Piracy: A Question Of Logic Versus Ethics

The New Oxford American Dictionary classifies "piracy" as 'the unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work'. More popularly, piracy is the act of unofficially and illegally distributing content (be it music, movies, software etc) where the originator of the content does not receive compensation from its sale and consumption. Traditionally, the act of piracy involved a vendor, who sold bootlegged content for much cheaper and even before official release. This practice has evolved into peer-to-peer and file-hosting services as we move into the digital age. The traditional method always involved a tangible revenue stream where the consumer doesn't know where the vendor gets his 'maal' from but there is an exchange of money which beyond the vendor, climbs dark and unknown ladders. The modern method  involves services like RapidShare and HotFile. In general uploaders don’t make money or profits from sharing content, although there are exceptions who do. Most download-happy people get their content from services like BitTorrent where the only expense that's concerning is a potentially whopping internet bill (still ways to get around that too).

Piracy in India is as illegal (falls under the Copyright Act of 1957) as it is rampant. There are multiple reasons for the popularity of piracy. The unavailability or censorship of content in legal streams is a big one. The expense of imported content and the ease of purchasing and availing content through illegal means is another. Even the lack of law enforcement and cracking down on illegal streams is a contributing factor. In a society that isn’t governed by laws, piracy would determine which companies retain their foothold and which companies start failing (as seen in the Sony versus Microsoft case later in this article). However, we have anti-piracy laws because it raises a series of ethical questions.

Piracy affects different industries in different ways. As we break it down by industry, we also discuss reasons for pro and anti piracy for each industry.

The Music Industry
From pirated MP3 CDs available on the street at Rs. 30 a pop to discographies of bands downloaded via torrents or other file-hosting services, you will find hordes of people scouring the net for what they want. And why is this? One could argue that people are cheap, and will take almost anything they can for free, but there's always a counter-argument where this delicate issue is concerned.

An average person's excuse for downloading music off the internet (apart from the fact that it's free) is the availability. The internet has EVERYTHING! From symphonies and old Hindi songs that your grandparents can enjoy to the latest club music and B-sides of bands whose names you will find hard to pronounce, you can find it somewhere or the other.

Another point that works in favour of pro-piracy propagators is the expense. You can download music off the net legally, but the price is usually a deal-breaker. For example, iTunes is the largest digital distributor of music, and they have the most number of licenses worldwide. To buy a song off iTunes costs $ 0.99, which translates roughly into Rs. 45. It would take a ton of money to download an entire discography this way. And then there's the fact that you need to have a credit card to do this. Given the Indian sentiment towards online payments (boo!), the free option is always the better option.  

Something to keep in mind is the way the music industry works. In a lot of countries, the relationship between record companies and artists does not come across as very symbiotic. When a record company is interested in an artist (their R&A have 'discovered' the next star), they put money into the artist for studio time, promotion, concerts and merchandising. This money however, is lent to the artist, and isn't a cost to the studio. The way artists make money is usually a 10% cut from all sales (more from backends if they have really good lawyers). They literally do not get paid for their music unless it sells, and even then, they don't get a major stake. From this 10%, they have to pay the studio back the money the studio put into them. Unless the artist sells an truckload of records, they usually end up taking a bank loan to pay the studio loan back. While this can be seen as a bank-entrepreneur relationship, it's also a game of unfair chances as the risk for artist to have an opportunity is exponentially larger than the risk for the studio 'investing' in an artist. This has resulted in the music industry becoming more about a product than the music. This is the reason people like Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus are mainstream and Rilo Kiley and Bloc Party are virtually unheard of.

This affects the ethics of piracy in a few ways. While one angle is that since none of the money that you would pay for music legitimately is going to the artist anyway, why spend? The counter argument to that is that because of piracy, there aren't enough sales to allow an artist to make enough money from royalties to repay their huge loan.

Sure these arguments hold quite a lot of weight, but at the end of the day, the law is the law. And the law says piracy is wrong. But people will keep downloading stuff of the Internet until someone is made a scapegoat. If you've been following the news lately, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has launched an assault on a number of peer-to-peer users, and is in the process of making an example out of a few of them.

A lot of people will remember the time Napster got sued by big artists like Metallica and Dr. Dre for encouraging piracy. Eventually Napster had to shut down.  But on the other hand, bands like The Offspring completely supported Napster. A lot of people will agree with Holland’s ideology that music is meant to be shared, so why shouldn’t everyone be able to access it.