The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a broad stroke effort to prevent unauthorized access to and copying of copyrighted material. There are a couple of provisions that dictate that, but the overall effect of the act, as noted by Kerry Maeve Sheehan, is that it’s blunderingly trying to keep up with technology that far outpaces the speed of lawmakers’.
Piracy, which has generally come to mean using something without permission (like listening to a copyrighted song without paying for it), is one of the principal targets of the DMCA, due to its popularity with the internet as a vehicle. The way the DMCA seeks to prevent piracy is by making illegal any attempt to “circumvent” digital rights management (DRM), and heightening the pre-existing penalties for doing so. (Circumvent is in quotes because pretty much every reading uses that term, and I believe it is purposefully vague.)
So the main idea is that the government is trying to prevent illegal music and movie downloads, which is a noble cause, but they aren’t really equipped to do it. Russell Brandom points out that “YouTube relies on user-generated flags to enforce its policies, which can make violations maddeningly inconsistent.”
This brings up the concept of Safe Harbor. The DMCA provides provisions to protect companies like YouTube, Facebook, and Google from copyright infringement. This, at least, is a reasonable idea, since making these tech giants liable for users’ copyright infringements would only serve to discourage the development of novel file-sharing technology.
What the Safe Harbor provisions dictate is that an online service provider (OSP), basically any website, is not responsible for illegal activities conducted by users, provided the OSP meets a few regulations: (1) the company must have no knowledge of the infringements, (2) the company must have a copyright policy, and (3) the company must have an agent to whom copyright claims should be directed. (This information conveniently gathered from Muso’s DMCA explanation.)
Due to the sheer volume of video on YouTube, it is reasonable to believe they can’t have knowledge of all copyright infringements hosted on their site, but they do have to make an effort, hence the “user-generated flags.” It is easy to see how that reporting system could become immensely frustrating for YouTube’s most frequent users.
And what motivation is there for users to flag copyrighted material on YouTube? It must primarily be those owning the copyrights as well as a handful of speciously-white knights – everyone else enjoys the material and is complacent enough to not ask questions. This behavior falls somewhere on the spectrum of piracy. At the other end is people who actively seek, steal, and disseminate copyrighted material. Somewhere in between are people like me, who download the audio tracks of YouTube videos as MP3 files and occasionally make use of torrenting sites to access copyrighted material.
In my opinion, people in that category aren’t actively seeking to stick it to the recording labels or the movie studios, those behaviors are more characteristic of the pirates Stephen Witt describes: “The founders of [The Pirate Bay] were ideological in nature, seeking a revolution in copyright law.”
As you shift slightly more toward the harmless end of the piracy spectrum from the founders, you get active torrenters who spend considerable amounts of time seeding files and ensuring there’s always enough content for people – “the last of the ideologues: anti-profit, pro-freedom political dissidents… at considerable personal risk.”
But once you get back to my category, people are just doing it because it’s the easiest and cheapest option. With services like Netflix and Spotify, the easiest and cheapest option is changing for a lot of people. Whether the line is drawn at <$10/month or the fact that Netflix accounts are naturally shareable, people have started to give up piracy in favor of streaming services. But again, the motivation is not noble or moral, it is simply ease of access.
I think piracy might start to fade with the next generation, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing. To conclude, here are my thoughts, summed up nicely by Joss Stone:
Yeah, I love [Piracy]. I think it’s brilliant and I’ll tell you why. Music should be shared. […] The only part about music that I dislike is the business that is attached to it. Now, if music is free, then there is no business, there is just music. So, I like it, I think that we should share.
It’s ok, if one person buys it, it’s totally cool, burn it up, share it with your friends, I don’t care. I don’t care how you hear it as long as you hear it. As long as you come to my show, and have a great time listening to the live show it’s totally cool. I don’t mind. I’m happy that they hear it.
pat73hat 