THE THIEVES MINDSET

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THE THIEVES’ MINDSET

With such rampant file copying occurring on and off the Internet, you might wonder why people do it, if they know it’s against the law. Of course, people break the speed limit, cheat on their taxes, and accept bribes for the same reason they might copy files illegally—because it’s a low-risk, high-reward activity.

One reason some people copy files illegally is because they don’t see their activities as harmful. When they copy a CD or give a duplicate to a friend, they don’t see anyone getting hurt in the process. What they don’t see are the copyright owners losing money every time someone copies a CD or DVD instead of buying a legitimate copy (assuming, of course, that they would have bought the pirated CD/DVD in the first place, which is not necessarily the case).

Beyond those who see copying as harmless and innocent, there are many more people who copy CDs and DVDs knowing full well that they’re breaking the law. In some cases, they feel that the law is too restrictive or unfair. After all, if you buy a legitimate copy of a computer program stored on a CD, why shouldn’t you be able to make multiple copies for backup purposes and install that same program on several different computers that you may use at work or at home?

Many people copy DVDs because they believe they have the right to make a backup copy in case their original DVD gets ruined. Some also copy them to get around the DVD region coding.

When manufacturers sell DVDs, they encode them to play only in DVD players within a certain region, such as North America or Europe. So if you buy a DVD in Asia and bring it home to North America, there’s a chance that the DVD won’t play at all. DVD manufacturers claim that regional coding reduces piracy, but customers complain that it hurts them even more. After all, why should someone buy two copies of the same DVD just to watch it on DVD players made by two different countries? So these people see no problem with copying a DVD that they may already own, just to get it to run in a different DVD player.

In the realm of music, people copy CDs for many reasons. Some just want to hear one hit single and won’t spend $18 or more to buy an entire CD just to get the one song they want. Others believe that the recording industry has cheated consumers for years by conspiring to artificially inflate CD prices, so stealing music is a way to get back at the recording industry for all the millions they already stole from their customers.

While many musicians complain that music trading over the Internet cuts into their CD sales and royalties, many others make very little from the sales of a studio CD and instead earn the bulk of their income from concerts and merchandise sales. So to these musicians, swapping music doesn’t steal from them; it steals from the record labels who are already stealing from the musicians anyway.

Older people may have vinyl records and may simply want to hear their favorite albums on their computer or through a portable MP3 player. Because they already bought the album once, they don’t want to buy a second copy on a CD when they could just copy the music off the Internet instead. File sharing is also much more convenient than “burning” a CD from their vinyl album.

Sometimes people copy for more practical reasons: they can’t find what they want on CD or DVD, so they have to resort to scouring the Internet to find the file they want. You can find music by the Rolling Stones or Elvis Presley practically everywhere. But if you want to find music by some obscure 18th-century composer, or ragtime melodies from the turn of the century, you may not be able to buy those songs no matter how much you’re willing to pay. If you can’t buy it, there’s still a chance that you can steal it, and with the Internet’s vast reach, there’s also a good chance someone somewhere will have exactly what you want if you just know where to look.

A small minority of people collect copyrighted files from the Internet just because they can. Such collectors enjoy the thrill of getting the latest Hollywood blockbusters, recording artists’ newest albums, or Microsoft’s latest programs before anyone else has a copy. Such collectors relish the idea of having every song the Beatles ever recorded or every episode of the Star Trek TV series. Collectors rarely profit from their collections. They just enjoy the challenge of gathering the most complete collection possible for their particular sphere of interest.

Another class of file swappers have simply lost respect for copyright because corporations overuse it, stamping blanket copyright notices on anything they produce. Jason Mazzone recently lamented this practice in the Washington D.C.–based newspaper, Legal Times (http://www.legaltimes.biz):

False claims to copyright are everywhere. Copyright belongs to the author of a work and expires 70 years after the author’s death. Yet copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven piano scores, and greeting card versions of Monet’s water lilies. Corporations that sell to libraries microfilmed versions of early newspapers and other documents too old to be copyrighted routinely attach a copyright notice to their products.

You can read the full article by Jason Mazzone, “Too Quick to Copyright,” at http://www.brooklaw.edu/faculty/news/mazzone_legtimes_2003-11-17.pdf.

Countries also continually extend the length of copyright terms, leaving less and less material to fall into the public domain. And when software companies no longer sell software but “licenses” to use the software, many people feel that there’s no longer a way to “own” something legally. So they resort to stealing the files they want from the Internet or their friends.

To save money, many college students swap pirated textbooks that have been electronically scanned. (And some students even get a copy of the test questions that come with the teacher’s manual of a textbook and share those over the Internet as well.) In some countries, textbooks are often unavailable at any price, so piracy may be the only way to get a copy of a particular book.

There’s a final reason why people copy files. It’s easy, and chances are they’ll never be caught. So if everybody’s doing it, why shouldn’t they?

In fact, there’s a good chance that someone will scan this book into a PDF file and pass it around the Internet. While many people may copy this book without ever intending to buy it, a handful of people may be interested and willing to pay for the convenience of reading an actual printed book instead of reading it off a computer screen, so sometimes file sharing can be a free form of advertising as well.

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