Pirates of the music scene (M6.1)

When I was a teenager music was a huge part of my life. I played bass guitar in a punk/new wave band and saved all my money to buy 45 RPM singles (if you don’t know what those are I probably don’t have the patience to explain it to you at my age). Record shops were a favourite hang out and unwrapping the latest vinyl masterpiece from one of my beloved recording artists before placing it on the turntable was a moment to savour.

Fast forward 30 years later and I can’t think of the last time I paid for music outside of a satellite radio subscription or an iTunes download for my young daughter. CDs were something I stopped buying in the ’90s (I did belong to the Columbia House CD Club) and music seemed to be everywhere on the internet.

Like many others I was turned on to file sharing sites and the incredible appeal of free music from every genre. I didn’t sample the services of Napster like many others, but I did experiment with Limewire. At first I was thrilled to be able to download some long lost classics from the ’80s that had escaped my music library, but the more I thought about what I was doing and heard the complaints of the music industry I realized it was wrong.

Certainly this was a brave new world with people freely sharing their music collections with other music lovers. As Bradley (2006) notes, this marriage of computer hackers and music aficionados was a match made in heaven, but there was a price being paid for all those free tracks. Most notably the artists themselves, who tend to get the smallest piece of the royalties pie to begin with, were not getting paid for their creative contribution to our culture.

This I find to be unforgivable, but try telling that to this current generation. They seem to feel that anything that can be accessed on the Internet is free to use, modify and share as they like. As a writer and photographer I have a serious issue with this “culture of piracy” as Condry (2004) labels it. More than once my words or images have been misappropriated without credit on other people’s websites and only a threatening letter can get them taken down.

Steinmetz and Tunnell (2013) suggest that copyright pirates are motivated by a number of factors, including a desire to share “cultural artifacts,” to sample works before purchasing, an inability to afford digital content and a desire to circumvent or undermine copyright laws. I would like to add “sense of entitlement” to that list. The young people I teach give none of the above reasons for stealing images, movies or music, they just do it because they can and because they feel they ought to be able to take whatever they want without paying from the Internet. “If it’s on the internet, isn’t it in the public domain and free to use?” is a question I frequently get asked.

Noted sci fi writer Harlan Ellison has some hilariously profane and pointed rants about this mentality where he likens internet theft to stealing someone’s car, then leaving it on the street for someone else to steal. You can watch the full rant below, but be warned that Harlan does not shy away from using vulgar language to get his point across. The quality of the video is also poor but his message is clear.