When I was growing up, I was under the impression that piracy was a bigger deal than it is. You wouldn't download a car, don't copy that floppy, Metallica suing Napster, it was scary out there. As I got older, there would be stories floating around my school about students having their internet turned off for pirating movies. It seemed like something that was not worth even trying to do. I got into high school, built my first PC, and started going to friends houses for LAN parties. That was the period in my life where my mind was changed. We were high school kids in a small town, we couldn't really keep up with buying all of the newest releases. My friend was playing one of these games and I was watching them play jealously. They leaned over and asked: "Do you wanna play too?" Obviously the answer is yes. They paused, minimized the game, whipped out a flash drive, loaded the game up, and handed it to me. A short install process later I was playing. Piracy is cool! They also showed me how torrent clients work and how to get games for free from the pirate bay. I was unleashed upon a tech that I had no reasonable understanding of how to do safely and let go free. This was an incredibly valuable part of my youth. From then I was able to get anything I wanted from the internet easily and for free. I've been doing this since.
From the point in which I moved out on my own and would casually tell my parents or siblings I would just torrent things, they always replied with "isn't that stealing?". I would usually reply with a maybe, but who cares? It's not like they were going to report me to a rightsholder, and I was fully on private torrent sites and seedboxes at this point. The reaction suprised me, though, so I thought about it for a bit. I have been a computer person my whole life. If you read my make your own keyboard manifesto, you could probably surmise that it's terminal. I had the ability to just copy data infinitely. We had reached the post-scarcity future. Why were we being limited by artificial limitations? There's no physical objects tied to this digital data. Me getting a copy of a file does not take the file from someone else. So who's losing money from this?
I used to concede the idea that in the era of physical media being ripped to digital formats then shared, that maybe someone was losing money. After more reflection, though, I came to the realization that if I had to pay for this media, I would just not experience it. This math changed, though, once a little service named Netflix started streaming while I was in college. I could pay, what, 15 bucks and stream whatever movies I wanted whenever I wanted? Where there may have been an argument before about rights holders or artists losing money, that concern evaporated immediately. 15 dollars spread out among the hundreds of movies I could consume a month? The only people making money off that is maybe Netflix. Doing a quick read, it seemed like Netflix was paying the studios to stream their movies, and subsidizing the cost through monthly subscriptions. Well if the organizations getting paid to allow Netflix to stream this stuff were still getting money, then the only person losing money from me getting a stream rip from a torrent site was Netflix. Who cares. Streaming is an inherently exploitative structure that just serves to crush small creators to get a chance to hit the audiences that these services have caught captive with subscriptions. If I like a piece of media, I'll buy it. If not, I'll delete it. I'm trying before I'm buying. I think that's a good idea for more people to do.
Piracy can let you do a bunch of really cool things. I'm pretty sure getting your hands on the "Despecialized" versions of the original star wars movies are piracy. Fan cuts of movies are a whole can of worms, but the point I'm trying to make is that piracy can let you get yourself a specific version of media that has been removed from the face of the earth. There was a version of Car Seat Headrest's album *Teens of Denial* that released with a sort of cover/interpolation/variation upon The Cars' "Just what I needed" that it turns out they didn't have the rights for. They had to take the album down and re-upload it with a modified sort-of placeholder track. There is an incredible album that I had been listening to since early in my music dork days from The Avalanches called *Since I Left You*. It truly is a magical work in a style called Plunderphonics where all of the music is created from a mashing up of countless different samples. Well as you can probably imagine, it managed to get released but quickly ran into rights problems. The Avalanches managed to get a re-release many years later, but I believe they had to re-records some samples or change them minorly to het rights to clear. This new release sounds fundamentally different from the one I had grown to cherish. Through the power of piracy, you are able to get the old versions of these albums whenever you want. I could get the theatrical, directors, or final cut of Blade Runner whenever I want. You can get extended editions, special editions, deluxe editions, all sorts of stuff that's just not generally available. Another really cool thing you can do is create physical media from digital downloads. You can download whole CD Rips of albums and movies and just burn them to disk and have an exact copy of the source media. With a DVD Burner you can genuinely create something valuable to you from something that had little prior value. That's the thing about all of this digital media that is so baffling to me.
The precepts of digital rights management and copyright law serve as this method to create scarcity where there is none. Digital data is infinitely copyable, so share with your friends. Share with your neighbors, hell share with your acquaintances. We were told sharing is caring until we became adults and suddenly it's every person for themselves and we're stepping on neck to get a leg up. If you're reading this, I'm assuning it's through the lens of another computer dork since this is the audience I'm expecting. Spin up a sharing server for your computer-illiterate friends. There's a multitude of free open source streaming systems that you can stream the movies on your hard drive from. You can set up a server to share whatever you want. Help your friends save money on streaming, create small communities of sharing. Maybe through copyright infringement we can help fracture the monolith the internet has become.