No, this “wee bit o’parchment laddie” , is dedicated to a far more nefarious form of “villainous sea dog”, one that pilfers from the pockets of thousands of individuals every day and is possibly more feared than Edward “Blackbeard” Teach ever was.  No ocean horizons for this pirate, just the unrestricted digital bay of the internet, with its lack of legal controls and general accountability, for continuing his treacherous criminal endeavors.

Being a writer, I am not often allowed the luxury of spouting my opinions everywhere, unless I’m writing a blog entry, which is far more caustic proof than any other form of publishing environment.  But on the subject of intellectual property theft or “piracy”, I tend to get a bit didactic. First coined in 1703 by Daniel Defoe, regarding illicitly copied manuscripts, the term pirate has long been embedded in the minds of the civilized world.  Over the centuries it has evolved, transcending the ocean and arriving on land, but the attitudes have changed dramatically.

From my studies, it seems that the general population deems that piracy is a victimless crime, deemed so because it’s strongly viewed by many that stealing a $20.00 DVD is nothing compared to the millions of dollars these production companies make month after month, year after year.  It seems that the Robin Hood effect has seeped into the minds of the public.  The ideology that the rich don’t need to be richer and the poor are entitled to something for nothing are both prevalent facts in society.  And a terrifying one, simply because film, or even music, piracy goes quite a bit farther than nickel-and-diming millionaires purses. Sure, MPAA studios attributed over 6.1 billion in lost revenues due to overseas piracy from Beijing and they note a 75% increase in piracy activity from 2005 to 2006.  But does it have an effect in markets below the studios themselves?  Is there a “below the line” cost?

In light of a few stories about major lawsuits being handed down from federal judges in the name of protecting artists from piracy, there however is not a grand effort going forward to protect these artists to a greater degree and the summary judgments that have been handed down seem to be window dressing, an effort to prove to the naysayers that something is being done about the problem. Problem is, the last time lawsuits were filed against pirates was back in 2007 and the last summary judgment handed down was in 2006 when Hollywood studios beat out Chinese pirates for selling illegally gotten movies.  And the judgment was only $20,500 USD each for five individual studios, as judged by a trial in Beijing.  The severe cost-ineffectiveness of that international fight still makes my head spin.

Every year, according to the Institute for Policy Innovation and an MPAA funded LEK study, online and offline pirates account for:

6.1 billion in lost annual earnings for U.S. workers alone, compounding the already dying consumer-ship

18.3 billion in lost tax revenue for a government already trillions in debt

750,000 jobs lost annually in an economy that already suffers a near 10% unemployment epidemic

The most staggering number however is the 20.5 billion in lost annual output to all U.S. industries.  But even worse, is that these numbers reflect only studios that hold memberships with the MPAA.  Even greater are the damages that are assessed to the unaffiliated studios, ones who do not have the legal protection or technology to prevent such things from occurring. Of course, these statistics are well documented and the real problem is that consumers have taken a sort of moral relativism when it comes to this theft.  Couple it with the fact that film piracy tends to fall into the same category as petty thefts and film companies would spend more money to fight it than they would receive in damages should they win, and it seems that the modern day pirate has not only succeeded in his attempts to profit from his crimes but may have possibly won the war in the long run.

However, the study doesn’t just end there.  These numbers are spouted repeatedly by both the MPAA and its advocates and even media outlets, but when I strove to find the report that discovered these losses, unfortunately, I was unable to locate it.  I was even more dismayed when I discovered that the report that was claiming these monumental losses to the studios was never made public and that fact was even challenged by The US Pirate Party, a group of individuals that seek out legitimate findings regarding piracy, not of course to further understand piracy and its effect on the marketplace industry, but to downplay the complaints of those claiming losses due to piracy.  They exist to prove that piracy is not as bad as it seems.  Even better, The Pirate Party is a legitimate political party with many constituents who believe in its methods and mentalities.  The Pirate Party discovered grievous errors in the MPAA’s findings, forcing them to issue an apology about “mistaken figures” and how estimates “were overly inflated due to internal errors”.  Well that’s just great.  Now I don’t know who to believe and I have to base my opinion solely on the moral high ground that theft is wrong.  But morals don’t count for anything in a court of law, only motives.  So yet another argument against piracy is slowly eroded away under the criticism of those pursuing piracy even though dimly veiled by the Freedom of Information Act.

So why the diatribe many will ask.  Why write about a subject that so many have before and especially a subject that is so grey due to the current laws in America? In the U.S. it is legal to trade, sell, copy, lend, or rent your own property.  When a consumer purchases or even comes into owning a DVD, he can pretty much do whatever he would like with it.  The only bar is that he may not, in any way, distribute the property, even if he doesn’t profit from it.  But herein is the hard part for legal enforcement.  How do you prove that an individual “distributed” a DVD when you cannot prove that the originating DVD was in the possession of the individual?  And what if the originating DVD was lent to someone else?  Does that make them culpable by association? And God forbid they copy the DVD to their computer for ease of use and a roommate networked to that same computer borrows it over the network.  Does that constitute distribution if it’s taken without knowledge from the originating owner?  These are all major questions that have yet to be answered in legal settings and because of that fact, the courts would be inundated with copyright cases, the plaintiffs would be forking out millions in civil suit legal fees, and in all likelihood, the defendants would be tried in absentia and would never actually pay the judgments, as they would never be able to afford them.

A daunting task it seems for our legal system to fight this monster that is copyright infringement.  The damages incurred trickle-down, even to the lowest denominator.  Billions are lost annually in unpaid wages.  Jobs that support families and pay for homes are lost.  And the only real way to fight back and make a difference falls into the hands of both the consumer and the legal system.  If consumers simply dropped the elitist and entitled mentality and stopped buying or downloading pirated films and if Washington stamped severely harsh penalties on infringement cases of even the smallest degree, then the message may get across.

Here we are in the middle and the bottom is falling out leading us to the inevitable decline of the production companies themselves.  Films require investments to make happen.  Millions are brought in via outside investors and studios to bring a film to fruition.  If that money is not made back, then the investors are not likely to lend that money again in the future, meaning less dollars to make movies. Less movies means less revenue for studios, especially if these fewer films are being pirated.  Less revenue means less job and less technical advancements leading to lower quality, just to keep costs down.  Less revenue for the artists also means less money to put back into themselves, as they are their own businesses, meaning less opportunities to work.  Eventually, it will cease to be less and eventually be none at all.

So, maybe, in the end, the reality is that online and offline pirates must be allowed to suffer the wrath of “natural selection”.  In nature, if a predator species over dominates its environment, the prey species in the ecosystem will move away or eventually die off in that area leaving the predator nothing to feed off of, leading, inevitably, to that species’ demise.  They, in a sense, kill themselves off through greed and mismanagement of consumption.  Perhaps this is the only real solution.  If there is nothing to pirate, there will be no pirates.  But does it mean anything to win if you can no longer do what you love?  What do you think?  Is the piracy of cinema a severe crime for which there should be harsh penalties and a zero-tolerance stance to protect the creative teams behind them?  Or is piracy merely an evolution of the online market, a move that signals the transcendence from an external marketplace to an internal one, of which the checks and balances simply are not yet in place?  Or, like illegal foreign labor, has the market simply become too indirectly dependent upon the piracy side-effects, like free mass advertising and broader audience sampling, that a complete attack against it would be more devastating to the industries than beneficial?

Let us know what you think and be sure to shut off uTorrent while you reply as it helps to sustain your overall maximum bandwidth.

Here are some websites to assist you in forming your own opinions:

http://www.pirate-party.us/
http://www.mpaa.org
http://www.uschamber.com
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.variety.com