Feb 11 JDN 2460353

I have written previously about how ridiculous it is that we refer to the unauthorized copying of media such as music and video games as “piracy” as though it were somehow equivalent to capturing ships on the high seas.

In that post a few years ago I suggested calling it simply “unauthorized copying”, but that clearly isn’t catching on, perhaps because it’s simply too much of a mouthful. So today I offer a compromise:

Let’s call it “copytheft”.

That takes no longer to say than “piracy” (and only slightly longer to write), and far more clearly states what’s actually going on. No ships have been seized on the high seas; there has been no murder, arson, or slavery.

Yes, it’s debatable whether copytheft really constitutes theft—and I would generally argue that it does not—but just from hearing that word, you would probably infer that the following process took place:

1. I took a thing.
2. I made a copy of that thing that I wasn’t supposed to.
3. I put the original thing back where it was, unharmed.

The paradigmatic example of this theft-copy-replace sequence would be a key, of course: You take someone’s key, copy it, then put the key back where it was, so you now can unlock their locks but they are none the wiser.

With unauthorized copying of media, you’re not exactly doing steps 1 and 3; the copier often has the media completely legitimately before they make the copy, and it may not even have a clear physical location to be put back to (it must be physically stored somewhere, but particularly if it’s streamed from the cloud it hardly matters where).

But you’re definitely doing step 2, and that was the only part that had a permanent effect; so I think that the nomenclature still seems to work well enough.

Copytheft also has a similar sound to copyleft, the use of alternative intellectual property mechanisms by the authors to grand broader licensing than is ordinarily afforded by copyright, and also to copyfraud, the crime of claiming exclusive copyright to content that is in fact public domain. Hopefully that common structure will help the term get some purchase.

Of course, I can hardly bring a word into widespread use on my own. Others like you have to not only read it, but like it enough that you’re willing to actually use it—and then we need a certain critical mass of people using it in order to make it actually catch on.

So, I’d like to take a moment to offer you some justification why it’s worth changing to this new word.

First, it is admittedly imperfect; by containing the word “theft”, it already feels like we’re conceding something to the defenders of copyright.

But by including the word “copy” in the term, we can draw attention to the most important aspect that distinguishes copytheft from, well, theft:

The original owner still has the thing.

That’s the part that they want us to forget, that the harsh word “piracy” leads you towards. A ship that is captured by pirates is a ship that may never again sail for your own navy. A song that is “pirated”—copythefted—is one that not only the original owners, but also everyone who bought it, still have in exactly the same state they did before.

Thus it simply cannot be that copytheft takes money out of the hands of artists. At worst, it fails to give money to artists.

That could still be a bad thing: Artists need to pay bills too, and a world where nobody pays for any art is surely a world with a lot fewer artists—and the ones who remain far more miserable. But it’s clearly a different sort of thing than ordinary theft, as nothing has been lost.

Moreover, it’s not clear that in most cases copytheft even does fail to give money that would otherwise have been given. Maybe sometimes it does—a certain proportion of people who copytheft a given song, film, or video game might have been willing to pay the original price if the copythefted version had not been available. But typically I suspect that people who’d be willing to pay full price… do pay full price. Thus, the people who are copythefting the media wouldn’t have bought it at full price anyway.

They might have bought it at some lower price, in which case that is foregone payment; but it’s surely considerably less than the “losses” often reported by the film and music industries, which seem to be based on the assumption that everyone who copythefts would have otherwise paid full price. And in fact many people might have been unwilling to buy at any nonzero price, and were only willing to copytheft the media precisely because it didn’t cost them any money or a great deal of effort to do so.

And in fact if you think about it, what about people who would have been willing to pay more than the original price? Surely there were many of them as well, yet we don’t grant media corporations the right to that money. That is also money that they could have been given but weren’t—and we decided, as a society, that they didn’t deserve to have it. It’s not that it would be impossible to do so: We could give corporations the authority to price-discriminate on all of their media. (They probably couldn’t do it perfectly, but they could surely do it quite well.) But we made the policy choice to live in a world where media is sold by single-price monopolies rather than one where it is sold by price-discriminating monopolies.

The mere fact that someone might have been willing to pay you more money if the market were different does not entitle you to receive that money. It has not been stolen from you. Indeed, typically it’s more that you have not been allowed to exploit them. It’s usually the presence of competition that prevents corporations from receiving the absolute maximum profit they might potentially have received if they had full control over the market. Corporations making less profit than they otherwise would have is generally a sign of good economic policy—a sign that things are reasonably fair.

Why else is “copytheft” a good word to use?

Above all, we do not allow our terms to be defined by our opponents.

We don’t allow them insinuate that our technically violating draconian regulations designed to maximize the profits of Disney and Viacom somehow constitutes a terrible crime against other human beings.

“Piracy is not a victimless crime”, they will say.

Well, actual piracy isn’t. But copytheft? Yeah, uh, it kinda is.

Maybe not quite as victimless as, say, marijuana or psilocybin, which no one even has any rational reason to prefer you not do. But still, you’re not really making anyone else worse off—that sounds pretty victimless.

Of course, it does give us less reason to wear tricorn hats and eyepatches.

But guess what? You can still do that anyway!