Of Piracy And Entitlement

You can’t escape the topic du jour: piracy of copyrighted intellectual property. First, the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) protests and now the take down of MegaUpload. I’ve made it clear that, in its current form, copyright law needs to change and the companies enforcing that law are often doing so to lash out in defense of their dwindling influence. That doesn’t mean, though, that I support wholesale redistribution of copyrighted content for profit. That is what MegaUpload is accused of and, after reading the indictment, I have to agree that they seriously played the game wrong.

In this game, there are two rules: don’t hijack content for your own profit, and don’t taunt the sharks. MegaUpload did both. And they got bitten.

The indictment can be read here: http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/78786408

I’ll summarize it here:

• They were aware of the existence of offending files on their servers.
  
• They had the capability to detect offending files at any time.
  
• They did nothing to prevent the upload of offending files.
  
• DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take-down requests resulted in only the deactivation of a link to an offending file, not the removal of the file itself, allowing other links to the same file to continue to work.
  
• They created for-pay services that specifically capitalized off of copyrighted material.
  
• They offered uploaders rewards for uploading heavily downloaded files, but did not punish them for uploading copyrighted material.
  
• They inserted advertisements in front of streaming copyrighted material.
  
• They willingly and swiftly identified and took down child porn, but not copyrighted material.
  
• They presented the facade of a legitimate media sharing service by manipulating their “top files” listing to only display legal files.
  
• They presented the facade of a personal private online storage service, but only offered such capability to their highest tier of paying customers.
  
• They made no payments to the copyright owners whose content they made money from hosting and streaming.
  
• They copied videos directly from YouTube to effectively create a larger collection of videos.
  
• The management of the site themselves used MegaUpload to upload, download and share copyrighted material.
  

In short, MegaUpload is fucked. Yes, copyright laws are out of date, but they exist and are easy enough to avoid tripping over. MegaUpload, on the other hand, embraced copyright infringement as their bread and butter and did the absolute minimum necessary to appear as if they were a legitimate business. Here are a few things they could have done to avoid the shit they are in now:

• Actually remove the files indicated by DMCA requests.
  
• Not reward users if the file they uploaded was found to violate copyright law.
  
• Use their knowledge of existing offending files to prevent them from being repeatedly uploaded.
  
• Offered to compensate copyright holders.
  

As a website driven by user-submitted content, they would not have been held liable for illegal content uploaded to their servers if they had shown significant concern for the fact that such activity was happening. In actuality, any concern they might have shown was plainly false, as evidenced by their DMCA procedure of deactivating a link to a file rather than removing the file completely. Sure, they wouldn’t have made nearly as much money, but they also wouldn’t be in jail right now.

Now, you might ask what the difference is between MegaUpload and a torrent site like The Pirate Bay. The big difference is that MegaUpload actually hosted offending content on servers that they paid for and made money directly from the viewing and downloading of said content. Torrent sites, on the other hand, simply aggregate information about potentially downloadable files. The files themselves are distributed amongst the anonymous users and never actually hosted in a central location. Torrent sites may make money from advertisements displayed while users browse the listings, but a listing is a mere reference and nothing more. Torrent trackers are a little closer to the action, and they actually facilitate the connection between users sharing their files, but at no point does either the tracker or the torrent listing site actually possess a single byte of copyrighted data.

So here’s my beef: people are playing it off like MegaUpload was the victim of a corrupt government crackdown. It’s as if they feel entitled to unchallenged piracy. They knew they were sticking it to the man by taking part in the parade and they are offended that the cops were waiting for them at the end of the street. I feel like this attitude is absolutely devastating to the otherwise legitimate message that the act of piracy attempts to convey.

Let’s get our story straight here. Piracy exists because the barrier to enjoy copyrighted content is unnecessarily high. It costs too much. It is not easy enough to acquire. It is not available in the formats users desire. It is riddled with boobytraps to restrict our freedom to enjoy it how users want to. Very little of the money users pay actually goes to the creators of the content. Pirated versions present a superior user experience. By pirating content, users are voting for a better, more affordable product, not simply a free product.

What users do NOT want to convey is that they are entitled to free content at the producer’s and distributor’s expense. Further, in order to successfully convey the right message, users must also demonstrate that they are well-informed and respectful of the law, despite not agreeing with it. MegaUpload was not respectful of the laws that they violated and lashing out in revenge for them is tactless, immature and delusional.