In response to the current state of copyright laws, tons of media have been spread throughout the Internet, offering a different look at intellectual property. Two documentaries, Steal This Film (2006) and Good Copy, Bad Copy (2007) seemed particularly articulate on the subject.
Both films can be viewed online for free:
http://www.stealthisfilm.com/Part1/
http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/
With part one, I'll be trying to help illustrate what the "pirates" interviewed in Steal This Film feel is wrong with copyright laws, focusing heavily on their view that American Intellectual Property proponents do not own the Internet; they do not have jurisdiction over the world.
Part Two, to follow shortly, will focus more on what the artists interviewed in Good Copy, Bad Copy have to say; mostly that stringent copyright laws are killing the creativity that they claim to promote.
The Pirate Bay
Steal This Film focuses on a specific group out of Sweden, the collective that manages The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay is the world's largest Bittorrent tracker, offering anyone looking with a comprehensive list of torrent links. Using these torrent files along with any number of freely available Bittorrent client programs, a user can connect with thousands and thousands of other people who are offering to share (or 'seed') the same file(s) the user is looking for.
In May 2006, Swedish police raided eight offices in Stockholm where servers for The Pirate Bay were located. The Swedish police did this because of a number of threats that the MPAA made to Swedish officials. The MPAA even pulled out all the lobbyist stops it had and sent word that if Sweden didn't do something to rein in these pirates, the US government would consider placing sanctions on them.
While the raids were ineffectual -- The Pirate Bay's servers were back online within three days of the raid -- several people who ran the site have been found guilty of "assistance to copyright infringement" and have been imprisoned and heavily fined. This has not stopped The Pirate Bay from running, however. The servers have all been given many redundancies and according to co-founder Fredrik Neij, "it is virtually impossible to take down."
Steal This Film asks the audience to listen to these people dubbed "pirates" by the media and ask: Don't these guys make more sense than corporations pushing for longer prison time and more crippling fines for downloading The Parent Trap?
The Changing Nature of Media Consumption
Years ago, VCRs came onto the scene. People were finally free to watch what they wanted, when they wanted to watch it (providing they could set a VCR timer properly and there wasn't a power outage). The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) went mad, and Jack Valenti testified to congress:
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."Yet the MPAA adapted their methodology and hundreds of millions of VHS copies of movies and television were sold or rented every year. The film industry cashed in.
Things have changed in recent years. New technologies that make P2P file-sharing easy and cheap have the MPAA and RIAA up in arms once agian.
It appears that the MPAA and RIAA are not only falsely lamenting their loss in profits, they are struggling against the new technology that promises to give them a new stream of revenue. Of course, Steal This Film was made over 5 years ago, and as anyone with a Netflix or iTunes or Pandora or Amazon account can tell you, the industry is cashing in on internet technology. Network Television even shows full episodes of their programs on sites like hulu.com, raking in the money from selling ads -- in addition to the money they receive selling network ad time and DVD sales.
The problem is that the profits losses that the MPAA and RIAA cite to justify tighter restraints on copyright infringement aren't really that bad. On the contrary, there have been some record gains in recent years. This is a chart of movie industry profits from 1995-2011:
If you'll notice, the numbers stay fairly high... these are surprisingly steady profits to take in during a global recession. Sure, the numbers have slightly dipped a couple of times in the past few years, but you have to remember that some of that lost revenue is due to people losing their homes and not having a place to watch DVDs anymore.
The real worry here is that the film and record industries have cut back the number of films they make/the number of artists they take on, even though they have maintained steady profits. So, is it "piracy" that is killing creativity, or is is corporate greed?
On a fundamental level, our culture of media consumption has changed. The days of extensive home video collections, with libraries of discs and tapes, are being replaced by DVRs, Cloud computing, online streaming services, and even smart phones. We are becoming less and less the collectors of media and more often simply transient observers in the ocean of media that is out there. (Navneet Alang -- http://www.techi.com/2011/03/everything-you-know-about-piracy-is-wrong/)
The MPAA and RIAA frequently equate a download with a lost sale. What they're failing to realize is that is not the case. Someone who downloads a movie or record, especially in poor neighborhoods and developing countries, would probably never buy those things in a store anyway. It is rarely a lost sale and much more frequently a case of a film or a piece of music reaching a much wider audience. (Navneet Alang -- http://www.techi.com/2011/03/everything-you-know-about-piracy-is-wrong/)
Availability
In many countries, P2P file-sharing is the only way to experience some media works. In China, where media piracy is the most rampant, their government allows only 20 foreign films to be shown in theaters per year. The Chinese would not be able to see most of the movies that are released if it weren't for piracy.
P2P file-sharing is a far more efficient and versatile means of distribution than the current system. With one instant download, a user can play a media file on any number of entertainment devices. Providers of legal downloads often include DRM encryption, meaning that the number of different ways a user can consume media is greatly limited -- and their version is the one people have to pay for.
For the environmentalist, acquiring media via P2P is quite a bit more desirable than the current methods of manufacturing and distribution. There are no discs to manufacture, no possibility for labor exploitation via the sweat shop, and no fuel burned to ship units from country to country.
Tougher Laws = More Piracy
The heightened legal restrictions concerning file-sharing have done nothing but encourage more file-sharing. Consumers look at industries that raise prices during a global recession and take a step back. For someone in a family, which now has to manage on half the income because of job loss, luxuries like movies and music are no longer affordable. Agencies like the MPAA and RIAA blame so much of the industry's losses on illegal downloads, which is a half-truth. True, some people who used to be good little consumers may no longer buy media but download it for free. The myth is that all of these "pirates" are just kids who want to get something for nothing, rather than people who can no longer afford to pay $15 for every movie they want to see.
Media corporations have become oligarchs, or at least attached to oligarchs. A small number of media corporations, owned by an even smaller number of giant corporations, control the type and amount of content put out every year. Piracy helps level the playing field by empowering all people to decide what sort of behavior they want to support, especially when considering the actions of the parent companies. For instance, they might ask if you want to pay for a film from Universal, owned by GE, one of the largest defense contractors in the world and therefore a part of the military industrial complex; or will you save that money to give to the local busking homeless guy, so he will sing Give Peace a Chance (which is also an act of copyright infringement)?
Actor Richard Dreyfuss had this to say:
Who are we giving money to? Other than lump sums paid at the time of artistic creation for everyone who worked on a project -- including singers, directors, producers, cameramen, productions assistants, grips, drivers, studio technicians -- some people (Singers and songwriters in music, above the line personnel in film) receive residuals as part of their contract. For a musician, the going rate for residuals is about 9.2 cents per song. While this amount certainly adds up when a track is downloaded millions of times, what about the other 89.8 cents? Well over half of the money from every track sold on iTunes goes directly to the record label.
So, who is trying to protect their money with stringent copyright laws? The artist that has already been paid, or the corporate proprietors who profit from the creative work of others? This is yet another PSA produced by the film industry on the negative consequences of internet piracy.
Obviously downloading movies and music for free has some effect on the entertainment industry. But is the effect as bad as the media corporations say? Is it impossible for the industry to keep making money so long as file-sharing continues? This is what the Pirates had to say about it:
Our profits...I mean, artists' profits are at stake!
"Before the advent of recorded music, musicians relied mostly on getting paid for live performances to support themselves. Recorded music presented a market for corporations to exploit. Now, it seems that the market might return to a state where musicians get most of their money for performances." [Rasmus Fleischer (Rsms) - Piratbyran]The demographic of people who pirate the most (males, 16-24, living in urban areas) has been and (despite piracy) continues to be the demographic who gives the motion picture and music industry the largest share of revenue. Doesn't it make more sense to be passive about media piracy, if it means that the people doing it will in turn spend money on concert tickets, band merchandise, Star Wars toys, or a special edition DVD to add to the collection or just to hear the commentary track?
So the question is, should the US continue to pass and enforce these Orwellian copyright laws, alienating their best customers, looking sleazy and greedy while trying to squeeze every penny out of Ernest Goes to Camp; or should we rethink what copyright means, what intellectual property should be defined as, and what level of a free exchange of information does a free society really need to feed its cultural appetite?
People call The Pirate Bay many things, from malicious saboteur to petty thug to divine salvation. This is what The Pirate Bay is meant to be, according to the words of one of its co-founders:
"For quite long now we've been involved in this free speech issue. This is a direct extension of that. The Pirate Bay is a sort of organized civil disobedience, to force a change in the current copyright laws." -- Gottfrid Svartholm (anakata)
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