"Well, it was a good run anyway." So read an online post from someone scared out of pirating copyrighted material. It was not a knock on the door from the Microsoft police or a lawsuit from the RIAA Gestapo that spooked him, but a form letter from his Internet service provider - Cox Communications.
Normally, I would respond: "Don't give up. There's nothing to be afraid of." But now things might be different - last Friday, the same notice graced my inbox.
It reads something like: "You are using your Cox High Speed Internet service to post or transmit material that infringes the copyrights of a complainant's members ... Accordingly, Cox will suspend your account and disable your connection to the Internet within 24 hours of your receipt of this e-mail, if the offending material is not removed."
I called Cox with meager expectations. (Their different offices talk to each other about as much as the CIA does the FBI.)
"Is this about your bill?" asked a kind woman on the other line.
"No," I said. "It's about file-sharing."
Dead silence.
"I've never dealt with this before," she admitted.
At this point I wanted to say, "Well, you're not a priest and I'm definitely not asking for forgiveness, so just put the security apes on the line."
The problem being that there are no security apes, no browbeating ex-cops to tell me I've been a bad boy. As one blogger posted, "I had to talk to three different people at Cox for them to even find a record of a complaint against my account."
After being on hold for half an hour, she came back with a fax number, asking me to send the complaint to some supervisor to make record of it. If they're holding their breath waiting on that fax, I'll be guilty of murder, too.
In reality, these letters are in place to prevent the only thing that is actually illegal: uploading.
That's right, you can download all you want and not raise an eyebrow. Sharing is the wind up in the Record Industry Association of America's and Motion Picture Association of America's respective skirts, and they want to make sure you are too afraid to share anything. Of course, if you become a "freeloader" and only use these networks to take and not share, there will be nothing to share.
But fear not, this will never happen so long as there is counter technology to hide your IP address (which I installed) and so long as there are people (pirates) willing to ignore corporate threats - despite certain government agencies backing them.
Unfortunately, most people have been well trained. When you see enough ads telling you to "hate piracy" and how downloading a song is exactly the same as swiping a DVD from Wal-Mart, sooner or later it is going to accomplish its goal - the criminalization of file-sharing.
In another post about the Cox letter, someone responded, "... legal or not, it's theft, both morally and economically. I don't see your excuses justifying it. Basically you're being cheap and feeling proud of stealing others' work. And I won't be helping with bail when they come to get you."
Cue an American flag waving in background, fireworks and an eagle flying overhead to the tune of "Proud To Be An American."
I think this post is either from the least free-thinking 8-year-old on the Net, or from some butt-monkey from the MPAA.
But you have to ask yourself why you are being spoon-fed your moral interpretations. Why do they not have commercials reminding you that murder is wrong, or child pornography? The fact is that file-sharing was never a moral or ethical issue until the RIAA and MPAA made it a moral issue. They have millions of dollars to spend on propaganda telling you pirates are terrible people. The title "pirates" does not exactly make you want to support them, and this is all very intentional.
Such corporations need public support in order to wage a war that, if introduced outright, would become rather unpopular. Imagine them, without the criminalization of file-sharing, coming forth and saying, "We are going to sue the pants of every one of you refusing to pay $20 a CD. And you are so little and puny that you will not be able to fight us."
I've read everything from people saying never pirate again if you have received such a notice, or others who say they left the "offending" content right where it was and gave the Digital Millennium Copyright Act the digital middle finger.
As for me, yeah, I moved the file. Now I can sleep at night, while my other files are being shared.
Darren Todd is an English literature graduate student. Call him a dirty pirate at lawrence.todd@asu.edu.
