Digital Liberian Risk,Sharing Copy Right:Electric Boogaloo

Piracy does not hurt industry

In the sense that  if I find content I enjoy I will share it with others and one of those people is bound to put money into it tell their friends and etc. A personal example is in the case of Adam WarRock I enjoy his musical content and each year he hosts a donation drive in which those who wish to support him can do so by donating money. In return they receive an exclusive mixtape only available to those who donate as well as other minor perks like original artwork.

Public Domain Image

To add on to that I only discovered the band The Protomen through music piracy and last year when they played a show in my area I went to it. In order to support them that was the only thing I did in the week long vacation I had. Without the internet and file-sharing websites I would not have been able to find the music of this band and later on go to one of their concerts.

 I am not saying we should all just download content but if one really enjoys something they will find ways to support it.

 

It’s a moral panic of sorts no different than VHS recording movies and TV and sitting in one's car waiting for a song to come on in order to copy it to ones cassette player and share it with friends.

It just those same activities on a  larger scale.

Continuing on with Doctorow and piracy  I'd like to close him out with the following also from the introduction to Little Brother

"Finally, let's look at the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It's how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars, which I'd just seen in the theater. Now that the Internet -- the world's most efficient copying machine -- is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to play out more and more. There's no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, I'd be a hypocrite: when I was 17, I was making mix-tapes, photocopying stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around then, I'd have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could.

There's no way to stop it, and the people who try end up doing more harm than piracy ever did"

Pirate Bay raid protest image by Jon Aslund

 Speaking of harm a lot of these file sharing sites are fairly untargeted sure they host copyright violating material but they also host files that are under no copyright and violate no copyright laws. It’s like  bank being targeted because   a drug dealer or other suspicious person is  saving their money in that bank.

Also  lot of DMCA take downs and the closing down of sites for holding pirated material is kind of futile because once its on the internet people have downloaded it some have saved it to re uploaded while others have created mirrors of the content elsewhere.