Confessions Of A Teenage Internet Pirate

Today’s post comes to us from a high school sophomore who prefers to remain anonymous. She’s talking about stealing. Downloading digital content without paying. Online piracy is a hot topic (again) of late because of the demise of Limewire and its settlement agreement, renewed legislation proposed to Congress, a crackdown on piracy domains, research from NPD Group and Ypulse, and, of course, the seemingly ever-increasing number of lawsuits filed by the RIAA and MPAA against consumers.

But what is really going on behind the screen? This teen tells us about the various factors that go into students’ decisions to download…or not. She also gives us a glimpse of the sort of legal downloading students would like to find more of.

Confessions Of A Teenage Internet Pirate

I know a high school student who steals small food items from drugstores. Although this disgusts many of my friends, I know that most of those same people condone another type of stealing: illegal downloading. As much as parents, teachers, and executives may try to convince youth to buy their music, movies, and video games, many of us, including myself, get them for free from YouTube or sites like The Pirate Bay. Many of my friends who download music from YouTube think it’s perfectly acceptable since it was already online, and listening from your iPod isn’t much different from listening online. It’s almost impossible for record companies to keep music off of YouTube, even with new protections that recognize licensed tracks, because a small pitch change makes a song unrecognizable to the computer. I’ve listened to many leaked albums on YouTube, and when they’re taken down, someone else usually uploads them again.

YouTube is sort of the “gateway drug” to full-on piracy. I started out only downloading a few songs from YouTube downloader, but I realized that it was much more convenient to download entire albums, which led to me deciding to switch to downloading in bulk. I went from downloading a couple albums to full discographies…and now I’ve accumulated a huge collection of pirated music and games.

Bittorent clients put companies in a difficult situation, because they’re technically a legal form of file sharing. It’s just that they’re used in illegal ways by many people. Most teenagers I know who illegally download music or games are not afraid of getting caught. There isn’t much of a threat as long as the “pirate” is smart enough to use privacy software like PeerGuardian. There’s such a massive number of people who use software like uTorrent and FrostWire, the perceived chance for a cautious downloader to be caught is extremely low.

Contrary to what many adults may think, most young people who don’t pirate music, movies, or games don’t do it because they think they’ll be caught or because think it’s wrong. They stay away because they think they’ll get viruses. This is a valid fear. I’ve gotten plenty of viruses from downloading P2P files, but they’re usually poorly placed and very easy to get rid of. Still many people I know are very scared that their computers will break down, so they don’t download anything illegally.

Back to the question of morals and stealing. I’ve heard the argument that pirating is wrong because you’re not supporting the artists. I have a friend who buys all her music and games for this reason. However, most of the money made from cd sales doesn’t really go to the artists and actually goes to the record companies. After finding this out, I felt much less guilty about pirating music from signed bands. I still buy music from independent artists, usually from their own websites instead of ITunes, knowing they’ll reap the profits — and I have several friends who abide by the same policy. Our reasoning is similar when it comes to spending money on other things: it’s much better to support a small local business (or a charity) than add to the profits of large corporations. It’s the right thing to do.

But even some large companies, like some game companies, struggle because of pirating. Despite a variety of anti-piracy protections, hackers are easily able to alter code and create keygens for false serials. Still, most of my friends buy their games to support the companies; I don’t because I don’t have the money. In these tough economic times, more and more teenagers in my friend group are turning to pirating because they can’t afford to buy as many games as they used to.

Sites like YouTube are also a problem for movie companies and TV networks, despite efforts to delete copyrighted content. Whenever an episode is deleted, somebody will inevitably reupload it, so deleting them is futile. But a great solution is putting the episodes up on the networks site, or a site like Hulu with ads. It’s worked very well for TV on sites like Hulu and Crunchyroll, which release shows right after they’ve aired. This is particularly good for anime, because many viewers pirate episodes or watch them illegally online because it takes such a long time for them to come out in the U.S. But Crunchyroll releases the anime shortly after it’s released in Japan, which undermines the incentive to pirate it. And putting up with a few ads isn’t as inconvenient as trying to find a fast download or searching for a place to stream episodes.

This approach can also be applied to music. There are plenty of sites with free legal online downloads. One such site is Guvera. After seeing a page with advertising, you can download songs and still support the artists. It also lets you stream songs for free. There’s a wide selection of tracks, but you can only download as much as advertisers have paid to support. Still, this type of site is a great innovation, and if there were more such sites in existence, I think a much smaller number of people would resort to torrenting.

The real challenge is coming up with a way to deliver games for free, or at least cheaper. With every new console, prices keep increasing, and I am much less likely to buy a major console game now that the prices have jumped to $60 when they used to be closer to $40. Even if there are ways to get music and videos for free legally through ad-supported sites, this just doesn’t work for major games. It just wouldn’t be as much fun to play Halo if Master Chief’s suit was stickered with logos like a NASCAR driver. Games need atmosphere, which out-of-place ads detract from. Sadly, with incredibly high production costs for games, there’s very low likelihood that prices will decrease, so for now I probably won’t pay for many games, unless I can find them used.