Pirates hate piracy

What’s the difference between fair use and piracy?
Fair use is when I use your content. Piracy is when you use my content.
That sounds like a joke. It’s not. It’s how people behave. And if the entity alleging piracy is a large company, it’s a business model.
I touched on this Wednesday. But the examples are so rich with irony, it’s worth another look.
Content and tech companies pirate. It’s endemic.
Around 2010, as a Forrester analyst covering the music industry, I interviewed an executive from the file-sharing site LimeWire. Like Napster, LimeWire was filled with pirated music files as well as all sorts of other pirated content including videos and software. As a joke, I suggested that somebody could upload the code for LimeWire itself, making it easy to pirate the LimeWire software.
The executive was horrified. “That’s would be a complete violation of the intellectual effort we put into creating the software,” he said. And when I published an account of our conversation, he was outraged, saying that I’d twisted his words.
Consider this story the archetype for how companies built on piracy behave.
A little later, I wrote a research report for Forrester on piracy and the content industries. I interviewed a number of organizations including the MPAA, which of course represents the interests of the movie industry. As a courtesy, we shared the report with the individuals we interviewed. A few days later, I was speaking to an executive from Disney. I offered to send him the report, which would normally cost thousands of dollars through a research subscription. “I already have it,” he said. When I asked how he’d gotten an early copy of a report they didn’t subscribe to, he said that they’d received a copy from the MPAA. Clearly the MPAA, which zealously protected the copyright interests of the movie industry, felt no compunctions about freely sharing somebody else’s valuable, copyrighted content.
The American publishing industry had its roots in piracy. According to the book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, American publishers developed a lucrative revenue stream from pirating British book contents without paying royalties.
Some (U.S. publishers) sent agents to England with orders to grab volumes from bookstalls… and ship them west by fast packet. Copy was then rushed from the dock to the composing room, presses run night and day, and books hurried to the stores or hawked in the streets like hot corn.
According to this book, one of the most successful pirates was the company that eventually became HarperCollins.
YouTube, of course, was established based on pirated video content. Once it had become successful and sold itself to Google, automated systems were put in place to detect copyrighted content. But these systems are glitchy. My friend Dave Carroll, creator of the hit music video “United Breaks Guitars,” has told me that he regularly has to deal with fraudulent copyright violation claims that cause YouTube to take his video off the site. Google has also had to fend off suits from authors and publishers regarding its unauthorized scanning of millions of books. Now Google is being sued by publishers for advertising sites that host pirated content. But you can bet that anyone caught stealing Google code would be prosecuted.
Meta, parent of Facebook, is another great example. Facebook is filled with posts including copyrighted images, articles pasted into posts, and copyrighted video content. There were countless groups hosting free pirated movies on Facebook. But of course, when another site called Power Ventures attempted to aggregate Facebook content with other social media content, Facebook sued them for unauthorized automated access that violated Facebook’s terms of service.
Feet of clay
At this point, these examples are beyond irony and have to be considered a steady pattern.
All I can tell you is this: when a big, rich company complains of copyright infringement, always be skeptical. Because the same company has likely used every legal and questionable trick in the book to accumulate power by violating the property rights of others.
It’s the American way.
Apparently The UK government is/was considering making piracy the legal default status:
“The government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use creators’ content on the internet to help develop their models, unless the rights holders opt out.”
(BBC Article: Paul McCartney: Don’t let AI rip off artists)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8xqv9g8442o