[Sirtel]

What I always notice in discussions about piracy and the moral/ethical side of it, is that people most vehemently condemning illegal downloading and file-sharing are almost always from relatively wealthy old democratic countries (US, UK, the rest of the Western Europe, Scandinavia, Australia etc). The countries where there has never been any lack of availability of digital goods, compared to the rest of the world. What's rarely discussed here and elsewhere is that the mindset in other parts of the world is quite different. I highly doubt that an average internet user in, for example, an African country where most western ebooks, movies and games are not available at all or their price is prohibitive, would think twice about the morality of copyright infringement. And if you say to that person that he/she is not entitled to digital goodies just because his/her country is not part of the select few, what do you think the response would be?

Speaking about mindsets, my generation here in Estonia grew up in Soviet Union. Where stealing (mostly from the state, because most property belonged to the state) was not a way of life, it was the way of life. If you stole on a large scale, you usually got caught and the punishment was severe. But mostly everyone stole from the regime on a small scale, when there was a chance to do so, and those who didn't were regarded as fools. That was the mindset my generation grew up with and naturally it made people pretty cynical.

It didn't make them inherently crueler or more heartless. But very few people here (and probably elsewhere in Eastern Europe) who are approximately my age would think twice about downloading a file from the internet. So what if an unknown author somewhere far away won't get paid? Tough, but that's life. They wouldn't bother to justify it. If someone asked them why they did it, that someone would be regarded as an idiot. The file was already there, why not? If someone lectured them about the immorality and entitlement of illegal downloading, they'd just laugh.

That mindset is slowly changing with younger generations who were born in a free country. And even those same people who don't bat an eye at pirating also buy many of their digital goods now legally, it's not an either/or situation anymore. Netflix has been legally available here for a while now and this has certainly reduced movie pirating. Still, illegal downloading probably remains quite rampant here for a while yet.