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Pirate this article! You have my permission to.
Throughout my time in journalism my senior year, I’ve been very vocal about what has been happening to the internet. Things regarding censorship, AI, and media preservation, have all been topics I’ve covered.
One that has particularly interested me for a while has been piracy.
Compared to other crimes in regards to the rapidly progressing digital age, piracy is one of the most minor, yet it used to be taken incredibly seriously.
Back in 2004, there was a PSA (short for “public service announcement,” which is another article in of itself) about piracy made by the Motion Pictures Association with lines such as “You wouldn’t steal a car,” and comparing it to watching a movie outside of a streaming service.
And that’s the thing: As we’re halfway into the 2020s decade, should piracy even be considered a crime? Is it even worth classifying as such? We live in an age where there are many cybercrimes happening every day, but piracy seems to be the big scary crime that haunts the internet.
To understand piracy though, we have to define it and explain where it even comes from.
Piracy (or specifically digital piracy) is the act of illegally copying and distributing copyrighted material over the internet. This includes albums and music, video games, TV shows and movies, and published works like books.
On the surface, this seems pretty bad. “Taking intellectual property that doesn’t belong to you? That’s just cruel!” One may be wondering… if that person doesn’t know much about the internet.
Digital piracy isn’t equivalent to direct, physical theft.
Let’s put it this way: You buy a CD of an album from a store, just for someone to steal it right after you buy it. That is theft, because it’s technically your property, as it was paid from your own money from your own bank account, under your ownership.
Piracy in comparison is if the person after buying the CD uploads the audio to their personal computer and hosts it on a site like The Pirate Bay, making it available for anyone to download it without going out to buy the album themselves, physically or digitally or otherwise.
When you upload the media to be pirated in the first place, most people don’t even do it out of malicious intent. Nine times out of ten, people will upload media to be accessed by the general public for the purpose of preserving the art.
My favorite place to look for certain media is the Internet Archive, where people can, well, archive stuff from the internet. Webpages (I.E. the Wayback Machine), Flash games, and the like.
You look through the archives, no one is “taking” or “stealing” the original media. They’re simply posting it for other people to see. Oftentimes, the things people post to the Internet Archive are relatively hard to find, or even once considered lost media. Due to copylight issues, they would upload it to the archive for public viewing.
And that stirred into another subject when talking about digital piracy: Copyright law.
Copyright law is a fickle thing. The moment you make something, it can be registered under your copyright. Things like original properties for shows, cartoons, and even music. That is your song, your show’s episode, your photo, all under your copyright.
All this to say, there has yet to be a real case of piracy where people steal content and claim it as their own.
In the extra amount of research I have done for this article, I made and put flyers around campus (which you can take as well if you wish here), asking for student input about their knowledge on piracy, and if they think it should be considered a crime.
A select few didn’t even know what piracy was. And when they made their educated guesses on piracy, they determined that it should be equal to direct theft.
So, clearly people still think piracy should still be constituted as a crime, but why?
Well, we have to think about who, or what piracy hurts directly. So, say someone uploads a series of movies to a pirating website, while the movies at full DVD price are quite expensive. So, people flock to the website that is going to let them watch the movie for free. This, to an extent, hurts DVD sales. From there, it hurts the manufacturers, and then studios themselves that make a cut of the profit from those sales.
This also counts for movies that are premiering at theatres, and especially streaming services. Streaming services are growing notorious for predatory tactics due to an oversaturated market.
This only became obvious during COVID-19 as streaming services turned into a replacement for movie theaters. Even with lockdown protocols being lifted, streaming services are still a profitable industry, with record numbers as 83% of households back in 2023 were subscribed to streaming services.
So, how does this go back to piracy?
Well, in my opinion, it’s all about keeping corporations happy.
Think about it: So many streaming websites have many of the same shows and movies, while on the other hand, there are some movies and shows that exist on one streaming service. Most people don’t want to pay almost $100+ dollars worth just to watch maybe two shows and a movie across multiple different services.
And I’m only being somewhat hyperbolic with the prices.
Apple TV is $100 annually/$13 a month, Prime Video is $135 per year/$15 a month, Disney+ is $10 with ads, $16 without, and $100 annually. Hulu is $19 a month without ads, or, of course, you can pay $120 dollars a year. Netflix is $8 with ads, $18 for higher resolution across different screens (still with ads too), then $25 for “4-K ultra high definition” across 4 screens.
This is absurd. All this for a few movies and shows.
There is also a common discussion of language barriers when it comes to piracy. A commonly pirated media is anime and other pieces of foreign media. Certain dubs, or even just subtitled movies or episodes of a series aren’t available on most streaming platforms.
Not to mention, the argument for media preservation.
Many of these titles include their most popular shows on the site/app, titles such as “She-Ra And The Princesses of Power,” “Arrested Development,” and a TON more.
Titles were also quietly leaving the site back in 2025 as well, such as “Top Chef” and the entirety of “How I Met Your Mother.” Say what you will about these shows, for many, Netflix was, for a while, the only place you can even watch some of these shows. So, to have them removed from the service altogether is going to be disheartening for some.
So, if a supposed “streaming original” series gets removed from the only streaming website it was on, with little to no DVD or physical release at all, where else can you watch the show?
… Piracy.
That might be the only method to watch these shows.
And speaking of watching things, let’s talk about the infamous “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy PSA that was released all the way back in 2004.
The PSA was made by Warner Bros. Studio and marketed by the Motion Pictures Association of America and was released on June 8th of 2004 in theatres, and was released on home media on July 7th of the same year, all up until 2008.
As is the case with most PSA’s, especially those of the 1990’s – 2000’s variety, it was met with scorn and ridicule by advertising agencies, the ones that get paid to review PSA’s. It was also the topic of discussion for a Vice article, about how it only caused piracy rates to skyrocket. This just goes back to the “keeping corporations happy” argument I made earlier. It’s less about the movie itself, but rather them worrying about losing money. (Million dollar corporation, mind you.)
One of the studies it goes over, Torrentfreak, mentions how anti-piracy messages of the time only seem to focus on “dry numbers without putting these into context.”
It also further mentions other anti-piracy campaigns. One of which was an Indian anti-piracy campaign, but starred celebrities “whose net worth is estimated to be $22–$400 million dollars, in a country where the annual per capita income is a bit less than $2,000.”
So… the message only gets lost when you see it through the eyes of companies just trying to save face. It’s details like this that only prove why people still pirate.
You jack up the prices of the streaming websites, all just to remove content that would be hard to find on any other streaming service that’s charging almost double, even triple the price annually? The companies are just asking to be pirated at that point.
Besides, it’s not like the money is going to the actual producers, writers, and creative folks behind most of the movies, shows, and games that the main corporations produce, market, and distribute. They’re all shared between the movie theaters that host the movie(s) in that 2-3 month time span, the marketing team, and the studio itself. It doesn’t go to most of the employees directly.
It can also be a situation of morals and ethics. Disney is a prominent example of this.
The Disney brand name has been in the ringer lately. Box office fails, bad reception with their movies, extremely messed up and shady business practices, the works. I bring them up, because the creator behind one of their original animated series, Dana Terrace’s “The Owl House” tweeted the following statement in response to Disney’s sudden push towards AI generated content on Disney+:
“Unsubscribe from Disney+. Pirate Owl House. I don’t care. F**k gen AI.”
To have a creator openly advocate for the piracy of their own works makes sense in a vacuum, as due to copyright law and the world of TV contracts, the creators of their own shows don’t hold creative control of their own works. Instead, it is under the ownership of the studio that picked up the show.
The actual creators aren’t compensated for their work properly, and all the creatives that go into a show are remotely screwed over due to the multi-billion dollar companies wanting even more money from the hard work of the people that actually made the show.
One pirated episode isn’t going to hurt them… or will it?
A common argument against piracy is that it hurts the creatives and the corporations that own the movie. As previously established, the original creators were already screwed over when they signed over the rights to their shows, their property.
This isn’t even a TV thing. It happens in the video game industry, and the music industry as well. Creative industries are very easily prone to exploitation.
So, pirate their works.
Sure, you might be barely supporting your favorite artist, but it’ll hurt the companies more, and I guarantee you, they don’t need the money just for you to be hopping from streaming service to streaming service just to listen to a song, or to watch a movie.
Hit them where it hurts. Here, it just happens to be their wallets.
Because, no. Piracy shouldn’t be considered a crime. It’s just a piece in the muddy world of copyright law.
