The Digital Natives: Pirates At Bay (Part Two)

Kyle Bylin, Associate Editor

Napster

Shawn Fanning, being the digital native he was at eighteen, became motivated by his college roommate having difficulties accessing the MP3 files, and spent months writing the code for a program that could provide an easy way to download music.  Upon its release, disintermediation, the cutting out of the middlemen from a supply chain, and screwing over The Record Industry became the norm for those who understood the implications of their actions.  For everyone else, Groundswell, as defined by Li and Bernoff, “A social trend in which people use technologies to get things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.”  In digitally revolutionizing music, what The Record Industry had lost forever is ownership of the customer.

Pirates At Bay

Herein lies the problem:  The Pirate Bay founders aren't just some college students from Boston…

On the grounds of innovation, Fanning brought forth a revolution, whereas The Pirate Bay seeks reform.  The lawsuits filed have only driven more users to the site, which already boasts one million unique visitors a day.  If we've learned anything about founders of The Pirate Bay, it’s that they're an entirely different kind of pirate.  In Alfred's final lesson to Bruce Wayne, he gave a very powerful reasoning as to why The Joker is a different kind of criminal.  Desperately trying to get through to Bruce, he articulates, “Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money.  They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with.  Some men just want to watch the world burn.”  It may be that they don't want the world to burn, but to watch it learn from its mistakes.

• Copyright—“All of us who run the TPB are against the copyright laws and want them to change," said "Brokep," a Pirate Bay operator. "We see it as our duty to spread culture and media. Technology is just a means to doing that."  "We don't want to stop the exchange of culture, we are just saying that the creators have to be paid," said Henrik Pontén, an attorney for Antipiratbyrån. "It is the copyright laws that pay for new games and movies."

• Pirate Party—“It has in many ways been obvious to the public that the anti-piracy lobby is also operating in their own, very doubtful, legal gray zone," said Piratbyrån member Rasmus Fleischer. "They are dependent on the existence of police officers willing to give priority to the hunting of file sharers over real criminality."

• Digital Library—“File sharing is the library of today and they want to take that away from us and make us start paying for every single thing that we go to the model library to get," said Sjöman.  "People have gotten used to that library and if they take the applications away from us they will take away the basic tools that people think are normal."

• Pirate Movement—“We are the new movement for this century," said Sjöman. "We have these views that copyright is hurting the economy and our right to be citizens and express yourself and get information."  "We're also into educating people about the consequences of piracy," Pirate Bay operator Brokep shot back in an e-mail. "We're teaching them how to do it."

Digital Transition

For those of you whom believe the winning of The War on Piracy will result in a cash flow of money from prosecuted and returning consumers that reinstalls the same levels profitability that The Record Industry shared into The Digital Economy you are dead wrong.  Why do you believe that you could've replicated the success of selling the culture that you and the baby boomer generation created together back to them a second time via plastic disc?  You can't create the same success in a digital transition because what you are doing is trying to sell the culture that was created by Digital Natives for Natives, without you, back to them through digital means.  The effectiveness of mass marketing that build the success of the transition between the tape and the compact disc which lead to the thriving of The Record Industry no longer has the same influence over the actions of these generations.

The behavior patterns in music fans have visibly changed in large numbers and sustained, resulting in a social change.  These changes in behavior patterns are seen as a deviance from culturally inherited values of The Record Industry and prosecution is deemed as the only option.  Resulting in a rebellion against established industry, forcing change in the social order called iTunes.  The problem is that you can't reverse engineer the wide scale adaption of new technologies through dominance once social change has occurred.  In trying to stop piracy, The RIAA spread it further by fragmenting the media landscape.  By thinking about the technology first they began chasing something they couldn't keep up with.  Lawsuits against file sharers resulted in the obvious conclusion of piracy behaviors still existing and new services rising to meet those needs.  Without a specific goal in mind, they failed at disrupting file-sharing through lawsuits and continued to burn relationship with their customers.

Read Part One (A Generation of Broken Robots), Part Three (Youth Culture), Part Four (Online Fandom and Community) and Part Five (Conclusions)