The New World

Think of those first maps of the New World we see as schoolchildren, illustrated by the cartographers of Europe’s Renaissance. North America is an embarrassing ingrown column of crude blotches: the discarded work of a kindergartener, unfit even for the refrigerator door. The true shapes of Florida, South America, and Panama are merely suggested. Bulges and contours hint at the truth. Studying the first attempts at mapping the limits and shape of a new land, it’s easy to see that the explorers were mostly clueless as to the fundamental nature of their new landscape. In places, the maps hinted at the true shape of the New World, but by and large they were insufficient aids for exploration.

For hundreds of years, Europe’s great explorers lost themselves in utopian fantasy, fixated on the hope of an easy water passage to their trading outposts in Asia. They sailed west across the Atlantic, certain the route would be found. But when they reached their destination, these men of experience repeatedly collided against the unforgiving shores of reality.

Imagine the frustration of the proud Renaissance adventurers as they failed—again and again—to cross through “The New Islands,” as the Americas were thought to be. Christopher Columbus believed that Asia was just a short distance past these “islands” and many assumed The New Islands were part of Asia itself, a far-eastern archipelago that buffered the continent. Operating upon these fallacious assumptions, the 1524 expedition of Giovanni da Verrazzano resulted in an erroneous “discovery.”

When exploring the coast of present-day Virginia, Verrazzano came across the Chesapeake Bay––and declared it the water route to Asia. In the blank spot between the mouth of the Chesapeake and Asia, Verrazzano’s imagination drew in a self-serving, utopian route to riches. His assumptions were reproduced in the form of new maps. When these maps were distributed, his mistaken rendering of the world propagated, multiplied and formed a new conventional wisdom.

Of course the idea of an easily navigable water route struck the explorers’ fancy. The idea suggested that they were sailing on the right side of history and were the true keepers of wisdom. But their self-delusion only delayed and amplified their eventual failure; they misunderstood the opportunity before them that lay in a new land of unimaginable resources and beauty. Of course, maps improved over time and explorers learned that the all-water route to Asia was in fact a fantasy—but not until the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 proved it so.

It needn’t take hundreds of years for humans to correct previously-held assumptions in the Information Age, but it still takes time. And just as the Old World explorers sleepwalked for centuries under the spell of ill-conceived notions, false maps, and intoxicating dreams, today we enter the novel geography of the Internet without a clear idea of where we are or where we’re going. Digital Determinists and their New Media brethren may claim to understand the true path of humanity’s engagement with technology, just as the explorers of old must have confidently reported back to the monarchies, “Trust me, the water route will soon be found. I understand the true nature of these New Islands.”

If we accept the confusion over whether or not to pay for digital content as a proxy for our exploration of the digital age, we see the malformed maps of The New Islands spread out before us. These maps are cognitive in nature. Rather than sketching out coastlines and river mouths, the maps we use come in the form of concepts, words, and symbols. These are the bobbing buoys and pulsing beacons that guide our path into the unknown. We are beholden to them.

As the vaunted American journalist Walter Lippman described in his 1922 treatise, Public Opinion, “the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety.”1 We are compelled to simplify the world, for it is the only chance we have to understand its processes and our role within them. “To traverse the world,” Lippmann said, “men must have maps of the world.” The more comprehensive the map, the better chance we individuals have to chart our own course in this world without losing ourselves in the process.

We require the language of symbols and stereotypes to establish basic landmarks and topography. The most egregious wrong we have perpetrated against ourselves, the reason why our piracy debates so commonly marooned, was our acceptance of the wrong symbols and stereotypes as our guides. Like the 16th century navigators, we find ourselves bumping up against reality, in search of terrain that does not exist.

During my own days of using P2P services like Audiogalaxy, never did I think, “I need to share some music right now.”

Digital Determinists rightly point out that humans have a fundamental need to share with others, making “file sharing” appear to be a natural, innocent process of building culture. We are social creatures, so sharing is essential to our being. File sharing, then, must be a net positive.

But, when I used digital services that were supposedly devoted to the utility of “file sharing,” sharing itself never crossed my mind. Why would it? I wasn’t emailing a friend or using G-chat to offer them the name of a new band I was excited about. My actions had zero relation to sharing something that I felt any sense of ownership over. No, sitting in my dingy bedroom in a slummy house in the same Minneapolis college town where Bob Dylan heard his first Woody Guthrie album, the action more closely resembled, “I want that album… now.” After reading an intriguing album review, seeing a hypnotizing music video, or hearing an arresting tune in a coffee shop or on the radio, I purposefully downloaded that artist’s work for free rather than purchase it. This choice had nothing to do with sharing. I downloaded because it was so easy, there were no immediate consequences, and best of all, it was free!

Sure, every file sharer knows that somewhere out there on the other end of your wireless connection, some other human’s computer—or a number of them, in the case of torrents—is seeding your download. Real people make file sharing possible, but they are anonymous figments of our imagination. In practical terms, they may as well not even exist. You, the file sharer, are engaging with a distributing website, search engine, or torrent tracker—not a person. The process is no different than searching for and purchasing any other item online. Except, in the case of eBooks, MP3s, movies and other creative content, no one can force you to pay if you don’t feel like it. Those who knowingly download or stream unlicensed files aren’t acting on a deep desire to share, but a deep desire to consume. Their “sharing” is just a ham-handed attempt at denial for their hyper-consumptive actions, nothing more. Over the years, both artists and consumers have misconceived file sharing as a linear extension of familiar, wholesome practices.

“If a friend of yours gave you a DVD of mine for you to watch one night,” asks the muckraking American filmmaker Michael Moore, “is that person doing something wrong? I’m not seeing any money from that… See, I think that’s okay. That’s always been okay. You share things with people. I think information, art and ideas should be shared.”

But file sharing isn’t a matter of one friend borrowing a DVD, book, or album from a neighbor who has purchased the copy, as Moore suggests. Rather, it is a case of tens or hundreds of millions of consumers being able to permanently borrow (or “take”) such works, copied from complete strangers, with commercial distributors like The Pirate Bay openly facilitating the transaction. If an original file is leaked before release, it is possible that none of the copies being shared online even derive from an original sold copy. Searching online for specific files, superficially held by digital simulacra of real people, we’re ostensibly accessing a black-market online store where an infinite array of cultural goods are offered for free. The ultimate goal is to get stuff, not to share stuff. Though it is certainly common for friends and colleagues to share files, in the context of unlicensed downloading, “file sharing” is a functionally inadequate term and a self-serving, blithe stand-in for situational reality that sets our journey into the information age off upon false pretenses.

That said, sincere digital sharing manifests a lofty ideal of global human communication. Today, I can write a book or an album, digitize it, and distribute it to anyone I see fit at a negligible cost to either myself or the receiver. Through constructive institutions like Wikipedia, human ideas, knowledge and expressions have fewer barriers than ever to widespread discovery. That is a positive revolution, without question. But as many exciting possibilities as the digital revolution allows, we still must try to control our enthusiasm and maintain perspective. In the widespread adoption of the term “file sharing,” we see individuals forgetting that a healthy culture isn’t only determined by the degree of shared information, but also shared responsibilities and shared visions of what makes a fair society.

The sheer number of distribution options available to creators today is a testament to all the good that can come from technology. But what do such options amount to when the same technology allows consumers to anonymously disregard creators’ rights on a pandemic scale, as is the case with file sharing? To respond by throwing one’s hands up in the air, saying there is no choice but to accept the good with the bad and not worry about the consequences, is the moral laziness hiding in clear sight when we accept the term. Consumers aren’t sharing; they are fundamentally taking advantage of an artist and ignoring their basic right to distribute their work as they wish.

When I logged on to Audiogalaxy in the early 2000s and downloaded a Shins or Cannibal Ox album, emerging artists on respected independent record labels, I knew the bands were putting the albums up for sale. By signing with their respective labels, the bands had chosen to partner with them and were implicitly asking me—the consumer—for payment if I sufficiently wanted to explore the music they’d worked so hard on. I’d only heard of the Shins (in 2001) after happening upon a music video for “New Slang” on a music blog. The label, Sub Pop, invested their money and time in producing that video and promoting it to online journalists. By that intentional investment of the label and artist, I was exposed to an album that I came to love. And when I hear the album today, I am instantly transported back in time to be reacquainted with an otherwise forgotten self and personal history. That experience is priceless—and no doubt worth $9.99.

But at the time, hitting right-click at my computer, I implicitly communicated to these artists who had made something beautiful for me, “I could care less about you and your choices,” as I found some anonymous drone to “share” the full album with me online.

This elemental disrespect between consumer and creator has, surprisingly, been glossed over by most writers of the piracy wars. The early acceptance of the term “file sharing” and the political tones it adopted during the copyright infringement lawsuits of the mid-2000s concealed the brazenness of this social contract violation. Just as erroneous maps of The New Islands amplified misunderstandings rather than corrected them, so too did the term “file sharing.”

The innermost mechanisms of commerce may be frustratingly opaque as it applies to creative industries like music, but such mechanisms facilitate a very real exchange between two individual entities—creator and consumer. When I downloaded albums for free, I openly undermined this egalitarian exchange. If the Internet weren’t such an anonymous locale, we would never stand for this corrupt concept of sharing. In 2012, both the band Beach House and LCD Soundsystem had songs of theirs closely imitated and used as commercial jingles. In the case of Beach House, they had declined to license a song to an ad campaign for weeks, only to find an obvious copy of the song’s style and substance used for a long form car advertisement. When Pitchfork featured these events in their news section, the site referred to the bands getting “ripped off.”2 But is it really much different when a consumer or (especially) an unsanctioned commercial website tries to circumvent an artist’s rights to their work for the sake of convenience? Artists have been getting massively ripped off through the Decade of Dysfunction, and we have stayed numb to that fact, in part, because of the term “file sharing.”

In his 2003 book, The Anarchist in the Library, NYU law professor Siva Vaidhyanathan fearlessly explored his own habits of downloading from Napster and burning CDs. “Mostly,” he admitted, “I download songs to see if I want to buy them.”

Seeing as he still buys the music that he likes, Vaidhyanathan says in the book that he didn’t see why he would be accused of damaging the music industry or violating any unspoken contract with the creator. Then he read a column by Randy Cohen, formerly The Ethicist at the New York Times Sunday Magazine, in which Cohen responds to a letter from a young file sharer. Cohen unconditionally declares that “to download music from the net illegally is theft, depriving songwriters, performers and record companies of payment for their work” and that accusing the music industry of being somehow culpable for such theft was akin to “blaming the victim.”

Vaidhyanathan wrote to Cohen to challenge his cut-and-dried approach. Vaidhyanathan reminded Cohen that we couldn’t simply use the law as our guide. “Some laws are badly drawn or misapplied, and breaking them under certain conditions is ethical…. Besides… the law is not clear about which actions are copyright violations.” The rest of their revelatory exchange in Vaidhyanathan’s indispensable book follows:

Cohen responded that while my unauthorized use of copyrighted material might ultimately benefit my favorite artists, the availability of these files should be up to the artists, not me. So I asked him about the pragmatic calculus. “What is the practical difference between listening to downloaded music in the privacy of my apartment and listening to broadcast music in the privacy of my car?” Cohen again asserted that the difference was in the permission. He said the chief concern in this ethical question was the interest of the artist—both financial and moral. “The history of popular culture is a continuous struggle on the artists’ part not to get robbed…it seems to be that what MP3 does is democratize the ability to rip off an artist,” Cohen wrote to me. “And what’s particularly galling is that you not only want to do it, you want to be praised as a social progressive when you do.”

When Vaidhyanathan wrote his book just after the millennium turned, there were a plentitude of excuses for such sharing. P2P was still a fresh development. Quite understandably, consumers delighted in experimenting with this new mode of distribution and consumption. At a time when there was no MySpace, Pandora, YouTube, iTunes, or Spotify, the file sharers’ insistence that they merely wanted to sample new music held considerable water. They would do so legally, some claimed, but the industry was dragging its feet and hadn’t given consumers a reasonable option to do so. It was the industry’s own fault for not adapting quickly enough. So goes the basic argument that, for Cohen, amounts to “blaming the victim.”

It is crucial to acknowledge that, though there was a time in which more reasonable grounds existed for unlicensed downloading, that time has clearly passed us by. When a plethora of options exist, as they do today, for sharing links to legally streaming full albums or free track downloads offered by labels, the claim that consumers are merely sharing when they knowingly look for unlicensed content is outright sleazy, like a mobster who is merely “borrowing” a semi-trailer full of merchandise.

Music is available to a far larger market than ever before and for far less money per unit. Any music fan in the early ’90s would have salivated to hear about what was coming: the $10 album and virtually unlimited access to streaming music for a minimal fee of $10 a month or less. It is important to remember that consumers in the ’90s complained that CDs were overpriced, not that they should be free.

But when a searchable online store suddenly exists where any and all music can be quickly obtained for free, why would you ever pay for any of it? Why would you pay, once finished convincing yourself that you’re engaging in a victimless act, merely sharing?

Call the unlicensed downloading of digital content what you will, but when we engage in the practice, by no means are we “file-sharing.” The term is the defensive expression of a guilty conscience. Breaking new ground in this discussion means putting such transparently self-serving terms to rest, lest we chart a needlessly long and futile path for civilization’s journey to digital discovery.

Just as Digital Determinists banked on the fuzzy notions of sharing to bend arguments over unlicensed downloading in their favor, the term “piracy” is used by government institutions and media companies to demonize and frighten consumers into compliance. Like “file-sharing,” “piracy” only obscures the truth about unlicensed downloading and hinders our understanding of the new digital world.

When I downloaded files from Audiogalaxy in the early 2000s, I was clearly in violation of the “exclusive rights” of creators guaranteed by copyright law, but was I a pirate? Some, like the RIAA and MPAA, would say absolutely; my unlicensed downloading amounted to theft. The RIAA infamously argued that every “pirated” song represented a “lost sale,” in order to buttress their mass lawsuits of the mid-2000s. If only determining the nature and costs of such piracy was that straightforward.

In April of 2010, the United States’ Government Accountability Office (GAO) released the results of a national study on the effects of pirated music, movies and books on the economy. Surely the organization could provide some definitive answers on the epochal topic of piracy, a controversy that had chased its own tail for over a decade.

At the conclusion of their study, the vaunted GAO winced, shrugged their shoulders, and scratched their heads in puzzlement. They stated that the “illicit nature” of intellectual property “theft” made it difficult to measure. They said some economic effects may well be positive to related industries, though “research in specific industries suggest that the problem is sizable…efforts to estimate losses involve assumptions such as the rate at which consumers would substitute counterfeit for legitimate products. No single method can be used to develop estimates…. Most experts observed that it is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts.”

Would I have purchased the music I downloaded for free online? Maybe, but I’ll never know for sure. Neither will the RIAA or the courts. One of the problems with embracing sloppy language like “piracy” is that it fails to draw a distinction between a college student who “pirates” a few albums online (and may very well be later paying for concert tickets, merchandise or the albums themselves), a bootlegger making a few dollars by selling pirated DVDs in your local metro station, and a Somali gang member who pirates an oil tanker in the Gulf of Aden, or the real problem for our purposes—pirate distributors like The Pirate Bay who sell advertising or subscriptions on the backs of exploited creators.

When we accuse someone of being a pirate, don’t we normally assume that person is collecting money somewhere in the process? The whole point of pirating goods is to sell them in the black market or collect a ransom. So a pirate isn’t simply a person who copies or steals a product, but also someone who seeks to profit financially from this violation of our laws and/or social contract.

Someone who makes illegal copies of cultural goods is engaging in counterfeiting—I don’t mean to obscure that fact—but calling that college version of myself a “pirate” fails the test of common sense. Such misapplied terminology weakens the word itself and, therefore, also its meaning and utility. By using the wrong word—the wrong symbol—as the keystone of any discourse, that discourse will eventually collapse from its own shoddy construction, leaving a messy pile of mortar that must be cleared before we can cross over to the gates to progress.

While authorities believe themselves to be playing tough, castigating the consumer pirates, they act out a futile scorched-earth policy with past and potential customers. By accepting the term, we begin a discussion on the terrain of personal attacks and accusation. If someone calls me a “pirate” or a thief, I quite naturally will become defensive.

“I’m not a pirate, I’m just sharing files. Nothing wrong with that. It’s not like I stole anything. The original still exists.”

Rather than openly engage in a conversation over those subtle, sticky issues of theft and consent, the accuser doubles down.

“Thief!” they continue. “You are pirating my goods. You are engaging in criminal activity and owe me money.”

Increasingly offended, my defensive posture shifts into aggression. The dialogue veers out of control into emotional, dysfunctional territory.

“Fine, I am a pirate. Well there are plenty more of us than there are of you and we will gladly destroy you and your old world business models if that’s what you really want. You can’t fight technology, fools. Arrr!”

If the attack is sustained for even a little while, the accused “pirate” will likely embrace the role. Given the choice, most cagey individuals—young or old—would prefer to be associated with pirates than with average, cog-in-the-machine consumers. The pirate is an archetype for adventure and creativity, ethics aside. When I say “piracy,” the murky outline of a ship slowly emerges. It creaks through a soupy fog as sea foam sprays into your eyes. When you open them, you see the skull and crossbones waving on high. The romance of rebellion is visceral and real as Black Beard boards the ferry of some dumb empire. He is a wild-eyed genius; misunderstood and ahead of his time. You don’t mind seeing him pillage the ship because, you figure, the crown that owns it has enough treasure as it is. The pirate is a symbol of individuality and vigilante justice—none of which applies to the mass disrespect and laziness that characterize unlicensed downloading. Thus, “piracy” lends an unearned veneer of romance to what is essentially a drab and bloodless practice: numbly violating creators’ rights while uploading and downloading bits of data to and from anonymous, isolated computer terminals.

“Arrr!”

You have the same old lawyers, executives, and politicians accusing half the world—it seems—of piracy. As a result, those who have violated the spirit and law of copyright have taken proud ownership of their newfound role, effectively neutralizing the attack. We have The Pirate Bay, the leaders of which have aggressively argued for their right to facilitate widespread unlicensed downloading, giving a pimply middle-finger to the corporations, governments, and supposedly wealthy artists who have tried—and failed—to shut down the site. The Pirate Party fights efforts to enforce copyright, under the pathetic rhetorical guises of free speech and privacy, from Sweden to Germany to Australia.

As time dragged on for the nautical explorers and the Renaissance phased into the Enlightenment, it became abundantly clear that finding an open water passage to Asia would be considerably more difficult than lazily floating up the Chesapeake Bay. They weren’t dealing with The New Islands, but with a New World. As this reality sunk in, it must have been a disappointment; difficult for some to accept, as if a great dream had been surrendered. But The New World was a discovery far greater than any water route, because it came with the promise of reality. With corrected maps, the explorers’ curiosities, dreams, and goals for the future were finally planted in firm soil, rather than the shifting sands of delusion. They could recognize the geography for what it was, not what they wished it to be.

The words “piracy” and “file-sharing’” have given us a discombobulated map for our exploration of the digital world. One term paints an inappropriately dastardly mask upon unlicensed downloading, while the other applies the grinning face of a town fool. Conversely, the terms downloading or free downloading are too general and imprecise. There is nothing inherently wrong with downloading, and free downloading is fantastic so long as it is being done with a creator’s consent. Illegal exploitation is accurate, but sounds shrill upon repetition (apologies, reader). What we are after is fidelity—a word that resonates with the truth.

The downloading of unlicensed digital content for free isn’t “piracy” or “file-sharing,” it is freeloading.

Freeloading is an ideal term because it describes the technical elements of the practice (free + downloading) while simultaneously exposing its behavioral nature. No more is it necessary to endure a clumsy debate based upon unsubstantiated blanket accusations of theft. No more are individual FreeLoaders so welcome to glibly pat themselves on the back for their digital sharing. The dictionary defines “freeloader” as “a person who takes advantage of others’ generosity without giving anything in return,” the generosity being that of the content’s creators, editors, and investors who have all taken real financial risks to produce the content for your benefit.

In the case of music, it’s true that FreeLoaders may end up paying good money at a concert or ponying up for artist merchandise. Neither excuses a fan from owning up to the flat-out disrespect shown to an artist when freeloading an album, knowing full well that an artist has put it up for sale and offered legal means of streaming or sampling the material. The term puts the individual consumer’s thanklessness in sharp relief and nurtures a culture of accountability for one’s choice of whether or not to pay. Use of the word is an acknowledgement of creators’ rights and the importance of their consent. Even if an individual is unable or unwilling to fight the temptation to FreeLoad an album, understanding the action as freeloading accepts the reality of their choice. This shift in perspective may form a foundation upon which the social contract, that respects the rights of creators for our shared benefit, can be reaffirmed in the digital age.

Unlike the term “piracy,” the use of freeloading avoids making casual accusations of criminal transgression. Rigid, zero-tolerance ideologies stifle communication and amplify conflict over the long term. So our goal should not be to eliminate freeloading. It will always constitute a particular node of Internet culture; an option waiting for those who seek it out. For every effort at tracking our actions online or encrypting content, someone—probably a highly intelligent, antisocial teenager or college student with nothing better to do—will look for a way to circumvent it. For every freeloading website or service taken down by governments, other services will pop up to replace them. In all likelihood, this cat-and-mouse game will continue, in one form or another, as long you and I go on breathing.

Because we will be living with freeloading—no matter how destructive we may believe it is to the long-term health of democratic, technologically advanced, market-based cultures—our goal must not be prohibition, but marginalization. The further freeloading is pushed to the margins—aided by acceptance of the term itself—the more absurd arguments in favor of freeloading will appear.

We may correct our crude, ignorant maps of The New Islands and find lasting progress, marginalizing misconception and sailing clear-eyed into The New World.