In 2004, the British Federation Against Copyright
Theft teamed up with the Motion Picture Association of America to create this public service announcement
that, depending on your age, you for sure remember seeing on most commercial DVDs. [INSTRUMENTAL ROCK MUSIC] Its attempts to deter the act of illegally
downloading copyrighted material, what we of course call “piracy,” backfired to
say the least. With its overdramatic editing, the ridiculous
comparisons to much more serious crimes, and just h
ow “in your face” it was on a marketing
scale, the commercial just became a laughingstock. It inspired tons of memes, parodies, and even
an urban legend that the music in the ad itself was stolen! Additionally, piracy rates actually went UP
throughout the 2000s, and according to research published by the Information Society, it is
believed that this PSA may have even been RESPONSIBLE for that, creating a sort of Streisand-Effect. As it turns out, in the world’s greatest
plot twist, people don’t
like being told what to do, especially when it’s this…obnoxious? I mean, come on, comparing downloading a movie
to STEALING someone’s TV? It’s obviously NOT the same thing…Right? Well, many sectors of governments all around
the world do seem to think they are quite comparable. The War on Piracy has been a contentious conflict
since…the beginning of time, it predates the internet. It’s just that the internet changed the
game completely. A skill reserved only for the elites with
years of experienc
e and craftsmanship, could now be learned and practiced in just a couple
of minutes, with just a click of a button. It was made clear that even in these modern
times, piracy was not only here to stay, but it was only going to get stronger. Much, much stronger. And lots of people weren’t happy about that. But regardless of where you stand on the subject,
it is clear that the growing prevalence of piracy is part of a deeply rooted issue. It’s not something purely motivated out
of insubordination,
but instead the result of a widespread systemic problem, with many
feeling that the burden and costs of legally obtaining a product don’t always outweigh
the calculated risk of just stealing it. Perhaps it’s the companies who are the problem,
not the pirates! And I think even on some more abstract level,
the act of copying these materials, in a weird way, connects us more to them. Because it often gives us that introspection,
that opportunity to observe all the moving parts that go into creating
a great work of
art, allowing us to see just how human it really is. Ugh! There’s just too many ads online! Thank God there’s never ads on any of MY
videos…and that’s because I use Opera. ;) Opera is a web browser designed to make
the online experience tailored to you. Especially with so much of our internet presence
today being tracked and bombarded with ads, Opera does away with all of that. Just one click and you can block ads completely. It’s all built-in so there’s no extensions
needed. Wh
at I really love is that Opera has a VPN
that is built-in and completely free of charge and unlimited to use! The other day I was actually at a coffee shop
outside of the country and the Wi-Fi that I connected to was not allowing me to see
YouTube comments. The network had some kind of security feature
called “Restricted mode” that was turned on. But all I had to do was turn on the VPN and,
boom, my comments were back as before! But it also has so much more. It also comes with Aria, the browser’
s own
virtual assistant. You can ask it any questions, provide any
prompts, and Aria uses real-time information from the web to provide a clear solution. You can also organize everything through “tab
islands” which enable you to both safe screen space and simplify switching back and forth
between pages. It also includes a music player as well as
an integrated messenger tool attached to the sidebar with a variety of different music
and messaging services to choose from. Opera has made browsing th
e internet SO much
easier for me and now it is my main browser that I use. And if you use the link in the description
you can download Opera completely free and get started using it right away! A special thanks to Opera for providing a
fast, yet secure and distraction-free online experience. There really isn’t a definitive answer to
when exactly “pirating” started other than the fact that, for as long as humans
have been capable of creating and selling things, there have always been people findi
ng
ways to obtain them through cutting corners: someone we call a “pirate.” Like the many grave robbers of the pharaohs
in ancient Egypt, or those who robbed Roman ships of their cargo of grains and olive oil. But how do we know the difference between
a pirate or…just a thief? Is there really a difference at all? This is quite a controversial question for
a lot of people and you will get many different answers. A huge portion of them will say “no, there
is no difference. Theft is theft.” But oth
ers will argue that for it to considered
“piracy,” it largely depends on the reason behind the theft that’s taking place. Historically speaking, “piracy” has always
been founded on some kind of social or economic inequality. And this couldn’t be more true than during
the Golden Age of Piracy, around the 17th century. This was a time where English farmers were
having their land taken away by the rich, leaving them no other choice but to find work
in the city. This of course led to overpopulation
in these
areas and therefore created much worse living conditions. The rich were getting richer, and the poor
were getting poorer. The only recourse left…was to do something
about it. It was clear at this time that working for
the system was a losing battle, and the only to make up for what they lost…was to get
it all back. And so, they pillaged and plundered all the
booty they could find, and didn’t give a hoot. “Drink up me hearties, yo-ho!” But as governmental policy changed and living
condit
ions for the less fortunate improved, the need for this kind of piracy eventually
died out, and as technology got better and society became more civilized, the philosophies
and customs of what constituted piracy needed to change and reflect that as well. The modern take on piracy was now different
from the antiquated sea ventures of the past. What if there was a way you could steal, without
stealing? That was the main concept that made the practice
stand out. With piracy, instead of stealing wha
t someone
already has, you just “make a copy” of it either for yourself or to be distributed. Everyone wins; it is a victimless crime. This was actually quite common with how MUSIC
was pirated back in the 1950s. Theoretically, you could make a negative molding
of a vinyl record, poor hot wax into this mold where it would assume the shape of these
grooves, and once the wax dried up, you had a new record that you could play back on a
turntable. Although a common misconception and technically
*poss
ible*, this method was pretty much never used. Because these copies were never identical,
the playback sounded TERRIBLE, and the materials required often costed more than the records
themselves. It was just not commercially viable. Instead, music was pirated through a cheaper,
much more *interesting* way. If we learned one thing from Edison’s phonographs
from the 19th century, wax is not a very good medium for storing music. But you know what *strangely* is? X-Ray film! And you didn’t even have
to pay for it! Just go to any hospital and start digging
through the trash! Music pirates cut this material into a circle,
burn a hole into the middle of it with a cigarette, and then use one of those old school phonograph
recorders that would carve INTO THE DISK the music that was being played nearby. These became known as “ribs” or “bone
music” as you could visibly see the X-Rays on them, some of these look incredibly painful. Bone music became very popular in the Soviet
Union, and while the s
ound quality of the end result wasn’t great, it costed next
to nothing to produce, so it didn’t really matter. And throughout the 60s and 70s when 8-track
tape recorders, VHS, and Betamax was becoming popular, this only got easier. Like a song you’re listening to on the radio? Tape it. Don’t want to miss the next Dr. Who episode? Just tape it, but make sure no one hijacks
the broadcast in the process. And this required much less skill and provided
more mediums of entertainment than something lik
e a RIB disc, and naturally the popularity
of tapes blew up; everyone started using them. Technically, the majority of people were now
pirating. And because the convenience of taping was
SO great, there was a growing concern that people would stop buying music or whatever,
because they could always just tape it. It was going to hurt the industry. This even led to a Supreme Court case (Sony
vs. Universal) specifically regarding the taping of television broadcasts, where it
was decided that taping
was fine as long as it was for personal use and these copies weren’t
sold for profit. In fact, most networks didn’t even care
that their programs were being taped, including Mr. Rogers who even testified about it! And so, this ruling essentially became the
legal precedent for how copyrighted material should be handled. Until something called the “computer”
showed up. Ever heard of it? And during its fledgling phases, the tech
community quickly established an attitude and culture for how persona
l computers should
be used, specifically subscribing to the idea that “computer information should be shared
and openly accessed.” Many people understood the true power such
a machine had and felt that there really shouldn’t any barrier to entry for it, and perhaps that
should apply to copyrighted content? This idea compounding with the fact that computers
were just so new that people didn’t really understand them, there were essentially no
laws regarding computer piracy at ALL, making it a digi
tal wild west. But this would change with the Computer Software
Copyright Act of 1980, putting computer programs under the same legal protections as “literary
works.” You are free to access these programs at any
local libraries that supply computers, you could even make your own copies of these programs
at home for PERSONAL use, much like with tapes, just as long as you did not sell them or distribute
them on a large scale. Heck, the law didn’t even care if you “gave
a copy” to a friend, thanks
to the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. It’s just not worth wasting time or resources
on something so small. But then, along came the internet. As you know, with the internet, computer capabilities
grew exponentially, and online, ANYBODY can be your friend. Rather than going to a friend’s house to
get a copy of that album you really like, now you have 10,000 friends who could give
you a copy, and you don’t even have to leave the room! The options for obtaining music grew with
computers as well.
If you wanted to tape a song, you typically
had to wait for it to show up on the radio, and even if you did rip it directly from the
album or single, the quality often wasn’t as good, as we demonstrated. Not only did “digital” ripping keep sound
quality virtually identical, it was much faster, hundreds of copies could be made in seconds,
and you could send ONE copy to multiple people! The only thing left was to actually make it
easy to access these songs, so that even people with no knowledge o
f computers could do it. And so in the 1990s, you have a little program
called Napster. Napster helped popularize something called
the P2P protocol, short for “peer-to-peer.” This was particularly clever from both an
economic AND legal standpoint. Rather than hosting the music themselves like
traditional download sites do, Naspter would simply refer to ANOTHER Napster user that
did in fact have that music file and you would then download it directly from THEIR computer! Not only was it cheap sin
ce Naspter didn’t
need all this bandwidth to host all these files, but they were technically off the hook! Because they weren’t the ones hosting the
files, they simply “knew a guy who knew a guy.” The popularity of Napster skyrocketed! It was insane! SO many people were using it. Being one of the first P2P programs to become
mainstream, it taught more uninformed people about how the internet was being used, and
even significantly contributed to online culture, much like how YouTube does today! I
f you grew up in the 90s and early 2000s,
you probably remember a lot of people, maybe including yourself, mistaking the song “Sex
and Candy” as being made by Nirvana, not the one-hit-wonder post-grunge band Marcy
Playground. You can thank Napster for that! In addition to the lead singer’s vocals
being similar to Cobain’s, someone uploaded the song to Napster’s index and made a typo,
and the misconception has existed ever since! Now the entire story of Napster deserves to
be its own separate vid
eo, so I’ll just give you the gist of everything that unfolded
after its start. Naturally, the recording labels felt that
this system really just wasn’t fair. I mean, they weren’t getting paid for this
sharing of the music, like at ALL. And so, Metallica, Dr. Dre, and other renown
recording artists SUED Napster for copyright infringement! This was a very controversial story at the
time, and even other successful recording artists thought the whole thing was ridiculous. “Kids want to listen to mu
sic, you know? I don’t think bands should be concerned
with making every penny that should be squeezed out of every thing.” And by the early 2000s, the United States
government ordered an injunction to terminate Napster’s indexing server, which effectively
shut the service down. Although Napster’s file-sharing activities
were now history, the program set an example for how file-sharing was going to exist online
moving forward. Soon, other programs would start popping up
such as GNUtella, LimeWir
e, and even an entirely new protocol, BitTorrent, would show up in
2001. I’ve already made an entire video on how
torrenting works, so you can check that out if you want to learn more about it. Now what made these programs different from
Napster? How were they immune to the copyright police? Well, overall, these programs didn’t provide
any database of copyrighted content. Instead they simply provided the tools NEEDED
for P2P file-sharing, which could also be used for a million other things that
are completely
legal to download, like free programs, public domain music, etc. It was now the responsibility of the user
to find these databases. That’s what places like Demonoid or Pirate
Bay were for. In fact, these programs generally condemned
the pirating of content on their disclaimers. Napster was basically like if you had a program
like uTorrent that had the Pirate Bay built into it. Obviously, you can’t do that, it’s endorsing
an illegal company. These companies didn’t do that, so there
’s
a lot more plausible deniability. Additionally, because of the new Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, “safe harbor” laws made the UPLOADERS liable for copyright infringement,
not the company, just as long as they were reasonably putting effort into fighting piracy. But even if these companies were to be pursued
by governments, they were designed to be decentralized, meaning they used thousands and thousands
of different P2P servers, unlike Napster which only used one. So if one of these server
s legally were shut
down, another could just pop right back up, effectively becoming a game of whack-a-mole. And as online technology got better, internet
speeds and bandwidth increased, which meant people could now pirate much more sophisticated
things, not just music! This included movies, video games, computer
programs, just about everything under the sun. And because all these companies were coming
up with ingenious loopholes around these new laws, leaving the government pretty much out
of o
ptions, they essentially resorted to “scare tactics” that made piracy look unappealing,
which is why you had ads like this showing up. Then they started taking other interesting
routes in fighting it: through something called “illegal numbers.” Yes, you heard that right. There are certain numbers that you are not
allowed to say, write down, or even own. Because these numbers are used as “encryption
keys” for accessing copyrighted work. As we’ve discussed many times on this channel
before, in ord
er for files to be sent online, they have to demodulated into something tangible,
like a string of numbers or code, in order for it to be reassembled on the other side,
and certain numbers represent certain copyrighted works. I am going to use a very simple example of
this. Let’s say that I want to copyright this
image of myself. It is not available on the internet, and the
only way you can access it is by paying me. Well, if someone were to buy this image from
me, upload it to the Canvas of Bab
el, they could get this REALLY long string of numbers
that represents that image. So if they copy and paste this number and
send it to somebody, that other person could now go on the Canvas of Babel website, paste
in that number, and access my image without even paying for it. And if someone’s online activity isn’t
encrypted and I can somehow see them distributing this number online, I could sue them for damages,
thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But this just makes things so compl
icated
and muddy. People don’t respond to blind authority
and bossiness, they respond to positive reinforcement. You know what truly helps in fighting piracy? Compromise. During the height of Napster, Apple decided
to take this newfound easy way of accessing music, and capitalize off of it, with its
“Rip. Mix. Burn” campaign. Basically, they worked with the record labels
to find a LEGAL way to provide users the convenience Napster had. Albums at the record store were often $15,
$20! What if the
album sucked? Now you can’t get your money back. Well, with Apple’s new program iTunes, you
could buy individual songs for just $0.99! Then, you could take all these songs you just
bought, rip any songs off of CDs you already own, create any arrangement you want of these
songs, and then burn them onto a new CD! And you could do this as many times as you
liked, because you already bought the songs, you don’t need to buy them again! iTunes would then EXPLODE with the release
of the iPod. You no lo
nger needed CDs, you could thousands
of songs in your pocket! The convenience was so great and cost SO cheap,
over the course of time, the general public didn’t really see a ton of reason for pirating
music anymore. And then, of course, websites like YouTube
started popping up. Although the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act had already been in place for some time, there still wasn’t a whole lot of legal
precedent backing it up. So naturally, the early days of YouTube are
just filled with pirated
movies, tv shows, songs, everything under the sun. But even as YouTube started cracking down
on these copyright issues and providing tons of original content, and as streaming offered
a super reasonable priced alternative to cable…it was actually quite enticing for a lot of people
to just…give up piracy. They were willing to pay just a *little* bit
to have all their entertainment in the palm of their hand. There was a compromise, just like with the
iPod. It’s about seeing your audience and findi
ng
a solution to their problem, rather than just telling them what to do. The government didn’t understand this and
as a result proposed one of the most controversial bills in online history: SOPA. Short for the “Stop Online Piracy Act,”
SOPA and PIPA, were bills that would allow the government to completely shut down or
block access to any website for any instances of copyright infringement, even just one! It would also allow for companies to cut funding
to certain websites or even have their l
inks removed entirely, if they felt they weren’t
doing a good enough job fighting copyright. Sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload, and a bunch
of others were getting shut down at around this time and the optics just did not look
good. SOPA at face value sounds pretty reasonable,
but many felt that its power could easily be abused. If they can block sites for copyright, whose
to say they won’t block websites for other reasons, like certain political affiliations! Now the story behind SOPA is CRAZY,
so I want
to save it for another video, but many people felt it was a HUGE threat to free speech. Ultimately, SOPA and PIPA were never passed,
but this did not stop corporations from making, well, one-side decisions, both legally and
commercially. SO many people started using streaming for
its convenience, that these companies decided to gradually up their prices. I mean, they already have the customers after
all. What once seemed very affordable and worth
it was now becoming more of what existe
d before. It was cable, but with extra steps. But then it started going beyond that. The prevalence of streaming has essentially
made any medium of entertainment obsolete. Often, people can longer go to the store and
buy DVDs of certain movies even if they WANT to, what many people are calling the death
of “physical media.” This is a HUGE problem, and it’s not even
just because of the convenience factor. Due to licensing terms, certain movies may
not be available on ANY streaming services, and w
ith physical copies no longer being made,
they are basically unwatchable. There have even been reports of people alleging
that their virtual DVD purchases disappeared! Despite already paying for it! Imagine buying a DVD, and having it disappear
off your shelf. These issues have led to growing concerns
of the idea that future customers will “never truly own anything,” but instead just subscribe
to it. There was a recent online post mentioning
that the movie 28 Days Later is currently not availabl
e on ANY streaming or in any physical
retail copies. Outside of some second-hand purchases on eBay
or craigslist, it is now an extinct film. And it’s with all these troubles and with
the rise of encryption technologies like VPNs, that we are, once again, seeing piracy and
physical media return. Ye come seeking adventure for salty ole' pirates, ay? That wasn't in the script I just, winged that. By making any desperate attempts to earn as
much money as possible, companies have ended up ironically,
turning customers away. And as a strange secondary result, pirating
kind of enhances our relationship with the media in question. Because it gives us that introspection, that
shows just how artificial it all is. Whether it’s through the grooves of a record
or a string of numbers that produce an image, There’s nothing really here. We’re observing a bunch of arbitrary patterns
that, when presented in their intended form, allow us to prescribe meaning to it, and that
meaning can often be life chan
ging. It really shows how human it is. But there’s also that component of being
able to say and believe that you truly own something. It is a big reason why vinyl is making a comeback. While its certainly more convenient, you don’t
think about the mp3 that’s streaming on your computer. It’s just kind of there, and if you want
to get rid of it, you can just click it away. A record is permanent. It is always there taking up space in your
life, reminding you that it’s yours, and always will be. It
allows us to turn the abstract into something
tangible, something we hold in our hand, something we can appreciate, whether it’s the artwork
of the album cover or just the fact that it can physically exist in our lives. Of course we can obtain this kind of meaning
by NOT stealing, and I’m not saying that you SHOULD. I am simply acknowledging that this is just
an unexpected byproduct, and with a continuing rise in costs and an effort to eliminate physical
media, this inequality is only going to b
ecome more noticeable and piracy will continue to
grow. Piracy is not going away. So, why worry about it? Combatting it in the wrong ways will just
make it stronger. Focus on the greater good. This video is not in defense of piracy. It is quite the opposite. If anything it is a request to the corporations
to also do their part in fighting piracy, and that is through making their prices fair
like they used to be. This is the only way you can truly help in
minimizing the download of copyrighted co
ntent. Don’t make this one-sided, make it a win
for everybody, much like how the iPod did. Want to truly fight piracy? Then everyone needs to do their part, the
right way. And also, supporting me on Patreon fights
piracy too. Just go to patreon.com/nationsquid. You can also buy me a coffee. That helps too. For a better world. A special thanks to my patrons and channel
members for making this video possible. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe
and click the
notification bell so that you never miss a future video.
Comments