the studios are not appropriating their money proportionally or correctly then that cannot be blamed on torrents.

So we come to the point of corporate greed, something which everyone has strong feelings about, yet we still have precious few facts surrounding this. While it has been shown that some are indeed overly greedy, we cannot say the same for all as we have not sat down and studied the facts. If the songs and films I did download in the past adversely affected someone’s life then I am truly sorry, and I agree that a lot of people making almost imperceptible dents will make a noticeable difference.

So yes, piracy is bad, if I want to know if I will like a film I should watch the trailers and find a film critic who I trust. If I want to know if I will like an album I should… Hmm. This one is a bit more difficult. Am I meant to filter through every band’s website and see what they have put up for me to hear as a reflection of their album? Do I listen non-stop to the radio? Do I subscribe to their YouTube channel? I’ll go with YouTube.

YouTube. Here we have what seems to be the world’s most institutionalised piracy forum. Everything seems to be there. Every song you can think of, even complete films can be found. And yet this website, which unlike the Pirate Bay hosts the videos, is legal. This is a website which popular artists use non-stop, yet alongside their own songs are the same ones uploaded by someone else. But the other ones are not allowed. They are illegal and in some cases are taken down. The artists then complain endlessly about how much they disagree with their songs being uploaded by other users. Now if the artists weren’t being hypocrites they would take themselves off YouTube and host all the videos and music on their own sites along with all the promotional benefits. But the promotional benefits are what drove them to YouTube in the first place. People go onto YouTube because they can watch what they want and listen to any song whenever they are near the internet. That is why the artists get their publicity. The users are not there solely because of you! They are there and happy to see you too!

This duplicity is what undermines the entire concept of convincing people that torrents are bad. It cannot be done both ways, either you accept the torrents and find a way to use them to your advertising advantage, or you stay clear of anything that comes close to resembling piracy. Please make your choices, either twist this to your advantage, or actually cut it out. Do not badmouth it from one side yet seemingly accept it from the other, it is confusing and will not help anyone in the long run.