Music Piracy: Mass Rape vs. Consensual Sex

I am guilty of music piracy. Or copyright infringement as I guess it's typically described in the legal realm. I am guilty of committing a crime.

Let me describe the specifics.

I pirated music from an early age. For me, that initially meant copying cassette tapes and eventually burning CDs - copying them from friends who gave them to me, hoping I would find this or that band interesting. It was stealing...

Note: there are people who are not lawyers (you'll need to dig, but check out the recurring comments from one of these people in this Lifehacker post) but who will nevertheless insist on calling this "copyright infringement" and not "stealing" - avoid these people like the plague, as they will tend to bring this kind of masturbatory semantic analysis into other conversations. Eventually they'll go away and start a self-righteous and self-stroking blog.

...but it was stealing of a different kind. Specifically, it was social stealing. There was a reason for it: someone, a friend or acquaintence, had formed a bond with this music. They had then begun to think about the music in the context of other people they knew, their likes and dislikes, and to whittle down a list of people with whom they could share this music. The music was intertwined with the social fabric of the participants.

Contrast this with large-scale peer-to-peer sharing. It is possible, with sufficient broadband, to randomly sample a huge variety of music. Quickly, without any social or financial commitment. You don't even need to tell your friend that the band they were so enthusiastic about...well, sucks. The relationship is one-sided. It is talking without listening (well, listening without talking but that just doesn't sound right).

My point is that social stealing is OK (well, it's OK to me, certainly not to the RIAA or their representatives). It helps build communities that will (eventually) engage in purchasing music and merchandise. The item being traded in social stealing is a component of a relationship between two people, a medium of communication. It is not a product. Large-scale file-sharing is exactly the opposite: faceless, an exchange of products given unwillingly and received essentially at random. Even more tragically, because nothing is sacrificed for the music, either financially or socially, the music becomes disposable. The work of months or even years of artist time becomes a three or four minute experience followed by immediate judgement for or against allowing that music to occupy storage space. With so little reflection on the quality of music, is it any wonder that major label releases become more and more homogeneous and that one release sounds so similar to another?

I won't go too deeply into my feelings about the ethics of the whole thing, but I also believe that stealing music anti-socially is just plain wrong. Taking something that has been given a specific value without paying for it is stealing (see the previous link for douchebag refutations of this sentiment). There is no justification for it, even the typical excuses of "I support bands by attending their shows" or "the label is screwing the artist anyway, why should I support them?" In any case, I think that my ethical argument is dead because of the general gluttony of the music-pirating public.

I am hopeful that the future of music will lead to more preference-driven selections rather than peer-to-peer. Automatic generation of "you might also like" lists such as are found on Amazon or with iTunes Genius might be the best replacement for the connections that encourage social stealing. Whether or not people actually purchase what is being suggested, at least there is some element of connection between what we enjoy and what someone or (in the case of preference algorithms) something thinks we might enjoy.

The title of this post relates to a conversation I was having with some friends a while back. I was basically trying to articulate my position (and doing it poorly - the metaphor is not all that great) that social stealing is the music piracy equivalent of a consensual one night stand - possibly successful, possibly not, possibly the beginning of some kind of relationship, a little tawdry but fun. The flip side of this is the comparison of peer-to-peer sharing as mass rape. This was not really such a great comparison and was actually offensive to some people. But my point is that larg-scale file sharing, without a social component, is as destructive, ultimately, to the people consuming (they develop narrow, shallow interests because of the lack of reflection) and the products consumed (made more homogenous to appeal to that narrowing focus and lack of reflection).