The Advantages of Illegalizing Torrents, Essay Example

An Ethical and Practical Case Against File-Sharing

Ever since Napster, the illegal sharing of digital media content has occasioned a profound social debate. Today bittorrents (“torrents”) are the main form of file-sharing, and they are hugely popular. Despite the popularity of torrenting, the case against file-sharing on both moral and practical grounds remains clear. Torrenting files is theft, and should be considered impermissible on ethical grounds. Torrenting also harms creators by depriving them of revenue. Finally, torrenting can expose people to viruses. Thus, torrenting should be avoided for reasons of principle, to keep from harming content creators, and to prevent infection with viruses.

Before discussing the ethics and hazards of torrenting, it is important to clarify what, exactly, “bittorrent” sharing is. Originally created by a Python-language programmer named Bram Cohen in 2001, since 2006 bittorrents have been the most popular form of file-sharing (Personal Computer World). Today many millions of people use torrents all over the world, and bittorrent networking has become the most popular activity, as measured by straight gigabytes of bandwidth used, on the entire internet. Torrents download small pieces of files from a variety of online sources at the same time. Torrenting is peer-to-peer (P2P) networking, meaning that private users provide the files that are copied and shared with others. The process is very user-friendly, and with the exception of a few torrent search providers, the torrents themselves have no user fees (Personal Computer World).

Bittorrent users “share” essentially all forms of digital media: music, movies, television shows, digital books, and software programs. Users are encouraged to “seed,” or share, their complete files (Personal Computer World). Torrents do have quality control procedures, which are capable of filtering out most corrupted or dummy files. The code responsible for torrenting is open-source, advertising-free, and lacks adware or spyware. This in turn means no single person or entity profits from torrenting (Personal Computer World).

This, of course, is the crux of the matter: torrenting may be described as “sharing,” but because no money changes hands, content creators are not paid for the music, movies, television shows, books, and software programs they have created. In other words, torrenting is theft, plain and simple, and it is treated as such by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and by many governments around the world (Personal Computer World). The fact that torrenting does not result in the appropriation of a physical product, but rather consists of the copying of digital files online, does not make it any less of a theft. There may be a practical difference between stealing DVDs of HBO’s Game of Thrones from Best Buy and copying files through a bittorrent; after all, stealing the DVDs means they are unavailable for the store to sell to someone else, while copying files does not destroy or erase them. Nonetheless, it is still theft: the appropriation of a product without paying the rightful owners of that product (Personal Computer World).

The above notwithstanding, many people who engage in file-sharing, aka piracy, defend it as ethically permissible. Here, a common argument is that file-sharing is “only” hurting so-called “big business” (Personal Computer World). The first thing to note about this argument is that it is plainly and simply wrong, as anyone who bothers to actually think about it should be able to ascertain. A very salient point here is that pirating a book published by Random House does not simply cost the company’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, a few fractions of a cent. Pirating the book harms the author by depriving them of a sale, something that should be more than sufficient reason to avoid doing it. Moreover, pirating the book harms the editorial staff, the layout staff, the marketing staff, even the cover designer. It also harms anyone else who is invested in the financial success of the book (Personal Computer World).

On a more fundamental ethical level, however, either theft is morally wrong or it is not. The “big business” argument is ethically bankrupt, a transparently self-serving and intellectually vacuous rationale for stealing. In essence, someone who uses this argument is saying “I like the content enough to want to own it, but I esteem the very people responsible for producing the content so little that I have no compunction about stealing from them.” A variation on this theme is the argument that successful content creators already have plenty of money. In essence, all that this argument boils down to is the idea that so many people have acquired the content in question by legitimate means that it no longer matters if someone acquires it by illegitimate means (Personal Computer World). This argument is just as ethically bankrupt as the “big business” argument, because it is the same argument, but it may be an even more intellectually vacuous variation of the argument. How much money is “enough” or “too much”? Who gets to determine that? Granted, J. K. Rowling has made so much money from her Harry Potter books that there is no way she will miss the revenues lost through piracy, but she made that money precisely because so many people did play by the rules and purchase her books (Personal Computer World).

Again: either it is morally wrong to steal things that belong to other people, or it is not. Granted, some thefts may be worse than others in terms of the impact they have: there is a practical difference between picking someone’s pocket and stealing the $35.00 in cash they have in their wallet, and stealing their identity so one can empty their life savings. However, the moral principle is the same: it is wrong to take things that belong to other people against their will, and without paying for them.

On a related note, it is worth drawing attention to the profound disrespect shown to content creators by pirating their works. Here one must also confront another self-serving argument in favor of piracy, namely that content creators should want to do what they do for the sake of art, rather than money (Personal Computer World). A fairly obvious counter to this argument is that piracy is essentially the action of an entitled child: ‘I want X content because it looks entertaining, but I do not want to spend my money to acquire it. Therefore I will simply take it without paying.’ Content creators invest their time and effort into creating their music, books, movies, television shows, and software programs. It is a profound act of disrespect to not compensate them for everything they have worked so hard to create.

It is also worth remarking on the profound hypocrisy of those who engage in file-sharing, but who are otherwise basically law-abiding people who expect the economy to work on the principle of compensation for goods and services. There are millions upon millions of people who engage in torrenting; it is reasonable to suppose that many of them are gainfully employed, and expect to be paid for their goods and services. It is an act of self-serving hypocrisy to take advantage of “shared” (stolen) content online while expecting to be paid for one’s own services at one’s job. Unless one is perfectly willing to labor to create things and have others help themselves without paying or asking for permission, one is acting by a double standard when one pirates content online.

Piracy forces the creators of digital content to confront the economic realities that those who steal their work deny or minimize. A clear example is the runaway blockbuster horror/comedy film Zombieland. The film earned about $85 million, over triple the production budget of $23.6 million—despite rampant online piracy, sufficient to establish it as the most torrented film on the whole internet (Personal Computer World). Taken at face value, this might seem to provide the pirates with a justification, no matter how intellectually and ethically shallow: the movie was still a success! The reality, however, is thatZombieland writer Rhett Reese has stated that thanks to the revenue lost to piracy, the prospect of a Zombieland 2 is now very much in doubt. It would be easy for the piracy apologists to cry Hollywood greed, while denying their own greed in stealing the film, but that impressive-sounding $85 million needs to be weighed against costs for marketing and promotion. For a Zombieland 2 to seem like a viable endeavor, Outlaw explains, Sony was probably looking for the numbers to hit the triple-digit millions. Significantly, this would have been very easy to accomplish if only the million or so people who pirated the film had paid for it instead (Personal Computer World).

A final practical argument against torrenting is the prospect of viruses. This is a weaker argument against the practice than the preceding ones, but it is a practical argument that is worth at least a mention. Granted, plenty of other activities online also carry the risks of viruses; also granted, there are safeguards on torrenting sites (Personal Computer World). All the same, the risk is still there. The torrent model entails encouraging random users from all over the world to upload files for people to click on and download, and new users are popping up on torrent sites all the time (Personal Computer World). One can take one’s chances, but in combination with the preceding arguments, the case against doing this seems clear.

Torrenting is not only illegal, but unethical, and the arguments in favor of it fail on both ethical and practical grounds. Taking things that belong to other people without compensation or permission is theft; the medium, such as digital files, is irrelevant. It is unethical even if it “only” harms moneyed interests, and the argument that it is permissible to harm moneyed interests relies on absolutely outrageous hypocrisy. Fundamentally, online file-sharing takes advantage of the hard work and inspiration of other people without compensating them for it. It also causes very real harms to content creators and other people who are invested in the success of various types of content. Any person who cares about doing the right thing should avoid file-sharing; so should anyone who cares about continuing to have excellent content to enjoy.

Works Cited

Personal Computer World. “The Torrent Becomes a Flood.” Personal Computer World (2007): n. pag. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 2 Jan. 2015.