In their coverage of the Pirate Bay story on Monday, the Metro included this sentence in isolation: “The music industry currently loses billions every year as a result of music piracy.” It is this kind of misinformed, lazy journalism that keeps the majority of consumers in the dark about copyright and piracy. Like the greedy copyright bigwigs, too many people are simply failing to comprehend that a freely downloaded album or movie does not equate to a lost sale. In fact, in what I would say is most cases; someone who downloads something ‘illegally’ would not necessarily have gone out and paid full-whack for the product if that was their only option.
There is nothing the governments of the world can do to stop people sharing copyright material freely online. Instead, companies need to start offering alternatives to rival the convenience free downloads provide. Imagine this scenario – you want to watch a certain movie one night, or get some new music for a long drive. Do you travel to HMV, pay £12 for a CD or DVD (with most of that money going to anyone but the artist), order from Amazon and wait three days, or do you pop onto Pirate Bay and have it ready to go within the hour? Even iTunes makes the process of buying music far more difficult and inconvenient than it needs to be – locking your legitimately bought files to use with only their own products in Apple’s typically paranoid style.
The Pirate Bay is the most popular ‘BitTorrent’ site in the world – hosting millions of links to freely download any music, movie, video game or software you could ever hope for. Now one of the top 100 visited sites in the world, it is a glorious example of human freedom and sharing. So predictably, along came the High Court to attempt to block UK internet users from accessing the site by June. Exasperatingly, this is the kind of action they and the major label bosses still believe will actually curb piracy and revive the music industry. They are wrong, of course; the following day Pirate Bay revealed plans to change the way it operates to escape this ruling having any effect.
Emerging from these recent debates is the idea that in this digital age we as consumers now hold the power – a few corporate bigwigs can no longer bully and control us into paying over the odds for a product the artist sees a minimal return from. Major music labels are rightly very worried, but their haphazard thought processes in combating piracy are only making things worse.
Throughout society there remains a devastating ignorance on the subject of piracy, thanks largely to consumers being brainwashed by poor journalism such as the Metro’s on Monday. If more people can realise this, and not just assume that breaking copyright law is inherently ‘wrong’, we can speed up this shift in power. It is time to start celebrating freedom, sort out the messy legalities in a mature and reasonable way and stop the corporate bullies’ wallets growing ever fatter.
