When are you allowed to pirate something?
These days, I rarely pirate anything at all. I subscribe to Spotify and Amazon Prime, and I pay the BBC TV Licence Fee. I buy all my books, apps, and games from Apple and Amazon; these are all unimaginably affordable compared to just a couple of decades ago, when a Nintendo 64 game easily cost £80/$130 in today’s money.
I usually see movies at the cinema but will occasionally buy blurays if it’s something special (plus I get screeners from BAFTA); and because I don’t watch much TV any more, I can get by with intermittent subscriptions to Netflix for the purposes of binge-watching Parks and Rec or similar.
That leaves one major exception: US TV shows that aren’t on Netflix or Amazon Instant Video. I believe the only way of legally watching shows like Game of Thrones, Mad Men, The Walking Dead, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, The Flash, True Detective, etc., in a timely fashion in the UK is by subscribing to Sky, who have bought up the rights to the most popular US shows. Sky is not cheap, especially if you’re only using it to watch literally one or two series a week.
In the absence of any way to buy the episodes outright via Apple or Amazon, I download a couple of shows a week. To assuage my guilt, I try to buy the shows when they finally go on sale in the UK. I suppose I could be more patient and just wait, but we live in a global village these days and I like to understand what my friends in the US are talking about when it comes to popular culture.
Things were different when I was a teenager and at university. There was no Spotify or Netflix, no Amazon Prime or iTunes TV Store. I also didn’t have much money. Accordingly, I pirated pretty much everything other than apps and games, which were a hassle to deal with.
Most of the stuff was poor quality such I’ve since deleted the files or obtained legal copies; but that doesn’t fix everything. I don’t regard piracy as a particularly bad sin – digital content is non-rivalrous and so the concept of ‘theft’ doesn’t apply – but I do think it shows wilful ignorance at best, and contempt at worst, towards artists.
In the olden days (90s and 2000s), you could attempt to justify piracy by claiming – somewhat truthfully – that only a tiny percentage of the sale price actually made it back to the artist. Putting aside the way this devalues the contribution of all the non-artists involved and the fact that even a tiny percentage is better than zero, the fact is that marketplaces like Steam, iTunes, and Amazon provide many artists with substantially higher cuts, from 35% to 70% and beyond. It’s much less palatable to advocate piracy when there’s no question you’re harming the artist financially.
The other argument was that a lot of desirable content was DRMed or not available in certain regions or on certain platforms. That is still the case for a few things including my beloved TV shows, but it’s much less common. As for DRM, it’s effectively vanished from purchased music, and the rise of tightly-integrated digital ecosystems owned by Apple, Amazon, and Google has taken the sting out of DRMed apps and video, for better or worse. I don’t like books being DRMed, but that’s not a good enough excuse for me to not buy them. Having said that, I feel absolutely no guilt in downloading un-DRMed versions of content I’ve already bought – not for sending to friends, but for consuming on incompatible ecosystems.
Today, I atone for the piratical sins of my youth by supporting new artists on Kickstarter. Every single penny counts when you’re starting out, so I like to pay things forward.
Update: @simonth reminds me that Agents of SHIELD is on Channel 4, albeit a few episodes behind.
mssv + Have You Played 