Internet pirates won’t sail away

It’s old news. People download music, films, and TV shows illegally instead of paying for them. Alternatively, they stream them online. As more and more ebooks hit the market, it looks like they might be the next victims of online piracy.

All the research indicates the terrible effect of this online swashbuckling: in the USA, over 70,000 jobs are lost every year due to piracy, and the workers that remain lose 2.7 billion dollars in earnings. In 2008 alone, industries affected by piracy in the UK supposedly lost 670 million euros.

I can almost see the ambivalence on your face. These numbers don’t change anything. Nobody cares.

70% of Internet users say there is “nothing wrong” with online piracy, which is a huge figure bearing in mind our parents and grandparents are on Facebook.

Over 75% of computers have something illegally downloaded on them, while the average iPod contains $800 worth of pirated music. We illegally downloaded Avatar over 17.5 million times.

We don’t care because the faces of these industries are incredibly, atrociously wealthy. Avatar made almost 3 billion dollars; so how much did our 17.5 million downloads really affect it? Tom Cruise made 75 million dollars in the last tax year and he was only in one movie – can you even name it? Simon Cowell supposedly pays each member of One Direction over three million dollars a year, so your guilty download of ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ from YouTube hasn’t really had an effect (sidenote: is anyone else appalled by the misogynistic message of that song?!).

The same people who told us in sensationalised adverts that we wouldn’t steal a car would probably agree that downloading doesn’t affect these people, but it does affect the workers lower down. The runners, smaller producers, those “indie” films you love – they’ll throw that word in to appeal to the youth. That’s who we’re harming with our incessant stealing.

I just can’t help but believe the wrong people are being blamed here. Is the exploitation of workers our fault because we don’t want to pay eight pounds to watch a film at the cinema that may or may not be awful? Or is it the fault of a capitalist industry and society that teaches us fame and fortune is the American Dream and that actors and pop stars deserve to be paid what they are?

670 million euros lost in the UK, you say. Simon Cowell’s personal fortune, made entirely by marketing meaningless bad music, stands at £130 million. His baby, the X Factor, costs almost £2 million to screen each week, and has yet to produce any “talent” that any of us will tell our kids about that way our dads talk about Neil Diamond. Meanwhile in the movie industry, a film came out this year called Strippers Vs. Werewolves.

There is evidently an incredible amount of money circulating in the industries affected by piracy, but it is going to people who are mass-producing low quality entertainment and laughing all the way to the bank.

Of course piracy is on the rise; when people are charged inordinate amounts for disappointing results, they don’t feel immoral taking things for free.

The entertainment industry isn’t being killed by illegal downloads. It’s committing suicide.