Patrick Chen
Future Forecast: Online Piracy
Online piracy is a topic that our increasingly digital society has been wrestling with for some time and I believe will eventually change the way all information is distributed throughout our society. Piracy of intellectual property and the prosecution of said piracy have been around for decades, however online piracy has only reached the mainstream population in the last decade. Every since the advent of Napster, online piracy has become a society wide phenom that has already changed the lives of millions of people. Every type of music, many movies, and an increasing number of books are available to anyone with a minimum of technical skills. For the first time since the age of the ravaging Norse, piracy has become one of the unifying activities of our society. Its rapid growth and unpredictable permutations have shaken the pillars of Intellectual Property Theory as we know it.
While some would trace the roots of online piracy to the creation of the MP3, the digital format that allowed the flawlessly copying of CD tracks, or of Winamp, one of the first and most popular MP3 playing programs, the advent of Napster in June of 1999 is what really heralded the beginning of this piratical onslaught for the masses. Much like the Crusades of the Middle Ages, once the elite (college kids and hackers) raised the banner the less technically-inclined peasants soon became the bulk of the movement. Napster’s design was simple in that it catalogued user’s music collections and then facilitated the downloading of this material. In other words, users would search the Napster database for a particular song and Napster would match your search to files on other user’s computers. It would then help you to connect to that user’s computer and download the file. In this way every song that was made available to Napster was available to everyone in the network. This centralized system was ultimately the downfall of Napster and its modus operandi. Since it overtly facilitated the distribution of “pirated” files it was successfully sued by a group of Music companies and musicians stopping it from allowing the free distribution of material. Luckily for all those people who were hooked on free music, a new, decentralized piracy paradigm was born in the ashes of Napster. P2P programs like BearShare, KaZaa, Morpheus, and a slew of others allow users to query other users directly for file availability and when a match is found that user downloads directly from the found user. This process is demonstrated quite well by a couple of flash movies produced by a man named Yong Lee of Honeywell International:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ygl/P2P/p2p_flash.html
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ygl/P2P/gnutella_flash.html).
Because of the decentralized nature of this new method of
piracy, regulation of such activities has become increasingly difficult. Because companies such as Bearshare or
Gnutella merely provide software rather than actually facilitate piracy and
since the software is simple enough to be easily copied, opponents of online
piracy have shifted their focus towards discouraging individuals. An example of this was when the
But what is the real damage done by
this online piracy? Unlike piracy of any
other type, the kind of media piracy that users of Gnutella and Bearshare
perpetrate is not the theft of any physical object or the theft of an idea for
profit. Damages are calculated based on
assumptions of lost revenues. Does
downloading a song from the internet mean that you won’t buy the CD for $18? Would you have bought it if you hadn’t been
able to download a song? Questions such
as these have cast doubt on the true nature of piracy’s cost. An interesting article by Tim O’Reilly, a
publisher of technical books, voices a different theory (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html). Mr. O’Reilly posits that one could view online piracy as a
kind of progressive tax on mainstream media.
Among other things, he points out that while piracy may put a slight dent into the profits of very popular acts such as
a Britney Spears or Metallica, it greatly profits obscure musicians who have a
heightened potential for exposure. Therefore
we could think of piracy as a progressive tax that in the long run benefits the
entire industry. I find these ideas very
interesting, but feel that in the end this argument is not very important. With the new decentralized P2P model of
online piracy and the less than concrete moral implications for individuals, I
don’t feel that online piracy can be shut down nor do I see much of a movement
among users to voluntarily quit.
So what
does the future hold for piracy? I believe that we are experiencing the dawning
days of an evolution in information distribution. Due to the physical constraints of distributing
books, movies, and CDs, media companies heavily promote only those products
that they feel are right for mass consumption or that will be popular. Bookstores can only hold so many books and
radio stations can only play so many songs.
But in this new environment where file delivery can literally be at a
touch of a button and as bandwidth standards and file storage norms increase,
media distribution has the potential to change dramatically. In the future I propose that rather than
develop just a few mega star artists with huge promotion budgets, the music
industry will have to spread their efforts over a much larger spectrum of
artists. The shift should be from
companies that push music to companies that sell CDs of music already
available. As I mentioned above, the
radio can only play only so many songs which is the original reason for
spending so much money on promoting a select few musicians. What does this crazy and slightly socialist
vision of the future mean for the music business? I would imagine that it would become more
like the publishing industry which spends most of its time developing and
scouting artists rather than promoting them.
Whatever happens I’m certain of one thing, Pandora’s Box has been opened
and there is no closing it. Piracy will
not stop, so the only question is how the media industry will adapt to this new
atmosphere of file sharing