Avast, Ye Maties

For this week, let's talk about something serious: pirating.  We hear it all the time, about people getting songs or movies for free off the internet.  And why not?  You could pay ten dollars to see a two hour film at the movie theatre, or fifteen for the latest album of your favorite band, but it’s so much easier to just go online and find it for free.  While in my heart, I abhor this behavior, sometimes I’ll just go to Youtube and find a song that I can’t be bothered with finding in a store.  It’s infinitely replayable, and I don’t have to waste hard drive space on it.  But this is where the buck stops for me.

            Some people take it further, having a whole library of songs, into the thousands, of files found on torrent sites.  As a fan of music, I want to support my favorite artists by buying their albums.  When you bypass the marketing aspect of media, you’re hindering the musicians, producers, composers, and anyone else involved, possibly making it so they don’t make any more albums.  No one wins.

            But piracy can also be seen on the creative side, not just the consuming side.  This is the world of taking sound bites and using them in a new song, of taking characters from one show and putting them in another; in essence, remix.  By definition, it is taking pre-existing material and using it for something new.  While some consider it creative, others consider it piracy.  Take for example, Nelly’s ‘Just A Dream’, and a cover of it by Youtubers Sam Tsui and Christina Grimmie, which is shown below.


The original version of the video, while hosted by Vevo and thus doubly sponsored, has twice as many views as the cover.  Still, the cover version has 50+ million views, meaning we can safely assume that it’s been seen by legal companies.  This is piracy, and yet it’s alright by legal standards.

            As how it should be.  Most problems nowadays are focused so much more on the money, and about ‘this is mine, pay me’.  What should be the focus is on the art, about seeing that both are valid in their own way, and we can recognize that Nelly is the original creator of the song.  So long as that’s agreed upon, there shouldn’t be any troubles.  But in a society where money comes first, we start to stifle creative input, and shut down potentially groundbreaking art.

            Another example of this comes from a few years back, when some original content was being put on Youtube, and George Lucas wasn’t very happy about it.  This is to be expected.  Putting out media that you should be paying for shouldn’t be seen for free.  The interesting thing to note is that he is alright with parody material on Youtube.  It’s basically free advertisement, so why demand for that being taken down?  It’s piracy, taking intellectual property and creating something new with it, and yet major corporations allow for it.

            This is an ideal system.  So long as everyone gets the credit they deserve, everything is alright.  If we just ousted with the desires for money and glory, and focused on the entertainment value, we could turn to more pressing problems, instead of trying to shut down 3^rd party media sites.

            In all, piracy is bad.  We’re taught all through our educational life that plagiarism is wrong, and that’s just what it is.  But so long as you acknowledge that, yes, I didn’t make this song, but I did a karaoke version of it, then that’s fine.  It’s our creative outlet.  We all want to leave our mark on the world, but we have to remember the people who helped us get there.