I dislike digital piracy, but I also respect it. It's an instrumental and useful force that rather subtly demands change in the ways ownership is viewed.
Here's a way of thinking about things that I just came up with:
Content is culture. Shakespeare, the Beatles, the Matrix, you name it. They're forms of culture. Their importance is not so much the actual frames in the Matrix or in the couplets that Shakespeare wrote, but rather in the ideas that they generate: the culture that suffuses and surrounds them. You can say, "To be or not to be" to just about anyone, or remix it and say, "To study or not to study".
That's premise 1.
Premise 2 is that culture cannot be owned. Culture is something that's collectively created, by virtue of a kind of unconditional sharing that happens. Whether it's one-way "Check out this new piece of code I wrote!", or two-way "Hey, I'll lend you my music collection if you let me borrow some of your movies", culture is developed by a community and defines that community. And since I think we can agree that it's silly to say that something as unstable as a community (what, with all its changes in membership) can actually own something (unless it's a corporation, record label, etc.?), thus culture cannot be owned.
Thus, anything that isn't culture-creating can be owned. Or rather, anything that hasn't created a culture can be owned. What digital piracy feels like (though it isn't in many cases) is a reaction to a control on culture. So if you suppress Mickey Mouse from being copied, digital piracy breaks it open and lets people use Mickey Mouse, if illegally.
Differently, many pirates do it because it's interesting and difficult to do it. I certainly can't hack a keygen program: my coding skills are far and away too minimal to even know where to start. But I admire the people who can do it for their ability to do so; their choice to then distribute their hacks to others is also admirable. It's simply when you put everything together: that the system they're breaking happens to be owned and private, that distributing their achievements is aiding and abetting: that it becomes a bad thing.
Imagine if everyone had the skill and knowledge such that the choice to be a pirate or not were meaningful. That's the situation with common copyright infringement, come to think of it: everyone has the capability to copy and paste. Everyone has the ability to rearrange words and letters into imitative forms. That was kinda the job of the town crier, back in the day: distribute a message as widely as possible, imitating it down to the letter.
I guess not all culture is public. There is, for instance, Skull and Bones culture. But there's no right over how culture is distributed, really. If some sneak goes into a fraternity, records everything they're doing, and posts it on the Internet, it's not a crime, other than trespassing on private property. The actual film isn't criminal.
Just thinking out loud. I've had years to mull over this, and I still don't have a solid argument either way.
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