Morals and Online Piracy

Usually when I write this blog every week, I have the general idea in my head of what I will write about for at least 2-4 days before I sit down and write it. I actually had the idea for writing about online piracy for at least a month now, but I thought because of other more pressing things coming up, that I should just wait until nothing more topical pops in my head before I write about the illegal downloads of various media on the internet. When I finally found myself sitting down and starting to write, I found myself in a moral quandary. I could write about how I think piracy is bad, and how you shouldn’t do it, but the more thought I put into it, the more pointless it seemed.

Take for example, the idea that piracy is stealing, the problem there is that online piracy violates the key reasoning of why people think stealing is wrong; that the object being stolen is coming at a loss of both the owner of what is stolen and to people wanting to buy it, but can’t now because it was stolen. With online piracy of digital items, neither is really true; the only thing someone steals when they are stealing a music file, video, or whatever, is the potential money that person could of spent if they were to pay for it. On one hand, there is a potential money loss, but on the other hand, having a person watching the media is potentially more profitable than if they were not going to spend any time experiencing it at all. So, in the end, if the money is the only thing really being lost in online piracy, is it then morally okay if the person doing the piracy then pays for something from that same owner based on the thing they pirated?

I personally don’t think it is moral, but I also honestly think that people who are heavily into online piracy are cheating themselves. They are spending their time with something they don’t like enough to shell out the money for. I understand that there are some people who just don’t have the money to afford media, but to then waste your time with something that the owner does not want available to you (unintentionally or not) when there are plenty of people who are willing to give out their stuff for free (or at least at “name your own price”) is ludicrous to me. Sure, maybe a big movie blockbuster like “Battleship,” at 10 bucks a ticket, is too expensive, but to then download it instead of supporting some movie that is cheaper is a lose-lose situation. The owner loses because of the loss of potential money, and the downloader loses because they spent time watching something that they didn’t care enough to pay for in the first place.

This paradigm of “don’t waste time if you can’t waste money” does become a bit murky though when it comes to things that people can not normally buy anymore. For example, I can’t buy the mono version of “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band” anymore, but I can get it if I hunt down and pay a huge premium for the entire Beatles catalog. Even worse, what about all those things that are only being preserved by online piracy? There are so much media that is going to be lost to the annuals of time if left to the efforts of their owners. Can people honestly say that with the knowledge of the history of an artist like Van Gogh (who was not considered a painting genius until after his death) that there shouldn’t be an effort from people to not let various music, videos, games, and whatever else die just because their fans cared more about them than the owners ever did?

And that is why I couldn’t just write a didactic “piracy is wrong!” blog. I don’t pirate things, but that is because I am usually too busy with the things I already have (and not having a ton of free time due to work and whatnot helps). I can’t blame people for downloading things, but I can blame them for not supporting those things they love, I suppose. I just wish that companies and owners of these properties that many people love would be more embracing of the people who love them, and stop setting up programs and rules that seem to both punish their consumers and the pirates equally. Until that happens, just remember you always have free blogs from people who really care about your readership (like mine! well, that is until I can figure out how I can monetize this thing, haha! just kidding!)(or am I???)(naw, just kidding).