Do What You Want 'Cause A Pirate is Free

I have on my computer many files in which I would be dishonest in referring to as... legal. Movies, television, music, all these things and more sit on my hard drive. I'm a geek, media is my forte. But then I'm also poor, and the Star Trek: The Next Generation DVD set still runs about three hundred and twenty dollars. It's a conundrum, if I had the money I would be more than willing to purchase it, but I don't. So am I so wrong in simply finding it online?

Well, yes.

I find it interesting how the internet culture, and even mainstream culture has vilified the RIAA and MPAA, who are technically the good guys in this little fight for rights. Here we have the people responsible for producing a product and putting it out to market, and another group of people come by and steal that product... How did the thieves become the good guys? Why are so many people rooting for pirates, why are so many people able to become pirates without any moral dilemma?

It's because the MPAA and RIAA make themselves such easy villains. Here we have two groups of people so willing to punish everyone for the crimes of a few. Vaguely legal DRMs install themselves on your computer without your knowledge, many of these programs are harmful and difficult to remove from your system. Movies in the Theaters have anti-piracy commercials stating how wrong stealing movies is to a group of people who just paid for that movie. DVDs as well have these anti-piracy commercials, unskippable, which never reaches the actual pirates as any decent bootlegger can simply remove that trailer without effort. Both companies severely skew the numbers and state that piracy is hurting the industry a lot more than it is. They sue people for thousands of dollars and throw them in jail for months if not years, and for what? A couple MP3s?

So what is the solution? How can these people in the moral right, stop looking like such villains to us? It's pretty simple, all they need to do is embrace digital distribution. By investing in technology that will help keep their products protected, cut down the price from hard copy distribution, and encourage a system that's easy to use and nearly instant, more people will be willing to purchase this media. The forefront of technology and media is changing rapidly, these people are fighting an archaic battle using intimidation and unfair punishment. By easing back and instead trying to develop new technology instead of protecting the old, their standing in the public eye will greatly shift.

In the end, though, there will always be piracy, and they need to accept that. Most all retailers have what they call a Shrink Quota, an amount of theft they accept and account for. Sure they try to actively keep theft down, but they also know it's impossible to stop. The industry is not losing the money they claim, and the artists are not going broke from piracy. What the companies need to do is simply back off a tiny bit, and continue making the things we actually want to spend money on.

Yo ho.