The Optics of "piracy"

This is a response to a Globe and Mail article about the most downloaded movies.

Sometimes I have to wonder if the purpose of a newspaper is to enlighten or dull the minds of its readers.

To suggest that illegal copying of copyright material began with Bit Torrent is woefully myopic. The article doesn't explicitly state this, but it does put the problem in a spotlight that suggests this is a new problem. I argue that the only thing that is new about this problem is that there are statistics that can be used to support a story. It is the kind of simple-minded journalism that makes me think that 

When I was a kid, we would "tape" stuff off the radio (free) and television (free). Then we would share these tapes with friends. Some of our friends had really clever setups that allowed one tape machine to copy to another tape machine. Heck! Most ghetto blasters had two tape decks in them with a "double speed recording" feature!

So, what has changed? If it was okay for me to tape stuff, photocopy stuff, and record stuff to share with my friends, why is it so nefarious to download stuff that is shared via the Internet? 

Simple answer, it's too easy and too good. Now, content producers and equipment manufacturers have a serious competitor in the innocent sharing of content because there is little difference between the shared item and its original source. This is scary. Every new generation of technology heralds the death of the technology that came before it. The newspaper killed the town crier, the radio killed the newspaper, the television killed the radio, the Internet killed them all. 

It is interesting to note, from this article, that the most pirated things are also the most successful things. People want to "tape" (record, remember, etc.) successful things and share them. This has been happening since people figured out how to tell each other stories around a campfire. The biggest problem is that "sharing" and "stealing" are becoming blurred concepts. For decades pursuing copyright piracy with individuals was not worth the effort. One commenter on the article stated that the dowload version (even though it is illegal) is preferable because it can be easily acquired.

Imagine if the production company decided to make its top selling movie available in the same form as the "shared" illegal version movie for 99 cents. At 21,000,000,000 downloads that makes a lot of cents (pun intended). The public will pay for what it is currently "stealing" and the 99 cent song has proven this. What's hard for these companies to understand is that their revenue model is changing. They must adapt or be pirated. It seems so silly to me that a company would rather stick to its business models in spite of the flaws, than shift gears and leverage the activity of its customers to its advantage.

Owen