Piracy

Someone could make a copy of my website and claim it as there own, right now. They could publish posts to it that, word for word, copy my thoughts and ideas. That would be plagiarism, not piracy. I think a lot of people seem to conflate plagiarism and piracy. In my opinion, "piracy" is not a good term for what it has become. It has too much of a negative connotation to it for a perfectly innocent act.

Imagine that you're walking at some kind of large event, say a career fair or festival. There's plenty of people standing at tables handing out free items. There was likely some money put into constructing those items, but there's so many of them at such a low cost that most people just want to get rid of them. I'm talking about items like water bottles, bracelets, fidget spinners, etc. Usually, these items will have some kind of corporate branding on them. It all came at a cost, yet it is free for anyone passing by to take.

I think this is a decent analogy for what piracy is. When someone downloads a piece of media, they are taking a free copy of something that was inexpensive to produce. It is entirely harmless to the creator of that media. However, if that person were to somehow publish that media, claim it as their own, and sell it, that is plagiarism. They are sucking away profit that the original creator would otherwise obtain.

This is the distinction that I have between piracy and plagiarism. I actively participate in piracy. I have a large collection of my favorite media, all obtained thanks to qBittorrent and ProtonVPN. For each piece of media that I download, I seed it so that others may download it as well. This is the balance of mutual respect that all "pirates" obey so that the peer-to-peer nature of the practice can stay alive. Arguably, there is no way any one pirate can be identified for "stealing" anything. It is all just data flowing across the internet.

All of this is entirely justified in the face of streaming platforms' abhorrent pricing and blatant online censorship. Piracy exemplifies what the internet was made for: unlimited access to any form of information at any time, by anyone. It has become impossible to stop the flow information to those with an internet-enabled device. It is within everyone's capability to obtain media at no cost whatsoever. And I haven't even mentioned Anna's Archive.

Anna's Archive is the largest online library ever. College students don't have to pay for books any more. No one does, really. If you have a collection of books, you could probably find a digital version of every single one on that website. It's far more cost efficient to purchase a used e-reader and download books for free, rather than buying a physical copy of each book. Remember, this isn't plagiarism. No one is harming the creator by doing this. This is piracy.

Despite all of this, I still buy physical books some times. I have even started collecting comics. This leads me to believe that we live in a very interesting time in humanity's history. Digitization threatens the materialistic culture that we have evolved into. Humans naturally like to collect things. Digital media and virtual reality, on the other hand, propose a far more efficient way to manage that behavior. Physical things take up space, time, and resources. A digital thing can be transported relatively instantly, copied forever, and only takes electricity. We live in a time when these two paradigms are merged.

For young people, real things are still important, because we were raised by people that held that value. Young people are far more accustomed to technology than their predecessors. We value both physical and digital things. In the years to come, when the line begins to blur, digital things will begin to hold far more value in peoples' lives. Books will become artifacts coveted by the rich. Music tapes will be displayed in (virtual) museums. USB drives will be pixels on a screen. Whether or not this transition benefits us, as humans, will be ours to determine.