Piracy among Digital Natives

Reasons for Piracy

• Saving time & money
  • Digital natives are used to having immediate access to digital media. They aren't familiar with having to go to a record store and buy the latest CD or even having to record on a VCR a favorite show -- they can get the materials almost as quickly as they come out.
• Supply & demand + youth popularity
• Method of self expression
• Curiosity & standing trends
• Weak repercussions
• Online disinhibition effect
• Anonymity

Online Piracy: The Ultimate Generation Gap, 2003

• FOX News report on youth piracy

"The generation before us had to pay for music," said recent college grad Joshua, 24, of New York City. "Now you have no reason to purchase the music or movie in physical form. Everything is digital."

"Kids really don't care," said college freshman Ben, 18, of Upper Nyack, N.Y. "We all copy music and download movies because the chances of them cracking down on us specifically are slim."

"The lawsuits are both futile and counterproductive," said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Not only will they not stop file sharing, but they'll alienate customers."

"We're hopeful we haven't lost this generation," said Bob Kruger, enforcement vice president of the Business Software Alliance, which fights software piracy.

"It makes me feel kind of bad — like, 'oh no, I'm doing something illegal,'" said Melissa, the Florida teen. "I'm probably downloading a little less."

Charismatic Code, Social Norms, and the Emergence of Cooperation on the File-Swapping Networks

• Strahilevitz's analysis of P2P networks

"Virtually everyone who participates in one of the file-swapping networks is breaking the law in the process. Ordinarily, people are unlikely to trust lawbreakers, especially anonymous lawbreakers. Yet a remarkable sense of trust permeates these networks. ... [I]t is possible to observe significant levels of cooperative behavior, very little by way of destructive behavior, and substantial trust among the anonymous users of these networks. Furthermore, the networks have survived and thrived largely because of their users' dogged willingness to engage in unlawful activities."

Charismatic code-- "a technology that presents each member of a community with a distorted picture of his fellow community members by magnifying cooperative behavior and masking uncooperative behavior."

• "the applications harness the actual members of the community to become actors for norm enforcement purposes by magnifying the actions of those who cooperate and masking the actions of those who do not"

• "the applications act as a substitute for the community of actors and enforcers, inculcating in their users those norms most likely to lead to the success and expansion of the networks"

• "the applications act as a substitute for the community of actors and enforcers, inculcating in their users those norms most likely to lead to the success and expansion of the networks"

Distorted image-- (Gnutella network) "Charismatic code is the primary tool in that effort. Because of the way the networks are structured, the actions of those who share content are quite visible, while the actions of those who do not share content are virtually invisible. ... The architecture of the networks is such that although many users on the networks do not share, the networks create an appearance that sharing is the norm. This dynamic - the magnified visibility of sharers and the invisibility of non-sharers - exists on every successful file-swapping application I have seen."

"By the same token, these affinities normalize file-swapping: Members of the file-swapping networks stop being identified as 'rogue software pirates' and start being identified as 'people who, like me, have excellent musical taste.'"

Reciprocity-- "Technologies that magnify cooperative behavior and mask uncooperative behavior can succeed by tapping into deeply held social norms. In this instance, the file-swapping networks have been successful in large part because they have managed to tap into internalized norms of reciprocity. ... The networks' creators are drawing upon reciprocal intuitions that their users are likely to possess. Once again, the software is designed to exploit those intuitions."

• MusicCity and KaZaa's upload/download page
• Forced reciprocity implementation in 2001

Piracy & Tech Culture

Newly developed technologies of the last decade are giving users unprecedented freedom and control over media. Since embracing novel technologies and keeping current with the latest trends are crucial to the cultural standard of digital natives, such innovations provided the foundations for today's piracy.

• Software innovations
  • Fast, efficient transfer protocols
  • User friendly file sharing applications
  • Online advertisement system
  • Software communications boom
• Hardware innovations
  • The personal computer
  • MP3 players
  • Portable multimedia players
  • Storage medium technologies
  • "Hardware synergy"

At heart, below the layers of accessories and fancy gadgets, the youth generation of today are not so different from the previous generations. Your typical teenager has a rebellious streak. Such teenage mentality drives counter-mainstream adult ideologies, which incites piracy.

We're a pirate nation, 2007

• Newspaper article concerning Canadian piracy

"Hollywood can help itself by doing business with iTunes Canada and providing a library of legal content to download. That, and some stronger legislation from Ottawa, would go a long way to keeping us honest."

"Based on a survey polling wired Canadians in February, we not only bootleg directly from the screen, but we also like to download pirated booty - a lot. A whopping 93% of those downloading movies in this country are doing so illegally. And it's not just tech-savvy teenagers. Nearly 50% are over age 46."

"And pinning it on in-theater theft seems to fly in the face of a 2003 study done by AT&T, which concluded that Hollywood was prone to insider attacks, which resulted in leaked screener copies of 77% of 312 movies studied."

"It's commonly known that Montreal is a hot spot," says Dewolde. "In Canada there's no law against camcordering, so it's hard to stop these guys. The worst they can get charged with is trespassing. It's a huge issue."

"At first blush, it looks as if Canadians are more liable to piracy than their counterparts in the U.S.," says Phil Dwyer in a release. "In reality, many of these illegal downloads are taking place because of the lack of legal alternatives. The market is more mature in the U.S., and the experience there shows that if you give consumers a legal, convenient and fairly priced alternative to piracy, the majority will use it."

"We're pretty polite pirates. Give us a legal way to download movies and you'll see a sea change. No doubt many people have looked longingly at the growth of content on iTunes before downloading that torrent."

Counterfeiting Culture, 2006

• Transcript of a round table discussion about counterfeiting in general

Roz Groome - "What has been highlighted are the different strains of harm that are going on. Physical harm, financial harm and social harm - the connection between counterfeiting, piracy, organised crime and other antisocial behaviour. Then also, there is economic harm for the industries and to the Treasury, because no tax flows back on counterfeit goods. People need to realise that they are not just lining the pockets of the rich and famous. For every musical hit there are ten failures and most musicians do not earn what Robbie Williams earns. In terms of creativity, and in terms of ensuring that consumers pay for the product, it is important to ensure that the money flows back to the people who are responsible for creating it and many of those people will not be rich and famous."

Michelle Childs - "Jo has done some interesting research about the motivation of consumers to purchase counterfeit goods. It raises some interesting competition questions. When you are talking about motivation to buy fake DVDs, 56 per cent of respondents bought them because they wanted to see a film as quickly as possible. So perhaps consumers are giving market signals. Perhaps they are saying that some of the old ways of doing things, such as having windows for releasing DVDs in different markets or only releasing music in certain formats, are not what they want and are not going to work."

Jo Bryce - "The answer might be to fill that market gap, rather than to get tough with criminal sanctions."

"If anything, they seemed to believe that the rip-off that was taking place was in the price charged for legitimate goods, rather than the counterfeit ones."

Mike Smith - "The counterfeit manufacturing and duplicating of CDs and DVDs and selling them through markets is highly visible. But on the internet, your children, 17 or 18 year olds, are swapping files and it is not so freely visible."

Mike Smith - "These young people are music enthusiasts, so it is ironic that, by swapping and downloading these music files, they are hacking into the profits of the record companies and taking money that should, by rights, be paid to the songwriters and artists."

Mike Smith - "There is an argument that the future may perhaps not consist of record sales, except in a more niche, particularly high-fidelity market. Essentially music may be seen as a commodity, as a utility, as something that you get streamed to your mobile phone and that you can access constantly, wherever you go. Maybe you will pay a monthly subscription and get your music constantly coming into your life, so that it almost seems like a free commodity. What the record companies need to work out is how the people that are still manufacturing and marketing most of that music also manage to get paid for it - how our artists get paid and the people writing the songs get paid."

Mike Smith - "No. So there is a degree of education to be done. There is also, to a degree, an acknowledgement that we are trying to turn back the tide and we cannot; it’s too late. We need to acknowledge that this is possibly the future and we need to adapt our business practices to reflect that."

Roz Groome - "They will not, but I tell you who is concerned: their parents. We have conducted a massive litigation campaign against egregious uploaders. These are not people downloading, they are uploading. They are behaving like mini free retailers. They are making available thousands of files to millions of people, constantly. Everything is available on filesharing software; everything is out there. I have spoken to the parents and they are horrified. They have copied their CD collections on to their computers to enjoy them, to put them on their iPods or whatever. Then their children have come home from school and downloaded some file-sharing software on to the family computer system, which has then made available to the world their entire CD collection. Incidentally, it is not just their CDs but anything that happens to be in their shared drive. This can include the family photographs, the Expedia receipts; I have seen bank account details, it is all there. That is where consumer education needs to come in. The people doing this need to see the harm it is causing."

Jeff Randall - "Once you can access music for free, people assume it is free. They do not think it through and they do not really care. That would be my view. It is a terribly cynical view, but the music industry, clearly, is facing that problem because that is what people are doing."

Mike Smith - "The music industry has to adapt in order to survive. What we are trying to do with BPI is legitimate protection of our copyrights. We have to do that, but the world is changing dramatically, and the way that a record company gets its revenues is not going to be reliant solely upon sales of records. We are going to have to become music companies, not record companies, and we may come to look upon records as being a loss leader."

Mike Smith - "All this could be a positive force. The internet could be the best thing that ever happened to the music industry."

Repercussions

For those who download through peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, the MPAA and RIAA have brought up the many potential risks one faces when accessing these servers. In the parental resources section of the MPAA website, the organization warns about four dangers of P2P programs: “Subject users to pornography, open personal files on your home computer to strangers online, increase the risk of a computer virus, lure kids into illegally downloading movies and music, which can lead to jail time and fines” [1].

The first three concerns the MPAA notes are typical risks users face when acquiring content through such systems. Many online hackers exploit the P2P search system for monetary gains. By analyzing the trends of high demand movies or music, these profiteers simply manipulate the file names of the viruses and malware they want to spread to match the names of popular song artists and movie titles. Average users who are unaware of these tactics often times are gullible enough to execute these masked programs without realizing the file’s identity. Even the ever-popular P2P software Limewire admits to the existence of viruses and other harmful material on their networks. In its online FAQ, the programmers warn Limewire’s users, “if you attempt to download a virus-infected file using LimeWire, you will be vulnerable to any viruses contained in that file” [2].

In addition to harmful materials one can download, many of these free P2P programs are packaged with third party spyware programs that will slowly but surely retard the speed and reliability of a computer. Like the infamous AOL installation back in the day, a handful of these shareware clients come bundled with various harmful third party applications. By means of a deceptive installation wizard or simply packing other software with the executable, oblivious individuals get much more than what they originally wanted.

Finally, users face the possibility of legal consequences due to copyright infringement. Since most P2P search requests will pull up media across the whole copyright spectrum, the MPAA does not want children to get the impression certain copyrighted content can be acquired without charge. The legal consequences does not discriminate by age. From a warning to a petty fine of $200 to $150,000 and 5 years in jail, the potential cost of piracy is very real [3].