I know the term “piracy” can be something people take different views and opinions on, so let me introduce the topic in a way I see best fit. Piracy can be defined as the unauthorized use of one’s intellectual property that they have the exclusive rights to due to copyright law. It’s a mouth-full right? Well, let’s see if I can break it down a bit more.
I’ll start off with unauthorized, meaning that the rightful owner does not give permission for the use of their product. This brings us to intellectual property, which is the intangible product the owner claims. Someone may exclusively own these intangible objects by filing for a copyright that the law can recognize as your creation. This is basically how musicians, writers and producers are able to take credit for their work. Alright, I know this all may be very trivial to hear.
The main message I wanted to get across is the unauthorized use part. I find this part interesting since the term describes not being allowed to have the product, but it is not considered theft. Unlike those fearsome pirates you see in the movies that steal all that ‘booty’ from other ships, piracy is the act of copying and keeping something that they did not rightfully pay for. Both parties still have the same product at the end.
The peoples rant
It may already seem like I have a bias opinion on this subject, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t. I think we would all have the same bias towards it since we benefit most from not having these new piracy laws like SOPA and PIPA taking away our free stuff. We have been able to thrive for so long with our ‘free Internet’ that this new threat is leaving us angry and confused by the changes.
But who can blame us? When we find out that something we’ve used every day for free for so long is going to be another thing we have to use our paycheck for, it’s just natural to be overwhelmed by upset emotions and fearful of the change. This new change has the possibility of making us spend a lot more money on the things we saw as simple parts of our lives. Our music, movies, books and anything else downloadable will just be another product to buy and use.
And why is this all happening now? I remember hearing about how in the 80s and 90s high school kids would make ‘mixtapes’ for their crushes and give it to them as a gift. Is this not an early form of piracy? When reading an article by Matthew Yglesias, I found a great quote that I believe is a perfect way to describe the situation of Internet piracy. “Online piracy is like fouling in basketball. You want to penalize it to prevent it from getting out of control, but any effort to actually eliminate it would be a cure much worse than the disease.”
Piracy ain’t all that bad!
There are actually some significant issues that may arise from cracking down on piracy laws. For one, piracy is something we all do almost every day and if it comes to the point that we have to pay for all of our transactions, it may have an impact on the communities standard of living. People will have to put even more money aside to be able to appreciate their everyday hobbies and may have to give up other areas of their life to afford it.
Also, if people now have to spend money on things they would usually download, it may cause them to no longer contribute as much as they used to on society, like at their local food market or at community events. According to an article, most people who download free stuff off the Internet would probably not buy the product in real life anyways. They chose to download a downgraded version of the real product over buying it in person for a reason. They are not able to justify using their hard earned money on a product that they will most likely only use a couple times. In this sense, the owner of the copyright isn’t really losing out on profits as much as they are losing out on reputation.
Personally, I know most musicians, directors, writers, and producers by downloading their work and forming my opinion. If I had to buy all of their stuff, I wouldn’t know if it was any good and would most likely ignore it all together.
They do have a point…
So far this blog has been filed with the opinion of a regular citizen, which will most likely be in favour of not having these new piracy laws crack down on us. But if we take a moment to think about it, the government’s position on this isn’t all that crazy. It actually makes a lot of sense to try to reduce one of the most common crimes.
Of course I may kick myself later for saying this, but I’m not surprised or even that angry about this new development. Even when I was younger I was able to see the problem with piracy on the Internet. It has been a problem brought up, jokingly, a lot in the past on TV shows, movies or even on the Internet itself. My opinion on all of this will probably change if the piracy laws go into full force and take away my ability to watch or listen to anything I want, but for the mean time I can see their position on the situation.
Overall, it can be good to have piracy laws. Piracy laws are put into place so that the rightful owners of copyrights can be appropriately compensated for the hard work they put in to create their art. It may seem absurd to some of us, but we need piracy laws in place to help protect the inventors. If we treated patent laws or trademark laws the same way as we treat copyright laws, our society’s economic market would be in shambles and no one would be safe to introduce their product to the world.
Take a quick look at this if your having a hard time picking sides.