Arghhh! Pirates
Some say I’m a pirate, but I prefer to call myself a collector. I have been since the late 1990s, when Napster, the first large-scale P2P (peer-to-peer) program, exploded on to the internet to kick-start the digital file-sharing revolution. Today, with a bit of tech-savvy, collectors like me can get their hands on almost any kind of media.
Ten years ago virtual space and download speeds were restrictive, but in 2009 broadband, DVD writers and boggling amounts of storage capacity have allowed for a new era of digital socialism to emerge (even though Telkom is still trying to stall the process to keep internet prices at a premium).
The new frontier is online and pirates are the missionaries spreading the good news of home entertainment. Everybody has a patch of digital real estate – however small – and acquiring more has never been so cheap. Or easy.
It’s worth drawing a distinction between the kind of pirate I am and the kind you see peddling their wares on street corners and in flea markets. I collect – books, music and, now, digital media. I don’t sell copies of films I’ve recorded on a handycam at the back of a cinema.
Obviously I’ll never get around to watching everything, but what I have is collateral to trade with fellow pirates – file-sharing has enabled drive-sharing, and a terabyte is a worthy bounty in anyone’s book.
“But isn’t it illegal?” you might ask. Strictly speaking yes. It is a violation of copyright laws. But with the exponential growth of the technology and its inversely proportional drop in price, those laws are difficult to implement.
It’s even arguable that that the laws are becoming outdated and will need to adapt to the medium so as not to be left behind. Instead of telling us it’s bad to download the screener for James Cameron’s Avatar, there will be sites that upload a high-definition version for a monthly subscription fee.
Already sites such as Showtime allow people to watch episodes the day after they’ve aired, although broadband penetration in South Africa still makes that difficult. Instead of making their major profits from DVD sales they’re cashing in on advertising. And there will always be those obsessive collectors who want the original box set.
“And what about the artists? You’re stealing from them!” Well, yes, we are.
But we’re also stealing from a string of middlemen with obscene profit margins. Hollywood has been milking the movie-going public dry for decades with its mass-produced, half-baked, plot-hole ridden rubbish, and now is the time for a little social redistribution.
Not that pirates are making money – they’re just not paying money for mostly below-par cinema.
But I’m far from alone in this.
To put the exponential growth of piracy into perspective, Forbes.com recently released figures on 2009’s most pirated movies and TV series.
They found the movie Watchmen was pirated 16.9-million times this year; compare that with last year’s most pirated film, the Batman sequel The Dark Knight, which was downloaded between seven and eight million times.
That means more than twice as many pirates got in on the action this year than the year before – and those are only the numbers that can be tracked.
Some artists have even come out in favour of piracy, saying that exposure leads to more sales and lucrative advertising deals. Just look at Katie Perry – she kissed a girl, liked it, made a song and a music video and posted it on YouTube; now she has a multi-million-dollar record deal and she’s hobnobbimg with Paris Hilton and the rest of the bimbo jet set.
Piracy is simply a form of progressive taxation for heightened presence, and most artists, even if they object that they’re losing money because of losers like me, would surely rather be seen than be obscure.
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