Piracy and the Internet: Reaching Common Ownership

Who pays to download music? I do not, I torrent it. Who pays to watch a movie? I do so very rarely because I prefer free internet streaming to buying DVDs. In this age of mass globalization and universal digitalization of the media, we still have a very antiquated mentality on the concept of property, especially on intellectual property. Nowadays, intellectual property is immaterial and fundamentally impossible to protect; if your work merits attention, it probably already is available to download for free on some site. The Internet, and this is a fact, is the homeland of piracy, yet the word ‘piracy’ is too archaic to describe the phenomenon of global ownership that is being driven by the global network. What meaning do the concepts of property and of theft itself have when I can download on my computer in my room a movie, that was produced in a different country far from Italy, without ever making contact with the creators? Stuck in the mentality of “I made that, therefore I have the right to want money for it,” creators seethe with impotent anger at torrenting, streaming, and free download sites. They would do their over-taxed minds, their over-worked lawyers, and us a favor if they just could forget all about it.

Sharing is the foundation of the Internet. The Internet has made the common ownership of any sort of intellectual property that can be digitalized possible. Even now, Internet common ownership might be expanding even more with the advent of 3D printers, which will have enormous repercussions on labor. The capitalist notion of royalties and of digital rights management is rapidly and beautifully falling apart, being slowly replaced by a digital common ownership that is reminiscent of an ideology that was never really quite well-understood. Now, let us for a moment assume that suddenly corporations and governments understood the futility of their inept and dreadfully authoritarian attempts to ‘protect’ intellectual property and that they suddenly decided to legalize all forms of what is nowadays called ‘digital privacy’. In this hypothetical reality, creators of digital commodities would have two choices: either stop producing or produce even more. In the first case, humanity would quickly become a dull place, and probably about half of the world’s population would be working in professions they hate but had to adopt because they liked money more than their art. In the second case instead, property as a means of building capital, at least in the digital world, would be completely abolished but art and digital products would thrive because there would be a much greater participation of people who might not have been able to access the products before the free Internet. The digital world would flourish, open source software would be a normal thing, not that awfully communist sounding thing some developers adopt for reasons that seem obscure to the layman.

Now this is all good and well, but how would half of the world’s population eat without royalties? To the wannabe artist this sounds like a very serious catch (as if Van Gogh or Mozart had been millionaires), yet the problem is immaterial. Putting aside the plethora of studies that show that empirically Internet sharing has not disincentivized anyone to stop doing anything nor has it decreased the size of any industry (whether it be music or film or architecture software), let us consider the human factor. Would you still go to concerts if you could access all the music in the world? I think I still would. Would you support your favorite software designer’s company if you had money to spare? I think I would. Accepting the Internet’s ‘pirate’ nature would remove the middle-man (always an awkward presence that always inspires distrust) and put the focus on the product itself, not on the number of billboards it has on Corso Francia.