If I use both music and the Internet in the same sentence, what do you always think first?
Downloading. That's right. Unscrupulous people stealing gigabytes and gigabytes of tracks, CDs and DVDs, comfortably lying in their beds, just clicking and taping on their keyboards in complete impunity.
This is a new era, an era where Pirates do not ride boats, do not steal strangers for money, but Pirates still, hidden behind the shadow of their IP address, surfing on the web, picking what they want, where they want and whenever they want it. They do not sail across the Caribbeans, the world wild web is their kingdom, a kingdom where boundaries, borders and frontiers are as blurry as a straight line in deep water.
The game has changed, but the rules remain the same. The pirates steal and try not to get caught. They conquer with no remorse, they live in danger looking over their shoulder every time they put foot on land. But when Pirates had guns and swords to defend themselves, peer-to-peer users can only count on the strength of their firewall.
Does that portrait seem fair to you?
Pirates are always portrayed as unscrupulous people, youngsters most of time, who do not have values, who seemed to lack even the simplest sense of morality.
But they only are portrayed like this by the previous generation. A generation which saw the Internet, and more importantly, peer-to-peer, as a threat. A threat because it changed and crushed the status-quo that prevailed for so many years.
Change, this is what many of us were born into. A world of technology growing faster that no one could ever imagine. A world that our fathers took part in creating. And just like our fathers took over the reality and the contemporaneity of their world, so did the pirates.
The Internet was created to collaborate, to exchange files, to literally link people together. Peer-to-peer is the exact expression of that definition. The simple right to share what you like, what you think people should have access to. The freedom to share the knowledge, the distraction, of what made you who you are.
That right is not free. You got to be equipped and pay for your connexion. But I already hear the defender of copyrights claiming that it is an unfair retribution for having the right to put online and share any type of file you got. And be sure that I feel the same way. But now that we have created this anomaly, that we have allowed people and somewhere encouraged them to do such a thing. Can we take it back in an instant.
Somewhere along the way we created an addiction, a cyber-addiction. The need to collect, to possess, to discover, to be aware of things. But at the same time we came to late to set boundaries, and when our society, our government punishes one person for having downloading ten songs, it feels like in some way we are ashamed to acknowledge it. Moreover, when I read that those cases must serve as an example for the rest of the population, it seems like the defendant became the victim.
I drew earlier a comparison between pirates and peer-to-peer users, and rest assure that this comparison is not futile nor a delusion of my literary past. This comparison has been used by peer-to-peer users themselves. One of the biggest bitTorrent tracker is called “The Pirate Bay”. This Swedish website, very popular among the peer-to-peer users' community, became even more famous when in May 2006, the Swedish police took down most of the servers. Engaged in an unprecedented lawsuit against the biggest Majors like EMI, Universal Music or Sony BMG Music entertainment, the founders were facing some serious time. Anyways, what came out of the juridical debacle that followed, is a movement: the “Pirate Party”. In only 3 years, the Pirate Party became the third largest party in Sweden. In the 2009 European Parliament elections, the party received 7,13% of the total Swedish votes, wining as a result one seat in the European Parliament.
The motto of the party is as follows: “We claim that today’s copyright system is unbalanced”. Needless to say, Pirates are fighting for their own beliefs with legal and democratic weapons. Shall we say that Pirates have climbed up a step in the evolution?
It appears to me that music became in someway a cause worse fighting for, assuming one more time the face of freedom.
The Internet totally changed the way we encountered music, the way we relate to it, the importance we put in it. Every morning I look around me and see people from 10 to 80 years old feeling the vibe through their headsets, and I can not stop thinking that music has reached such an enormous potential because of the Internet. Therefor preventing people from downloading music would be a gigantic hit down on the music industry.
So before thinking about how we could capture pirates, we should think about how we could make this work for everybody, make this industry viable for the producers and the consumers. I can feel a certain uneasiness in the air when talking about music and the Internet. But in this long debate, there is no easy way out, and the way it is going to end up, is totally up to you.
T.
