Piracy: A Scourge or a Blessing to the Internet?
One of the popular memes of the past seems to not hold up today: “You Wouldn’t Download a Car.” Parodying an anti-piracy ad from the late 2000s, it means to play up the absurdity of the PSA that compares piracy to car theft or physically stealing merchandise from stores. If that were the case, millions of people would be going to jail. Defined as “the illegal copying or distribution of copyrighted material via the Internet” by the International Criminal Police Organization, piracy has been an open secret for the majority of the world’s citizens. Despite being not only widespread but socially accepted, piracy is very illegal. piracy is a highly controversial topic. It usually occurs via the sharing or downloading of files through either file-hosting sites or peer-to-peer applications like Bittorrent. Advocates on both sides of the aisle clash regularly over the ethics and legality of piracy, with one saying that it only hurts businesses and the other arguing that it only helps people. I stand with those who uphold the latter stance: Piracy only benefits our society as it aids digital preservation, gives people access to resources that they wouldn’t have otherwise, and protects consumers against corporate greed.
One major point in favor of piracy is the facilitation of media preservation. Abigail de Kosnik, an author and professor at UC Berkeley, in her article “Piracy is the Future of Culture: Speculating about Media Preservation after Collapse,” posits that even in the worst-case scenario of societal collapse, the efforts that pirate archivists have made will ensure that our media lives on: “While professional archivists have been stymied in their efforts to legally digitally copy and migrate cultural texts, pirate archivists have built up personal collections of digital cultural files and are sharing them freely online, allowing numerous exact copies of these files to be stored all over the world. Thus, pirate archivists have constructed what is essentially an alternative cultural preservation system that will hopefully function as an additional safeguard for digital texts in the event of large-scale disintegration of social norms and infrastructure” (de Kosnik 68). De Kosnik’s point is relevant to my reasoning that piracy is important to digital preservation given that efforts to preserve cultural texts in a legal manner have been outpaced by pirates in not only security, but reach to an intended audience. Because of the technological structure of pirate networks, the security of media uploaded there is far more robust and less likely to suffer complete deletion. Not only does piracy help preserve media, in some cases it may be the most viable option, for example in the gaming sphere. James Newman, a Research Professor and Senior University Teaching Fellow, highlights this: “The inevitable material and digital deterioration of games systems and storage media means that emulation is presently considered by many to be the most viable, or even only, long-term preservation strategy for ensuring playability… the implementation of a preservation strategy based around emulation is far from straightforward. With no specific provision or defence covering the use of ROMs and emulation, game preservation practitioners potentially find themselves engaged in software piracy” (Newman 49). Newman’s point supports the idea that piracy aids media preservation by explaining that trying to stay in legal bounds and avoid it only hinders the progress of the most viable methods of preservation.
The reach of piracy stretches very far, seemingly even farther than that of media that can be obtained legally. Shijie Lu, a professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame and an empirical modeler, argues that the unavailability of legally obtainable content only fuels the fires of piracy: “We find that Netflix’s failure to launch in Indonesia leads to a 19.7% increase in search for pirated movies and TV shows in Indonesia relative to the other 40 countries where Netflix entered and remained available, suggesting a net substitution effect of OTT services on piracy.” Lu’s comment supports my claim that piracy provides greater access to media resources, as legally Indonesians had no avenue to consume content on Netflix, which turned them in the direction of piracy in order to watch the shows and movies they wanted to. This effect is only amplified when looking at certain practices taken by streaming services, as Samala Nagaraj, a Dean and Associate Professor and the School of Innovation and Management, states: “Further longitudinal studies probing the global content sharing ecosystem and a large segment of users relying on freely downloadable pirated content despite privacy issues [14–16]. Such growing propensity to consume pirated content can be attributed to the rising popularity of exclusive OTT content [17]. Consumers who cannot access or afford subscription to these streaming services are resorting to consuming pirated version of the offered content [18]” (Nagaraj et al. 2). Nagaraj strengthens the idea by pointing out how the rise of piracy is mainly caused by exclusive content on streaming services, meaning that consuming the content the user wants would mean a rapidly-increasing barrier to entry, which alienates a customer who cannot afford so many subscriptions.
The effects of piracy reverberate throughout society from individuals like you and me to the most monumental of corporations, and said effects are very different as you move from one side of the scale to the other. Large companies lose ever-increasing amounts of money to it, so they try to combat illegal downloads and sharing at every turn with more and more elaborate-and controversial- methods. Meanwhile, the average person gets to participate in culture via piracy, although “participate” may be too small a word: Piracy connects people to a whole new world that was previously locked away from them. For every recipient, there is a giver: Piracy in itself is the culture of sharing. Every time you lend a friend a DVD or send your sibling the file to a song you like, you’re not only giving them a bit of culture that they can pass on themselves, you’re ensuring that the media lives on. Not only on your hard drive, but in the minds of others. So don’t be afraid of sailing the high seas, especially when it only helps you and others. Piracy, ultimately, is an answer to a problem: “How can a resource be made accessible to me?” In most cases, piracy is the quickest and easiest solution. But that doesn’t mean it is the best solution. If companies can come up with more consumer-friendly models for their products, then piracy may not need to exist at all.
Works Cited
De Kosnik, Abigail. “Piracy is the Future of Culture: Speculating about Media Preservation after Collapse.” Third Text, vol.34, no.1, 1 Nov 2019, pp. 62-70, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1663687.
Lu, Shijie et al. “The Effect of Over-the-Top Media Services on Piracy Search:Evidence from a Natural Experiment.” Informs: Marketing Science, vol.40, no.3, May-June 2021, pp. 548-568.
Nagaraj, Samala et al. “Factors affecting consumers’ willingness to subscribe to over-the-top (OTT) video streaming services in India.” Technology in Society, vol. 65, no.1, 2021, pp.1-7.
Newman, James. “Illegal Deposit: Game Preservation and/as software piracy.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol.19, no.1, 2012, pp. 45-61,
Reflection:
During writing this paper, I practiced using Google Scholar and the CCNY Libraries to find scholarly articles relating to my subject matter: I just searched up my topic- online piracy- at first, and as I started to get an idea on specific aspects the issue I wanted to focus on, I would add them to the search, like “media preservation” and “streaming services. I strengthened my source use practices by learning how to use in-text citations in MLA format and how to create a Works Cited page. Not only that, I learned how to synthesize my sources to strengthen my argument. When reading sources, I came across many that seemed to be related to my topic by the title, but once I dove deeper, I found out they weren’t. This helped me learn not to just judge a source by its title, but to also do a skim of the abstract and/or the introduction so that you know the full subject matter of the paper. I wanted to put my personal experience into the paper to strengthen pathos, but I knew that a research paper is a more factual and less intuitive form of writing. To mitigate this, I kept it to the hook to try and interest the reader and give context to my stance. While collaborating with my peers, I found that context is important so that your audience can understand the subject and certain terms you are speaking about, and not get lost.
