The Times: Why we're all pirates at heart
Comment: Why copyright owners are on to a loser. By David Rowan
There is a bustling street market in southeast London where, for a wink and a fiver, a chap by the name of Tel will gladly update your CD collection with the latest chart hits. For a tenner, he can supply the latest computer games - Metal Gear Solid 2 should be in any day now -and, if you're looking for schmutters, he always has a good price on Versace jeans or Louis Vuitton bags. The goods might not be entirely kosher, of course, but Tel's clients never seem to mind. "Who needs Harrods," he says, "when you've got fakes as good as these?"
The crowds of respectable middle-class professionals willing to boost Tel's (presumably undeclared) income suggest that the pirate economy is doing rather well in Britain. From the songs we download from unlicensed websites to the fake Gucci sunglasses we wear on the beach, we are a nation at ease with cheating the system.
The only surprising thing about this week's row over pirated TV smartcards is why anyone should be shocked that so many unlawful smartcards are in circulation. The truth is that the average consumer today has no moral compunction about beating the system. We are, it seems, all pirates now. Most of us have "borrowed" a friend's computer software for our own use, or photocopied one too many pages in a library book, with the full knowledge that, technically, we are breaking the rules. Why should we worry if we are unlikely to get caught? Indeed, for even the most respectable of us, there may be an added thrill in temporarily living in the underworld -even if that means only underpaying for a train ticket, or claiming mileage expenses for a trip that never took place.
In a world increasingly dominated by faceless multinational corporations, we are rather relieved when some enterprising young David manages to put one over on the Goliaths - even if that means breaking the law. Who would sympathise with America's over-fed music-industry executives trying to shut down Sean Fanning's Napster website simply to defend their vast royalties? Who wouldn't side with Jon Johansen, a 19-year-old Norwegian charged with the crime of writing software that can unscramble the restrictions on how you watch DVDs?
It is no coincidence that the Internet was the means by which pirated smartcard source cards were allegedly made available as claimed in the case being brought by CanalPlus, the French television company, against NDS, the British-based technology firm which is 79 per cent owned by The News Corporation, parent company of The Times.
The Internet can make a pirate of any of us, simply by typing a few simple key strokes into a search engine. Go to Google and type "warez" - the key term for pirated software - and you have no fewer than 2,460,000 pages to choose from. And, boy, what choice we naughty consumers have. Take illegally distributed films: according to Viant, a research firm, more than 300,000 pirated movies are downloaded from the Net every day. It took me only 30 seconds last night to find pirated copies of Lord of the Rings, Monsters Inc and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
I made my excuses and left, of course. But, human nature being what it is, sooner or later selfishness is going to dominate my inherent sense of lawfulness. When the UK software industry warns that it loses £3 billion to pirates each year, I'm afraid my first thought is not for the jobs at risk or the supposed links between terrorist groups and unlawful software sales. It is for the £400 they are asking if I want to use Windows XP, or the £40 it will cost me to try a mediocre video game.
Similarly, when the Recording Industry Association of America claims that CD sales fell by 10 per cent last year because of Internet piracy, my instinctive response is to wonder why they charge so much for them in the first place.
Face it: we are all, by Hobbesian instinct, merely self-serving opportunists out to protect our personal interests. However ethical our behaviour in public, most of us would take a short-cut in private if we thought we could get away with it -which, most of the time, we can.
That is very bad news for the copyright owners of digital entertainment. Just don't say that The Times told you so.
(The Times, March 14, 2002)
There is a bustling street market in southeast London where, for a wink and a fiver, a chap by the name of Tel will gladly update your CD collection with the latest chart hits. For a tenner, he can supply the latest computer games - Metal Gear Solid 2 should be in any day now -and, if you're looking for schmutters, he always has a good price on Versace jeans or Louis Vuitton bags. The goods might not be entirely kosher, of course, but Tel's clients never seem to mind. "Who needs Harrods," he says, "when you've got fakes as good as these?"
The crowds of respectable middle-class professionals willing to boost Tel's (presumably undeclared) income suggest that the pirate economy is doing rather well in Britain. From the songs we download from unlicensed websites to the fake Gucci sunglasses we wear on the beach, we are a nation at ease with cheating the system.
The only surprising thing about this week's row over pirated TV smartcards is why anyone should be shocked that so many unlawful smartcards are in circulation. The truth is that the average consumer today has no moral compunction about beating the system. We are, it seems, all pirates now. Most of us have "borrowed" a friend's computer software for our own use, or photocopied one too many pages in a library book, with the full knowledge that, technically, we are breaking the rules. Why should we worry if we are unlikely to get caught? Indeed, for even the most respectable of us, there may be an added thrill in temporarily living in the underworld -even if that means only underpaying for a train ticket, or claiming mileage expenses for a trip that never took place.
In a world increasingly dominated by faceless multinational corporations, we are rather relieved when some enterprising young David manages to put one over on the Goliaths - even if that means breaking the law. Who would sympathise with America's over-fed music-industry executives trying to shut down Sean Fanning's Napster website simply to defend their vast royalties? Who wouldn't side with Jon Johansen, a 19-year-old Norwegian charged with the crime of writing software that can unscramble the restrictions on how you watch DVDs?
It is no coincidence that the Internet was the means by which pirated smartcard source cards were allegedly made available as claimed in the case being brought by CanalPlus, the French television company, against NDS, the British-based technology firm which is 79 per cent owned by The News Corporation, parent company of The Times.
The Internet can make a pirate of any of us, simply by typing a few simple key strokes into a search engine. Go to Google and type "warez" - the key term for pirated software - and you have no fewer than 2,460,000 pages to choose from. And, boy, what choice we naughty consumers have. Take illegally distributed films: according to Viant, a research firm, more than 300,000 pirated movies are downloaded from the Net every day. It took me only 30 seconds last night to find pirated copies of Lord of the Rings, Monsters Inc and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
I made my excuses and left, of course. But, human nature being what it is, sooner or later selfishness is going to dominate my inherent sense of lawfulness. When the UK software industry warns that it loses £3 billion to pirates each year, I'm afraid my first thought is not for the jobs at risk or the supposed links between terrorist groups and unlawful software sales. It is for the £400 they are asking if I want to use Windows XP, or the £40 it will cost me to try a mediocre video game.
Similarly, when the Recording Industry Association of America claims that CD sales fell by 10 per cent last year because of Internet piracy, my instinctive response is to wonder why they charge so much for them in the first place.
Face it: we are all, by Hobbesian instinct, merely self-serving opportunists out to protect our personal interests. However ethical our behaviour in public, most of us would take a short-cut in private if we thought we could get away with it -which, most of the time, we can.
That is very bad news for the copyright owners of digital entertainment. Just don't say that The Times told you so.
(The Times, March 14, 2002)
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