|
To throw in one thought on the side of justification and reasonableness of piracy, I would say that the one right that is being gained by pirating is the right to information regardless of income/spending ability. I've pirated thousands and thousands of dollars worth of material, and not needing to pay for that stuff means that I place no limits on my ability to acquire information that I wouldn't reasonably be able to pay for without an exorbitant amount of financial sacrifice on my own part. The trade-off for me hurting the artist has been the (admittedly selfish) benefit of compiling really decent digital collections of music, books, and art. It's really been a big gift to myself, and the benefits I've gained has been massive compared to the disenfranchisement of any one individual's bank account that I'm personally responsible for. In other words, it's a really big win for me at the cost of many small individual losses for others.
If you want to go beyond my individual responsibility to the artist, I mean, obviously the culture of piracy clearly feeds off the attitude I just described, so I'm certainly not helping the problem. Also, the very nature of P2P sharing involves giving as much as you take (or often more than you take), contributing to the proliferation of that material to new groups of non-paying customers.
So basically pirating is really bad but not all that bad sometimes but also it's complex and definitely more complicated than just good vs. bad, although it can boil down to that if you want to get really practical, but people don't actually operate within an "I'm right" vs. "I'm wrong" mentality, so holding up the negatives of pirates and piracy as the be-all and end-all of this discussion, no matter how clear and universal those negatives may be, doesn't really have a lot to do with the way pirates are actually operating as they decide to steal material, making it almost into more of a straightforward legal issue rather than one dealing with the intricate dynamics of society and technology, which, even if you are simply looking for ways to prevent piracy, are the most important keys to understanding what has become a ubiquitous phenomenon.
|