Pirates on the Internet?

Pirates — peg-legged, swashbuckling pirates. Cruising on the Internet, without boats and guns? You bet.

Do they prey on hapless passers-by to steal their money and valuables? Perhaps they steal their victim’s identities? No, that isn’t the game for these pirates. These pirates steal from the rich and the not so rich alike.

In this case music, movie and software producers and distributors are the rich and the people actually creating the music, movies and software we all use are the not so rich. I’m talking in particular about “The Pirate Bay,” a group of technologists in Sweden who put up a Web site making it easier for bootleg copies of movies, songs and software to be distributed. They are the most recent pirate poster boys on the Internet.

They created a Web site whose primary purpose was to help people find and share media online. Their defense is that they merely provided the framework and what people did with it wasn’t their responsibility. The system they put together, they say, could just as easily have been used, and in some cases was, to share legally distributable media. In most cases, however, it was used to traffic in stolen merchandise.

We’ve probably all read or heard about Napster or one of the other file sharing programs which allowed people to do the same kind of trading. A few years ago the creator of Napster, Shawn Fanning, (when it wasn’t a pay to play music service) paid hefty fines for his part in creating this new “free” paradigm. Millions of people shared illegal copies of music, movies and software utilizing the network he created to do so. We’ve also probably heard heated debate both for and against so-called file sharing. Most of us probably don’t think it affects us much, if at all, but it does and here’s how.

When someone creates something of value it is one of the tenets of our society that they deserve and have a right to be fairly compensated for the knowledge, experience and materials that went into making it. This is why if you walk into a store and take something without paying for it you will be prosecuted — to make sure we defend that right of compensation for our creative output. While what is being stolen in this case is not something you can pick up with your hands, it is still theft, usually petty theft.

There are different ways of looking at the players in this issue depending on your perspective.

Those who are fostering an environment which is used to trade in illicit goods, such as The Pirate Bay, are working at destroying one of the building blocks of modern society.

Those who are utilizing that environment for their own gain are hurting both themselves and society as they sap the will and ability of those who would create by taking away their compensation for their work.

Those who monopolize the market for such goods like the large media conglomerates have already destroyed that building block because they take what has been created, sell it and keep most of the value for themselves with a very small percentage getting back to the creator of the item.

Why should you care? If you like getting paid for what you create it is important to defend that principle for the benefit of society in general. What these court cases against illegal file sharing highlight for us is a growing gap between the ability to quickly and easily distribute media and the ability to defend the rights of the creators of that media to be compensated and have a say in how their creation is used. On the flip side of this is the fact that media companies are working vigilantly to stay a step ahead (and they are losing that battle).

One of their primary weapons is digital rights management. Digital rights management or copy protection places differing levels of restriction on what you can do with something you buy. When you buy a CD part of the license to use that CD includes a restriction against copying and distributing it. The physical form of the item makes it harder to duplicate. Digital versions of that material are much easier to copy and much harder to keep people from copying. So the schemes that the media companies use become more draconian over time as they find they cannot win the battle with technology alone. So your ability to do what you see fit with something you buy, like moving it from computer to computer, is at stake as well.

Are there pirates on the Internet? There absolutely are whether you think the pirates are the file sharers or the media conglomerates. Are you one? You could be, perhaps unwittingly, and it is a question you owe it to yourself to answer. Can we make the system fairer to both consumers and creators without destroying it? That’s the billion dollar question.

Fred Kuhne, owner of FWare, a local computer consulting and support company in Lihu‘e, writes a monthly technology column for The Garden Island. He can be reached at fred@fware.net.