Don't Download This Song

Or watch this music video.

I reacted to an argument in favor of IP piracy in class the other day, partially because it was one that I've often heard before and partially because it's one I've personally used in past arguments on this topic. Essentially the argument went that piracy exists as a reaction to high prices set by the music and movie industries for their product. If not for those high prices, more people could afford the product, and would be more tempted to spend money on it.

As I mentioned, I used to support this argument, with my former status as a mostly-unemployed undergraduate who would make, on a good month, about $150. Which, at the time was fine. The local network gave access to whatever other students were willing to share with the campus, ranging from wide arrays of recent blockbusters, full seasons of TV shows, terabytes of music, and emulated video games. This was before Hulu and before Netflix had become widely accepted on college campuses, so the common belief was that if you lacked the money to pay for these products anyway, it was a victimless crime. Indeed, the idea that the losses of the industry were based on "potential" market earnings helped spread the concept that organizations like the RIAA and MPAA were greedy bullies, which was backed up by the exorbitant lawsuits they inflicted on helpless college students who were easy to sympathize with.

However, the flaws in the "expensive/greedy" argument are that it is very self-oriented and that it presumes that the vast majority of consumers engaged in piracy - including non-Americans - do so for the same motivations. Saying that something is too expensive is a subjective analysis and presumes that all media is equal; i.e. a recording of a guy playing the saxophone on the street is worth the same as one from an internationally recognized artist. Conceptually and objectively, they may be. However, from that standpoint, price should be a non-issue. The radio offers diverse, as well as free programming (ignoring satellite radio). One is not pirating to protest having to pay money for music, but because in their mind, some music is more equal than others. The question is not about what the media costs, but what one is willing to pay for the satisfaction of their subjective needs.

On this note...
It's important to recognize that artists and corporations are not making a product to entertain the user. They're making a (hopefully) entertaining product that the user will buy that will also promote a successful formula (not to mention investor funding) to continue to make profits. Personal satisfaction in one's work is an essential factor for success, but goes hand in hand with needs of survival. Indeed, lots of experiments in regards to letting the user set the price for the product may be dramatically lower than what the product needs to be worth to be profitable. Of note would be the independent video game "World of Goo" and its' 'pay what you want' experiment in 2009. The game sells at a $19.99 price point, but the most common price point for the "user's choice" experiment was $0.01 which equaled a negative profit with administrative fees by Paypal and bandwidth costs. In addition, U.S. downloaders were often less generous on average than other global users with dramatically lower state-GDP per capita figures.

It is within this context that I'm inclined to agree with Mattleart that piracy is less of a reflection of price as it is of increasing globalization. "One of the main attractions of pirate video networks," He explains, "was that they
offered, at reduced cost, easy access to the images of this transnational entertainment culture." (313) People have developed a yearning for these representations and extensions of Western "culture," portrayed in dramas like "Sex and the City" and "One Tree Hill," and want to be exposed to the images they offer. They want to be part of the global community at any cost, even if it's not a community they're supposed to have action to. "One of the main factors explaining the spread of video to countries of the South and the East from the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s," Mattleart states, "was also that it gave people a way of bypassing state political control of the communications media." (314) People want this media and what it represents and are willing to pay for it, but have less of the means to.

Why are Brazilians willing to pay, on average $0.40 more on an independent video game than Americans, despite having half the per capita income? While one cannot, ipso facto, draw a causative connection, an argument can be made that it's more about the product's perceived representative, rather than perceived financial worth.