Reading 13: Piracy

“The ‘anti-circumvention’ provisions of the DMCA [discourage] copyright ‘pirates’ from defeating DRM and other content access or copy restrictions on copyrighted works” (EFF). More specifically, “the DMCA makes it a crime to circumvent technological access controls. Breaking any type of ‘digital lock,’ no matter how weak, is considered a crime, even if you own the device and aren’t violating copyright otherwise” (Hoffman). Essentially, DMCA prevents you from breaking security measures that are in place in order to discourage you from illegally copying and accessing content. The safe harbor provisions of the DMCA are in place to protect service providers from being liable for copyright crimes committed by their users. For example, “if a user uploads a copyrighted video to YouTube, posts a copyrighted article on Tumblr, places a copyrighted file on Dropbox and shares links publicly, or just hosts a copyright-infringing website with a web hosting provider, the provider of the service — YouTube, Tumblr, Dropbox, or the web host — is exempt from liability.” (Hoffman). In general, I don’t think it’s ethical to illegally download and share copyrighted material because to me, it feels like you’re exploiting the creator of the content by not giving them the credit due. They are essentially robbed of money they “earn” when you do this. However, if you do own it already, then I think it’s more okay to download material because you have given them their credit. As such, I do think you should be allowed to make backup copies or port copies to another platform, but only if they’re for your own use and not distribution. I don’t, however, think that sampling or testing is a good excuse to illegally download and share either. Creators should be able to decide whether or not they want to provide samples of their content (like having music samples when they put their songs on iTunes). There are proper avenues to get content and benefit the creators as well. To me, sampling is like if you took a box of cereal off of the shelf at a grocery store, ate a handful of cereal, decided you didn’t like it, and put the box back. Would you ever just take a game from the store (without paying for it) to “sample it” then put it back when you decided you don’t like it? No, because it’s theft and downloading stuff illegally for the sake of “sampling” is the same. I don’t think I have, but I can’t really remember if I participated in the sharing of copyrighted material. I think so many people participate in this behavior even though it’s against the law because it saves them money, and honestly, it’s more often than not, without much risk since most people don’t get caught and are not punished for it. I certainly think the emergence of services like Netflix and Spotify have helped address the problem of piracy, but I don’t think these services are sufficient since they only cover specific media. I also think it will be hard to completely destroy piracy without making everything free (whether it’s money-wise or free of ads) since oftentimes this is an incentive for pirates. I don’t think the problem of piracy will ever be solved because people will always try to find a way to be as lazy and as stingy as possible when it comes to getting content. Right now, I don’t think piracy is a real problem because its presence has dwindled over the years like how “in 2015, [P2P] was estimated to be 3 percent [of all internet traffic]” (Bailey) while it had been as high as 70% in 2006.