Raised on robbery (part 1)

You’ll never stop [piracy]. So what you have to do is compete with it.

– Steve Jobs

We know piracy won’t go away altogether, and we won’t always agree on the best way to go about disrupting it. But we can agree on a vision for a digital future that better serves audiences and artists alike, and that future depends on reducing piracy.

- Ruth Vitale and Tim League, “Here’s How Piracy Hurts Indie Film,” Indiewire

In the 1980s, if you lived in a small town in India and wanted to see a movie, you had to wait two or three months after its release in a big city. When the movie arrived, you went, you went to your local theater – a shoddy single-screen venue that might accommodate 1,000 people at a time. If the movie didn’t come to your town, or if you just missed it, you were out of luck. All you could do was hope that it might be shown on television a few years later.

The emergence of the VCR in the mid 1980s changed everything. Videos proliferated; rental shops became commonplace, and “mini-theatres” with large VCR libraries began to offer screenings for a small fee. For Indian consumers, the change was glorious, even if the quality of the videos was third-rate. Now they could watch the latest films – or their favourite old ones – whenever they liked. Almost all of the videos in India were pirated, but what did that matter? This sort of casual piracy wasn’t hurting anyone, was it?

Piracy is by no means a new problem in the West. (In the nineteenth century, the greatest source of pirated European books was the United States.) But as the creative industries developed during the twentieth century, the rich nations of the world developed and enforced an increasingly stringent set of copyright laws, in part to combat the threat of piracy. In large measure the system worked, at least in Europe and the United States, where most consumers were willing to obey the law and pay for the significantly better quality and easier availability of legal copies. But in poor and developing countries, the majority of the population simply did not have the resources to find or buy these products legally, and piracy came to dominate the market.

The industries complained, of course. But as long as their copyrights were enforced and their profits remained strong in the developed countries, their executives slept well at night. Recordings, films, and books were physical objects, after all, and had to be reproduced one at a time. The process took time and cost money, and there natural limits on the speed and quality of the pirated reproductions and on the ease with which these reproductions could be distributed. From the industries’ perspective, piracy was legal and annoying, but the products were hard to find and almost always inferior in quality, limiting any financial damage.

Everything changed in the 1990s with the “perfect storm” of technological change we discussed in earlier article series: the rapid growth of digital media, big advances in micro-computing and mobile technologies, and the advent of the internet. Producing and distributing perfect copies of digital files suddenly became almost free, almost effortless, and, almost overnight, piracy became an interconnected global phenomenon. The startling rise in 1999 of Napster, the peer-to-peer music-sharing site that allowed users all over the world to exchange music for free, presaged an ominous future for the creative industries. By some estimates, music revenue fell by 57 percent in the decade after the launch of Napster, and DVD revenue fell by 43 percent in the five years after 2004, when BitTorrent gain popularity.

The music industry, arguing that digital piracy represented a grave threat to its existence, mobilised a legal campaign to get Napster shut down, which succeeded in 2001. Building on this and other legal victories, the creative industries banded together to convince American legislators to get involved. In 2011, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which proposed a set of restrictions and punishments that, he claimed, would help “stop the flow of revenue to rogue websites and [ensure] that the profits from American innovations go to American innovators.” The act failed because of surprisingly stiff resistance from technology companies and internet activists, but the entertainment industries remained convinced that digital piracy was a major threat to their business that had to be met head on.