Piracy, Again

First of all, and once again, apologies to my readers for the lack of fresh content. If it's any consolation, I have one e-friend averaging a post a month, another who hasn't posted at all in eight months, and another blog I follow that's been silent for well over a year now. Two of the three tweet pretty much constantly. I have tried Twitter--I've had an account for over a year now--and I don't understand the appeal at all. My thoughts resist being truncated into 140-character sound bites and those that don't go on my Facebook wall anyway...so what exactly is the point?

Anyway. if you read the above thinking what a weirdo, you probably should bail now.

The Reddit thread concerned the ludicrous shipping/handling charges that U.S. companies inflict on Canadian customers. I mentioned the vast discrepancy between the Amazon.com price for Season 1 of Game of Thrones and the Amazon.ca price...then detailed how I got around that. I sent a money order for the U.S. cost plus five bucks to my friend in California...who ordered the thing and mailed it to me. I saved about twenty bucks.

Reddit has a little orange-red envelope that lights up when you get a reply to your post. Within seconds, that envelope lit up, I clicked it, and found this: "cost on TPB: $0."

TPB, for those of you not up on your TLAs (three letter acronyms) is The Pirate Bay.

And so I answered my informer. "If something is worthless, why do you have it?"

He didn't understand. I rephrased the question.

Why would you want something that isn't worth paying for? I dislike the value of something being doubled just because I live on one side of an arbitrary line. But I really enjoyed Game of Thrones and if I were to assign a value to it, it wouldn't be zero dollars. 

Response:

 You have a gaping disconnect in logic there. Just because I don't wanna pay for it doesn't mean it's not worth paying for. GoT is a great show, it's definitely worth more than nothing, but I'm not gonna pay for it if I can get it for free. Simple as that. If there was a way that you could get a Ferrari for free (with no consequence and the equivalent ease of torrenting a file), would you do it? I know I would.

Would I get a Ferrari for free?

Assuming I drove, and had some use for a Ferrari in a country where it would rust out after a year and I couldn't drive it legally anywhere past second gear...I'd be wondering what mechanism I was using to get this free Ferrari, how much the people who made it were paid (would you want a car made by people working for peanuts, let alone nothing?) I guess the short answer is no, I wouldn't want a free Ferrari.

I sat there in the wake of writing this, thinking to myself you just turned down a free Ferrari. I checked and rechecked the thought process that led to that surprising conclusion, and eventually straightened up and said yup, I just turned down a free Ferrari.


For the record, I do, on occasion, pirate things. I will resort to piracy when the legitimate purveyor of content doesn't want my money. In the case of a record album, I will make this assumption if, for example, iTunes--the largest seller of music in the world--does not stock it.

I have also pirated many an album on a trial basis, as it were: the equivalent of taking it out of the library. If I don't like the album after a couple of listens, it gets deleted. If I do like the album enough to keep it, I buy it.

I do this because I am a writer and composer and I really like the idea of writers and composers being compensated for their skullsweat. Now, that said, I share with the most ardent pirate a complete and utter contempt for the middlemen who are desperately trying to cling to obsolete business models. I would just as soon reward an author or composer directly. I believe that this is eventually going to be commonplace, but right now it's very rare, and agencies like the RIAA and MPAA are fighting it like crazy. I get that nobody likes to be rendered irrelevant, but that's technology for you. We don't lament the loss of chandlers and smiths nowadays.

I can certainly understand trying to find as good a deal as possible on whatever you're buying. But for me, at least, that doesn't extend to free.