May 24th, 2012
File sharing is probably piracy. I don’t want to get Santino all worked up, but I say “probably” because there are some important legal and philosophical distinctions involved. What if the peers in the P-2-P know each other and are not anonymous? What about the legal protections for analog copying established by the Audio Home Recording Act? What about the philosophical parallels suggested by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction?
So let’s just side-step all of this by saying that file-sharing is, at best, a legal gray-area and a minor sin and, at worst, a crime and a major sin. Either way, it’s on the wrong side of moral neutrality.
But part of the reason so many people revolt against the piracy argument is that the people making it are often absurd. To wit: RIAA has been embroiled in a lawsuit with file-sharing service Limewire for several years. RIAA has now announced how much they seek in damages. The number?
That’s more money than the recording agency, collectively, has made since the invention of audio recording. The wealth of the entire world is estimated at $60 trillion, meaning that RIAA is asking a court to award them 28 percent of all the money on the planet to make them whole.
No wonder people are so willing to downplay the problems inherent in file-sharing. What jury would convict a petty thief caught ripping off a mafia don?
Update: Galley Friend A.W. writes that this is all old news:
There’s something odd about that Lime Wire story. Your AV Club news story is based on NME and ComputerWorldstories. The NME story actually just points over to CW. And the CW story . . . is over a year old.
More importantly, the RIAA and Lime Wire eventually settled the whole case, in May 2011, for $105 million.
It’s anyone’s guess why NME and AV Club suddenly resurrected the whole story.
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Apart from legal lexicon it’s not quite right to call movie-swiping piracy, a sense transmitted from the SPA days of computer software protection. Arguably they can be exchanging the pilfered data bits for other goods of value (?) but the number of cyberlocker companies, the blatant enterprising baddies that actually charge a subscription on top of facilitating copyright violation, is relatively manageable through the tax apparatus and civil statutes. I think the sad-sack housewives of Minnesota that the RIAA/MPAA chase after are rather in a different category. Instead of pirates I’d just say “looters” which is still moralistic without being grandiosely criminal-sounding
Peter W. May 24, 2012 at 2:32 pm
The hyperlink for the $17 trillion figure goes to a report that gives the amount of damages sought as $72 trillion, more than the total amount of money in the world.
I was about to say that if that’s accurate then the story here is even more absurd than you indicate, but on reflection I think suing for 28% of all the money in the world is every bit as crazy as suing for 120%.