Staffer's Note

Judging by yesterday’s overwhelming anti-SOPA/PIPA sentiment, it doesn’t appear as though many consumers much care about preserving the record label or big-budget studio, which is reason enough in itself to let them go the way of the dodo.

But what’s more important than the “what” is the “why” and the “how.” It’s no revelation that the average music-listening moviegoer has little invested in media industry status quo, of course, but it’s a long leap from there to understanding why we seem so comfortable and justified in engaging in “theft” and “piracy.” I use scare quotes here because we all know that it’s exceptionally difficult to think of downloading music and movies as theft. If anything, the terms instead conjures images of, well, thieves and pirates. Part of the reason downloading content doesn’t feel like theft is because it doesn’t really resemble it, either. When we steal money, cars or a collection of knick-knacks, we know that it’s wrong, and we remedy the situation by returning the property to its rightful owner.

We apply this same idea to the media that we download off the internet, and with all other forms of ostensible property that don’t have a physical (or “rival,” in economist-speak) component to them. We call this process the “protection of intellectual property,” hence PIPA. This implies that the ideas that we create, like sounds and images we record, are the same as the money or cars or knick-knacks we own. Others don’t have a right to take them and claim them as their own, do they? Some part of most of us would probably agree with that statement; in truth, though, it doesn’t make illegal downloading feel any more like theft than it did before.

Consider this, though: a thief grows richer with each dollar, car and knick-knack that he steals. But the same isn’t true for online media pirates. Really, stealing media is like stealing air out of the sky or dirt from the ground: all of them are abundant. Air is plentiful, as is dirt, as are media files, which can be copied ad infinitum. Like the two former, the latter is not scarce, and thus has no measure of marginal utility. This explains why many of us do not feel inclined to pay for them.

When we paid for music in the past, we did so because the content we wanted was created in forms that were not abundant. Because cassette tapes and VHS, CDs and DVDs were characterized by an element of scarcity, we would have felt wrong slipping one in our pocket and walking out of the store. But now those inefficient methods of packaging have been done away with, and adhering to a now-irrelevant business model will only prolong the pain.

If this seems short-sighted or crazy, consider that it’s really no different from the public domain laws that allow you to download Moby Dick right now, for free, if you like, and that Hulu and Netflix have already taken steps in the right direction. I don’t have the space here to refute the obvious counter-arguments to my attack on intellectual property rights, but believe me, they exist. I wish merely to suggest that perhaps it’s not the downloading masses doing the plundering in this case, and that legislation in favor of outdated industries might be a slightly more serious (and imminently less helpful) form of theft.