Why do we Pirate?
There as been many times of late where my friends and I have somewhat philosophical discussions on moral and social issues. We talk about god and organized religion, government, and most recently on our views of pirating. There were many good thoughts in the discussion and I agreed with a lot, in particular the views of my friend Mr. White (given a fake name for his protection). Mr. White (W. White personal communication, 2011) believes that pirating (music pirating in particular) is not necessarily a bad thing providing people a service that they want and I'm inclined to agree. Piracy is a means to acquire music in the format one chooses and doesn't necessarily hurt the market.
One might ask what exactly pirating or illegal downloading is. According to the RIAA (The Law 2011), Recording Industry Association of America, piracy is defined as "Making unauthorized copies of copyrighted music.." and that the consequences of pirating are "Criminal charges leaving you with a felony record, accompanied by up to five years in jail and fines up to $250,000." The law however, does not state anything about downloading said illegal mediums, yet people who get caught downloading illegally are being tried in court. How could this be if the law does not state that downloading is illegal? The definition of downloading is the transfer (software, data, character sets, etc.) from a distant to a nearby computer, from a larger to a smaller computer, or from a computer to a peripheral device, which could be applied as the copying and transfer of said mediums. Upon closer consideration of the law described above, people who are caught downloading illegally are considered to be making illegal copies of mediums for their own personal use. Creating copies of the music, movies, games and software that you originally bought is perfectly legal, as long as it is for your personal use (The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998). This being said, the law states that because you make a torrent or a copy of a medium, it doesn't mean that you have the legal right to place the file on a P2P (person to person) site.
If people didn't place their files onto P2P sites, then others would have no way to pirate and this issue wouldn't need delving into. Though I do not believe that anyone should be tried for piracy, if music corporations are so concerned about it, they should be trying to find ways to stop people from placing illegal copies of mediums on P2P networks instead of trying people for using a service that is out there and easy to use. But what are the benefits of downloading off of P2P sites other then getting things for free?
I asked a few of my friends about their thoughts on pirating and all of them had slightly different takes on the subject. Some thought it was wrong, some thought it was a good way to get free stuff, and some thought it was a good way to get exactly what they wanted. The person that I most readily agree with is Mr. White. The question I asked was "Other than the acquisition of free music, are there any reasons why you download illegally?" Mr. White (2011) responded with that the other reason he downloads music illegally is so that he can get it in the format and sound quality that he wants it in. An audio file's bit depth is "the number of bits of information recorded on for each sample" and "corresponds to the resolution of each sample (Audio Bit Depth, 2011)." This means the higher the bit depth, the better the audio quality. A traditional CD has a bit depth of 16 bits and thus the bit depths of digital files are the same. However the music bit rate (amount of bits transmitted or received over time) can change depending on what format the file is in. The traditional CD has a bit rate of roughly 1,000 kbps while music downloaded from iTunes has a bit rate of 256kbps (Bit Rate, 2011). For people who can pick up sound quality easily, this is a substantial loss. The lossless (loss in quality) is due to ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec), a compression method for files that doesn't effectively keep the quality of the music (Chris Lowe personal communication 2011). If you download a song from iTunes or burn a CD onto iTunes the music file is automatically compressed in this format and there is nothing you can do about it. A compression method that people feel works better is called FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), which has a bit rate of anywhere between 400 kbps and 1000 kbps and can maintain a better quality of sound in comparison to ALAC (Colsan 2011). If people who prefer a higher sound quality wish to have this type of file, the easiest way to get it is to download it illegally.
The digital rights management, or DRM poses another problem at perspective buyers of mediums. DRM's are technologies used to prevent the reproduction and distribution of copies of legally purchased music, such as Apple's DRM technology that allows a song only on five machines. However, DRM's are viewed by some as a hindrance to digital music sales (Machado, Sellman and Sinha, 2010) and can actually provoke people into pirating to get DRM free music. Machado et. al state "while fair-use legislation may allow consumers to create a private copy, DRM can take away that ability. In this way, DRM can impose many restrictions that consumers might find unfair or inconsistent with their desired ability to use purchased music." A point also brought up by Cohen (as cited in Machado et. al, 2011) is that some DRMs "have the ability to track individual consumer usage of music files" ignoring data privacy. All this irks people into finding different means of acquiring their music digitally without DRMs, thus potentially hurting the market. Of course DRMs aren't used that much today after iTunes dropped the technology, but they are still present on older music that was purchased when the DRM's were in use.
You might be asking, "If people want higher quality music without DRMs, why don't they buy the CD?" What it really boils down to is cost. The average CD today cost anywhere between $12.99 and $15.99. A fan of a particular band generally will want to have the physical CD and won't find that it's necessary to download it illegally. Someone who isn't sure about a particular band or artist may download illegally to see if they have any interest in them. If a person went out and bought the CD for every band that they wanted to listen to, then they'd be spending a lot of money and putting a lot of faith in that they are actually going to like the CDs. People want to find out if they'll like something before they buy it whether it's clothing, food, music, movies, etc. Radios and online streaming sites do provide the opportunity for a person to listen to the band to see if they are interested, but only to a certain degree (play only certain songs or only does a preview). If the person downloading the music turns out to like the band, then the band or artist can benefit.
At this point you're probably asking, "How can a band benefit from piracy, especially when it's crippling the music industry?" I cannot deny that there has been a large loss of money in record sales due to pirating. According to the RIAA (2011) sales have dropped from $14.6 billion to $7.7 billion between 2004 and 2009. RIAA (2011) also estimates that between 2004 and 2009 roughly 30 billion songs were downloaded illegally, with a loss of about $12.5 billion annually, for a grand total of $375 billion lost in five years. This is a substantial loss, but what isn't mentioned by the RIAA is that this money is mostly remade. The piracy rate claimed by the music industry is 95% and yet only 10% of claimed illegal downloads are considered as a loss (Peratla, 2011). Why is this exactly? Consider this, everything that a band sells, does, or makes, the music industry gets a cut. This includes band merchandise, concerts, and websites. If the person ends up liking a band, they are more inclined to purchase the bands merchandise, future CD's and go to their concerts. In the end the band or artist ends up making back the money that they lost from piracy. Even if someone never buys a single song from an artist or band, they are still putting the word out to there friends, family colleagues, and possibly strangers. The more the word gets out about the band or artist, the more merchandise, concert tickets, and CD's are sold, thus off setting the money lost to piracy.With other mediums, such as computer software, piracy can actually help set industry standards. According to Starmedia (2011), Photoshop is the most downloaded program, with a total of 16,900 downloads. However these downloads attribute to Adobe's success and "helps maintain Adobe's tools as standards (SSRC according to Starmedia)." Because Photoshop is so widely downloaded, it has become the industry standard for photo manipulation, causing the people who feel that they need to be honest, to buy this product and thus beating out Adobe's competitors. If this is all the case, then how can piracy be considered bad?
Piracy is a means to acquire music in the format one chooses and doesn't necessarily hurt the market. Music comes in many formats with many restrictions that irritate consumers into finding alternative means to get exactly what they want easily conveniently and for free. Though it can appear that pirating hurts the market, it does admittedly do a little harm, it can get people to buy more of a particular artist or creator and help set industry standards. Though piracy is frowned upon by most, it should be recognized for what is and what it can do for the entertainment industry a not as a hindrance. However if corporations and artist wish to stop piracy altogether, Gabe Newell (a respected game designer) suggests, "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates (Tim 2011)." I can tell you one thing, until this better service comes out, this pirate will keep on pirating. Ahoy me fellow pirates!