GREEN PIRATE

Quite often, a piece is written by someone who intuitively seems to understand that “piracy”, which for the duration of this post will refer to the file-sharing of copyrighted content, is a good thing. Yet, in the face of critics who endeavor to educate people to adopt the view that piracy is wrong, attempts are often made to justify or rationalize piracy against baseless criteria set forth by organizations claiming, falsely, that piracy is theft or somehow immoral. For those of you with minds open enough that you are already exploring this emerging paradigm, let it be known that piracy needs no defense. Piracy is as natural as breathing. Green Pirate hereby proffers that it remains the burden of those who feel that piracy is wrong to convince the world otherwise, as has always been the case.

Inspiration for this post was triggered after reading a recent article by Kyle Wagner whose main point can probably be summed up well enough by saying that the movie industry has their head so far up their asses when it comes to their DVD marketing and release practices that it drives consumers to pirate films. Without any disrespect meant toward Kyle, this is one of many persuasive arguments made in an attempt to justify the massive, growing scale of internet piracy as some collective, conscious reaction to irrational corporate strategy. This is not quite true.

While Green Pirate is also guilty of attempting to refute the inane arguments put forth by the anti-pirate agenda, the underlying essence of this matter has been realized and must be place at the center of focus. Your average pirate does not care all that much about prices, release dates, the poor marketing strategies of the movie or music industry or even the way these industries are willing to roll over innocent elderly women and children in the name of enforcing copyright law. If you’ve been involved in the pirate communities for long enough to become educated and interested in these issues, close your eyes and remember when you first downloaded that torrent file or that song on Napster or whatever it was. Do you remember why you did this? If you’re like most people, the answer is very simply put “Because I could.”

The reason piracy runs rampant and is growing every day is because we can. We have built and continue to run the most efficient method for sharing content in the history of mankind and it’s virtually free to boot. There are some decent services available now, paid and free, but none of them compare to file-sharing when it comes to finding and accessing content. So, you downloaded that song or movie and rejoiced in how convenient and free it was, probably without putting a whole lot of thought into it. Of course you downloaded. After all, you’re not an idiot. Why wouldn’t you?

Enter the fail brigade whose agenda is to re-educate the public about copyright with claims that downloading is somehow bad. It’s not even illegal to download by the way. It’s just “bad” in their opinion. Downloading is “the same as stealing a car” and other such nonsense. There is no need to list the poor arguments that have been presented and continue to be clung to by those who subscribe to the anti-pirate agenda. The only point worth focusing on is that it takes a great deal of effort to coerce people away from piracy and it takes very little effort or thought for someone to download or share content. Why do you think the wealthy and the feds have repeatedly failed to find a solution to the piracy problem? Because it’s not actually a problem.

Until there are valid arguments put forth against piracy which carry more weight than the many benefits provided by file-sharing, there is no reason to ever lend any credence to the irrational smear campaigns against file-sharing by defending your actions against these claims. Your actions are already valid and need no defense.

Sharing is an innate human quality. It is the way of the human species to share. There is no individual reading this now whose entire life is not thoroughly dependent upon the ideas, language, methods, designs and creations of those who came before us. Copyright or not, we benefit from these because of our most valuable tools for survival, our ability to copy, create and share, which predates the existence of copyright by at least 200,000 years.

Beware of anyone who wants to limit your ability to copy, create or share. Any person or organization who seeks to stifle this human right is anti-human and ultimately threatens our welfare.

What then, if you think it is ok to violate our human rights, is your excuse for hindering our ability to thrive, create new industries and prosper? What is your excuse for this when you lose nothing and gain nothing beyond oppressing the rest of us? Those who have exiled themselves from and waged a cold war upon the human race are insignificant and powerless. We are the artists. We are the businesses. We are the government. We are human. We are even you.

We are done justifying our existence to anti-pirates. You anti-pirates are charged with justifying your existence, not us. You adamantly claim you cannot thrive as long as we live. Meanwhile, we will continue with or without your approval.

No force beyond annihilation of the human species will ever change this. You want to end piracy? End the human race. End of story. Which of you would press the button and nuke the planet then, tough guys? Unless you are willing to take it that far, kindly step aside while those of us who would rather create than destroy focus on building a better world that even anti-pirates will benefit from, whether they want to admit it or not.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2012 at 12:49 PM and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.