Can Digital Piracy be Justified (Part I) ?
An ethical analysis of large-scale internet file-sharing
This is the first of what will hopefully be a multi-part essay on this topic.
In the news this week, the CEO of the popular app Telegram has been arrested in Paris, on multiple charges, among which is complicity in disseminating pirated content (Gupta, 2024).
Digital Piracy is widespread all over the world, and downloads of pirated content accounts for 24% of the global internet bandwidth (Jugovic Spajic, 2024). However, it is relatively more common in Asian and African countries because of economic reasons (Karaganis, 2011). The rates charged for software seem prohibitively expensive for the average software user in African nations. Thus, the levels of software piracy in Africa are typically 80% (Heuler, 2014). This is also true for computer games (Michael, 2017). Interestingly even Asian students who study abroad in places where content is more easily accessible at lower costs (e.g., university licensing schemes) are still found to justify the use of pirated material (Yu, 2013).
High Prices and Poor Service
One common anti-piracy view is that there is no inherent right to digital content. If one is unable to afford access to digital content, then one must simply do without. This argument is particularly effective when discussing the piracy of entertainment content (Advocate Staff, 2014). Then there are those who opt to download pirated content out of sheer frustration stemming from the cumulative effect of various region related restrictions on digital content and payment plans that don’t appear reasonable to them (Mijailovic, 2023). Similarly, there are those who choose to pirate because “publishers have a long history of doing really stupid things to try to curb piracy (CyberCPU Tech, 2023)” such as the Sony Rootkit Scandal of 2005 (Brown, 2015). Along these lines, Hart (2012) lists a few reasons typically used to justify piracy. They mostly come down to problems of pricing and service. He rebuts these reasons with the same principle: if you can’t afford it, that does not justify your stealing it.
How Ordinary People Justify Piracy
Today, widespread digital piracy is practiced by a vast majority of people who are otherwise law-abiding citizens. What is it about the context of the internet that causes such people to act contrary to their normal behaviour? American criminologists David Cressey, Gresham Sykes, and David Matza came up with the Neutralization Theory to explain such behaviour, explaining that individuals who normally subscribe to the moral standards of society but make exceptions in certain matters are able to justify this by redefining such behaviour to make it morally acceptable (Bernard & Mannheim, 1999). This fits in well with the justifications of piracy that are built upon the nature of the internet, such as the argument by Cory Doctrow that since the internet is basically a system that runs on producing copies of digital content, by its very nature, it does not make sense to apply copyright regulations and punitive measures which were developed to regulate physical objects like books (Webb, 2013). Among various possible neutralisation mechanisms, research has shown that the one used most often by pirates in justifying their actions was that of “denial of injury.” In effect, digital piracy is seen as a victimless crime (Cladwell Brown, 2024). The social learning theory can also explain how the unique online cultures that develop on the internet transmit this neutralization to new users (Jennings & Bossler, 2020). Recently, Bowman & Hammer (2022) have theorised that it makes sense to view piracy as a feedback driven reinforcement-based social process rather than as an instance of planned behaviour.
Individualism and Cultural Forces as Drivers of Piracy
Breakey (2018) describes digital pirates as a unique class of individuals who are characterised by being Deliberate, Principled, Self-Interested Lawbreakers. In this category, he identifies five sub-categories of people whom he labels as follows: Takers (who download copyrighted works which they would have otherwise bought, to avoid paying), Samplers (who download stuff which they know they will later buy), Non-Payers (who only download content which they would not have otherwise bought), Effective-payers (who only download copyrighted works they have already paid for – e.g., a DJ who has purchased a licence for music software but allows his staff to install pirated versions of the same software in some of his studio’s systems for the sake of convenience), and Finders (who download works which are otherwise inaccessible). Eisend (2019) points out that the practice of piracy has various cultural drivers like attitudes related to individualism, masculinity and uncertainty (Eisend, 2019). Further, the non-physical nature of digital piracy weakens the psychological association with traditional notions of property theft (Hardy et al., 2013).
Financial Loss and Gain
When it comes to empirical data, there are those who assert that piracy has not impacted the earnings of artists and has rather helped them by giving them publicity they would not have otherwise had (Frosio, 2016). However, there is also the fact that websites that make piracy possible are also business enterprises. They attract investment and generate revenue through ads. Naturally, many creators and legally authorised distributors of content view these pirate outlets as siphoning off the flow of income that would have otherwise come to them. It can be argued that such pirate outlets form what is in effect a parallel economy. Remeikiene et al. (2017) have taken it upon themselves to arrive at a satisfactory definition of a Digital Shadow Economy: “illegal activities, such as digital service provision and sales of goods/services online, when operating exceptionally in digital space, the entities violate the existent legal norms and regulations witha pursuit of illegal mutual interest and material benefits.” A report on the earnings of popular torrent sites, published in 2017 stated that “The 30 largest sites studied that are supported only by ads average $4.4 million annually, with the largest BitTorrent portal sites topping $6 million (A. Brown, 2017).” It is estimated that the film industry faces losses of about $20.5 bn annually due to piracy. These losses to creators become all the more significant if we consider that digital sales has become a mainstream source of income for creators in the post-pandemic era (Urquhart, 2021). Ruen (2021) argues that widespread piracy forces studios to prioritise low-brow entertainment, for the sake of financial survival. Aspiring and novice full-time content creators are the ones most affected by piracy, because they have not yet built up the base of financial security that would have allowed them to endure the loss of some income (Townsened, 2023).
Piracy as an Indicator
Piracy may not be a long-term stable solution, but it does satisfy an immediate need (which can range from entertainment to academic information or software tools that enable downloaders to develop skills that would make them employable) and serves as an indicator that the current system is in some way broken (Lawson, 2017).
(To be continued)
References
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