I'm just going to come out and say it: I'm a pirate.
Whether that admission classifies me as a low-level terrorist deserving of indefinite detention coupled with excessive copyright-infringement fines and quite possibly water boarding under the slew of borderline-totalitarian legislation Congress is trying to pass remains to be seen, but for the time being, I'm not going to hide the fact.
Like most people who aren't music industry executives or a congressmen receiving sizable campaign contributions from music industry executives, I'm against SOPA and PIPA. A lot of this has to do with the same caveats everyone who isn't a millionaire septuagenarian has, but a portion of my opposition also has to do with the fact that I don't like paying for digital media, and feel I shouldn't have to pay for digital media.
Notice that I said ‘digital media' – I still willingly and happily pay for physical media (I bought seven new books over the winter break, for instance), but digital media's a different animal. For one thing, electrons don't cost anything, and ideas shouldn't cost anything, so why company X feels the need to charge me money for something that costs next to nothing in physical terms is beyond me.
Admittedly, my position is influenced in part by the fact I favor intellectual abstraction over the practical, and in part because I'm a quasi-socialist who strongly objects to the commodification of art and ideas. For the purposes of this column, though, let's stick to practical arguments.
A lot of the MPAA's pro-SOPA/PIPA rhetoric has to do with protecting the intellectual property of "creative Americans" from "foreign thieves." Aside from dissecting the obvious xenophobic appeal being made here, let's examine just how the entertainment industry (specifically, the music industry, because they're the ones most associated with anti-piracy stuff anyway) compensates these "creative Americans" they rhetorically profess to care so much about.
When all you responsible, contributing members of society go out and buy CDs at your local record store (or, more likely, local corporate chain distributor), the vast majority of the $9.99 you dish out goes to people and entities that are decidedly not the band, most of them the corporate middlemen that digital dissemination has rendered totally redundant. Depending on what sources you look at (and I've looked at quite a few), only about 6 to 15 percent of that $9.99 goes to the band you're professing to support. Divvy that up four or five ways between the band members, and "creative Americans" are left with peanuts.
(Humorous example: as it stands, if you were to walk into an FYE, steal all five studio albums in Mastodon's discography, and mail a $10 bill to the band to be split between the four members, you'd be "supporting" said band infinitely more than if you'd dished out $50 plus to buy said albums legally.)
Now, you might be thinking something along the lines of "well, even ‘peanuts' is better than nothing, you thieving foreign anti-American socialist pirate, you!" at this point, and you're absolutely right. However, you'd also be ignoring the other half of the music business: concerts.
Bands around the board make far more, both proportionally and in absolute terms, from concerts than they do from album sales because concerts don't require the recording, mastering, production, promotion, and distribution services record companies use to justify the massive cut they take from CD sales.
So, even though I "stole" all of Mastodon's albums, because I dished out something like $40 to see them live once (and would have again this past November, if I'd had the chance), I've actually "supported" them far more than if I'd spent even more money legally purchasing their music. What's more, I can safely say I wouldn't have spent that $40 on my concert ticket if I hadn't "stolen" Mastodon's music because I wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to them.
A lot of bands get this paradigm. Mastodon (because I've been using them as an example this whole column) gave away free digital copies of their most recent album The Hunter with the purchase of tour tickets. Electrons are free, after all.
Record companies (and all other entertainment companies, too) also understand this, which is why they're fighting it. Because ultimately, SOPA/PIPA isn't about protecting "creative Americans," it's about protecting a system of corporate middlemen that media editing software, social networking sites, and torrents have rendered all but redundant.
Email: eabenoit@buffalo.edu
