The New York Times recently published a profile of a rather dreadful person who made a living by effecting the theft of movies and TV shows. For her crimes, she went to prison. That's good! I wish she'd gone away a bit longer than 16 months, but whatever. But it doesn't really matter. Because entertainment theft is now a way of life for my cohort. And that's never going to change.
From the Times:
Even if it were possible to shut down every illegal site tomorrow, new ones would surely pop up. The demand is there. One study, by the American Assembly at Columbia University, found that 70 percent of young adults between 18 and 29 had copied or downloaded music or video free and almost 30 percent got most of their collections that way. The pervasive cultural norm, especially among younger people, is that illegal downloading, at least when it involves material from big corporations, is no big deal. Andrés Monroy-Hernández, a social computing researcher at Microsoft Research, studied attitudes around ownership on collaborative, user-generated websites. He found that young Internet users became angry when peers used their works without permission, but didn’t see a problem in lifting images from shows or movies for use in their own work. ...
To this day, [the terrible woman who went to prison for enabling entertainment theft] argues that the movie business is so big that skimming a little off the top doesn’t hurt anybody. She likes to say that NinjaVideo was operating in a "gray area."
Two thoughts. Thought the first: I always find it amusing when libertarians get worked up about punishing those who violate copyright law,* since most of those who violate copyright law do so with just that justification: "It's, like, the corporations man. Who cares if they have a little less money to pay their fat cat CEOs? Who am I really hurting? If they want me to pay for something they should provide it to me in the manner I want and at a price point I deem appropriate. And if they don't do those things, well, I'm totes justified in taking them for $0." This isn't capitalism. It's economic terrorism.
Thought the second: The cat's out of the bag. The horse is never going back in that barn. [Third cliche about not being able to go back to a previous state.] Millennials feel no compunction about stealing because they have been raised in a world that tells them stealing is, at worst, a victimless crime. Indeed, they think they are the ones being victimized by corporations who want them to, gasp, pay for content by signing up for providers like Netflix or Hulu Plus or Amazon Prime. And they've been enabled by a generation of thinkers who have created the intellectual framework necessary to justify such theft.
The entertainment industry will be fine for a while. Old people don't steal, and there are a small number of people such as myself in my age group who subscribe to the old-fashioned notion that it's wrong to steal creative works from people who worked hard on them and the corporations that provided the funding for them. But, eventually, we're going to reach a tipping point where too many people expect to get all their TV shows and movies for free, leading to a lack of revenue for the producers of said TV shows and movies, leading to far fewer TV shows and movies.
Whatever. Those corporate fat cats don't deserve your money. Screw 'em.
*For the record: I am, generally, in favor of updating copyright law to better protect fair use and help reestablish the concept of the public domain. I'm also, generally, opposed to the sort of laws that would radically disrupt the functioning of the Internet. I just happen to be strongly in favor of, you know, punishing thieves. Spare me the "digitally stealing movies isn't theft because non-rivalry!" argument, please. It is not only pedantic hair-splitting, it is also idiotic.