Internet Piracy

Bgood writes: “How about making a show regarding Internet-piracy? What are your opinions about this? This is especially relevant because The Pirate Bay, the largest torrent tracker is being sued, and could be shut down permanently. If they are shut down, what will this mean for the Internet? They estimate they are responsible for 30-40% of total Internet traffic.”

What does this mean? It means 30-40% of the internet is welcome to come steal our show. Heave to and prepare to be boarded. Whatever flibbers your gibbets.

First of all, let’s talk specifically about Napster I mean Torrentspy I mean the Pirate Bay. Illegal download sites come and go because it’s easy for downloaders to find them and its easy for people to set them up. So whether or not they shut down the Pirate bay in the long term won’t change anything except the domain name you go to looking for your illicit bounty.

Bounty, booty, it’s all the same thing. Well, it’s not the same thing. Back to the plunder.

In legal terms Internet piracy is just like stealing anything else. Yes, you can and will justify it but downloading copyrighted music, games, software is still stealing even if it doesn’t feel like stealing. And yes, the law is very clear on that fair use included.

But the economics of it make a few interesting points. First off, there is no direct loss. For example, when you slap on an eye patch and run somebody through for their CD “The Best of Depeche Mode Volume 1″ somebody lost money, because somebody had to pay money to make that CD in the first place. And now you are stealing it. Whereas technically downloading a song does not cost anything for the people that made it or sell it. You’re just stealing it. But they didn’t pay anything to make it. That one copy. I mean the marginal unit for all those of you who speak nerd out there.

The best they can claim is that they lost the money you would have spent to get it. Which makes one really big assumption that you would have paid for it in the first place. Depeche Mode. In economics it’s called dead weight loss. And it’s the funny little triangular space underneath where supply and demand meet.

It represents all the potential transactions for that people who would have bought the product if the price were less expensive or in some cases free. So you can’t assume that all those illegal downloads are lost money. Because after all there are people like me who wouldn’t buy it unless it were free. Plunder always be free except for a bit of work stabbing the crew.

So the real problem is one of substitution that people higher up on the demand curve will just download it instead of buying it. And that means the makers of the song or movie really are losing money. People are always finding creative ways not to pay for things. And the recording industry has always tried to recoup it’s perceived losses. Remember cassette tapes and how you would wait by the radio until your favorite song came on so you could record it? No… your an Internet baby. You probably don’t remember that.

The solution to this deviant behavior is that the record labels get a tiny bit of every cassette tape sold. It just doesn’t seem quite fair for the people who use tapes for different things like for their commodore 64 or their Fisher-Price pixel vision video camera. Now the idea is to do the same thing with MP3 players and slap on a little a fee that is given to record labels every time a unit is sold. It’s like a piracy tax. But once again it punishes the people who legally buy their music and it might have a backlash effect making more people feel even more comfortable about illegally downloading digital material.

Hey RIAA guy isn’t that like kind of counter productive against what you were doing earlier. You remember when out of sheer desperation you started suing individual downloaders? Those kind of fear tactics are only scary as long as you can keep them up. And lawyers are expensive. It’s not really very cost effective guys. And then you thought “I know!” “Maybe some guilt-induced advertising will do the trick.” No… They’re Internet babies. They’re immune to guilt.

There are other ways to legally get music that’s still illegal. Sites that sell superstar music at super bargain basement discount prices. How does that work? Well, copyright and intellectual protection laws aren’t the same everywhere so you can buy from a Russian company where that song isn’t protected and then import it back into the US illegally. How do they get away with it? Because it’s really tough to define and control the import and export of intangible goods like digital files across borders. Or enforce it. That is really tough. Without breaking through your door, seizing your computer checking all the files and then telling you “you were naughty” and sending you to jail. Which likely won’t happen. They’ll come after your dad’s guns first. Wait, the RIAA is coming after your dad’s guns? Arr, shot and powder.

And one more thing, I have read posts online that say copying CDs is illegal. And technically that’s inaccurate. I mean, ripping and burning a CD sounds very pirate-y. But it’s not, unless it’s someone else’s CD. Selling or distributing copies of material, that’s illegal but you have the right to make backups of your originals. Honestly, I think piracy is the knee jerk reaction to CDs that have been and continue to be way over-priced. And until the industry finds a way to balance that out people will continue following the treasure maps to their illegal digital swag.

You wouldn’t steal a CD would you? How about a car? How about a taco? How about underpants? How about another man’s woman? How about my backup singers? How about my bling? How about my Grammy? Then you’re a pirate.

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