[Piracy] - My take

The piracy phenomenon is a vast collection of different yet related realities, too large to fully document in a blogg. The term is surrounded by lies, greyzones and no absolute truths. In a course on ethical issues in technology the most obvious question is: is internet piracy ethically sound? There is no single answer to that question, but I will give my take on it.

At the very first glance, downloading something like a music album for free that is intended to be sold for money immediately feels wrong. In reality the question isn’t nearly as easily solved. Some call this stealing while the only thing you do is actually making a copy of the file. It can be argued that it however becomes related to stealing when you originally intended to buy the song/film/program but decided to copy it for free instead. Still, nothing has actually been stolen, the CD safely stays in the store. The main reason I think people are against piracy is because they believe that it makes the creator lose money. My main concern is to make sure there is a lasting culture flow, to make sure artists still have the same opportunity to produce culture. If everyone illegally copied every CD and never paid for it, the artist would obviously lose some of his/her income. That is ofcourse not the case but does that still make filesharing as a whole a bad thing? Let’s take a look on it from another perspective. The vast majority of the world’s music artists does not make a living producing music. Most aren’t even signed to any record label so buying their records immediately becomes impossible. The only way for these bands to reach the whole world with their music is through filesharing. There are numerous bands that never sold a record in their life but still has an audience large enough to perform live shows. So as more and more people download their records, more people go to their concert. Without the filesharing networks, these artists would often at most have a local fanbase. In it’s extremes, this means that the music culture climate is enriched and broadened by filesharing, not reduced. So what about those poor artists that actually had a record contract and lost tons of income because of the piracy? Well, in reality the record sales hasn’t decreased but increased (2004) globally contradictory to what the record companies will have us believe. The reason I believe is because people can now freely explore music in a way they never could before. By downloading an album with a new artist, people can get a taste for new music freely and decide for themselves if the record is worth buying or not. The record industry have a hard time accepting this reality, unwilling to let a penny fall through their hand even if they would earn 2 pennys later.

But this is just the music industry. Filesharing is so much more. What about the movies industry? Actually, roughly the same priciples are applicable here. By applying free exploration, a broader selection of movies will be able to make it. It is true that movie theatres are reporting less revenues but that is largely because of the popularity and availability of home theatres has increased greatly recently. In fact a survey performed by SF (Swedish Filmindustry) showed that active filesharers more frequently go to the theatres than non-filesharers.

Last but not least, the games industry. Once again I believe that filesharing will broaden the selection and distinguish good games from bad. Year after year the games industry increases it’s sales and has long since surpassed the movies industry. In 2005 the games industry revenues was $32.6 billion and the business expects it to double by 2011. All the while pirated copies of games are increasingly made available, often before they are even released. Some companies are now beginning to embrace piracy like game publisher giant EA. Representative Gerhard Florin stated that Piracy have helped open up the online market for the company. I hope more companies open their eyes to this in the future, allthough I doubt it will happen anytime soon.

All in all, I don’t believe that filesharing are any threat to the culture climate on any plane. On the contrary I believe it benfits greatly from it. But in order to fully take advantage of this the many companies business models have to change as it has through all times. If they don’t and stay stagnant, they will surely die like all the discarded and forgotten technologies they promote.