You are a pirate

Recently it dawned on me that my needs for pirating have changed greatly since I started doing it, back in the Napster years. Pirating was something that began as a bit of a desire to have digital content such as music, videos, games and general software. As a teenager and eventually a university student, I just wouldn't be able to afford all these things. Once I got a job, and began my career I started to be able to afford things and I also started to feel the need to support things I cared about. I had heard the opinions of some many publishers and musicians that despite losing money from this practice, still supported it.

The first one I can remember, actually came from Fred Durst who always supported music sharing because it is how a lot of his music and the music of his peers even began to gain popularity. At the time I was a musician myself, and I voluntarily placed my music on Napster and similar services, in the hopes that if my music was linked to other popular artists I would be able to get it out. Obviously that didn't work for me in the end. The industry's attitude towards piracy has always been negative, of course because they make less money, however this is clearly an attitude of self interest, and of capitalist greed rather than a true desire to expand the reaches of the art. Also, what's even the point of trying to fight a war that has already been lost. All this pointless effort does is cost millions of dollars, affects greatly the few that actually get sued by these companies and in the end gets them nowhere.

Another great example from the industry for me was Notch, the Swedish game developer responsible for Minecraft. He basically said that he doesn't mind pirating. He made this game that eventually became very successful and the main reason for his success was efficient sharing of his content. Notch said that he prefers that people play an enjoy his game even if it is pirated. Obviously he prefers if people pay for it, but in the end, he would prefer someone playing the game for free than not playing it at all. It obviously gives him great personal satisfaction. Now, to be completely honest, when I first heard of Minecraft I thought "I don't get why this game is good". I was still intriged by it's sudden popularity during the beta days. So I downloaded it in torrent form. I played it for a week or so and decided it was good, so I purchased a license of the beta game. That wasn't the last time I did that either.



In the end, fighting against piracy is futile. Instead intelligent folks like Gaben and the guys behind Netflix decided to use the change in the industry to make money. They have been extremely successful and I gladly pay for their services. I have no problem paying money to support services trying to improve customer experience during a time where so many others are losing money.

Another big change in my downloading practices is that I started to pay money to pirate things. I dislike the idea of anti piracy efforts so much, and the anti privacy policies involved so much, that I rather pay for a third party to provide me with annonymity, than to pay for the media I'm wanting to use, just not enough to pay for it. This has an upside and a downside. On the downside, these anti piracy moves threaten the very essence of the internet. It threatens the greatest advancement in humanity of the last century, which is now the core that moves information, disseminating it over our ever shrinking world. Which means we have to continue to fight to maintain our cybernetic freedom. On the upside, I think this fear produced causes people to be more careful and make them attempt to protect themselves as well as educated themselves. Me, I learned all about networks like Usenet, which is a history lesson as well. I learned about VPNs, and how to hide behind proxies. All very useful information in this age where we are quickly becoming more vulnerable.

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Anyone, just to wrap this post up here is a relevant video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEBbu-wkKrs