MAKE THE TUNELUBBERS WALK THE PLANK
By Carrington Vanston - June 19, 2004
http://www.carringtonvanston.net/archives/tunelubbers

The RIAA have forced Verizon to hand over the names of people suspected of pirating music. I'm not going to rant about privacy issues, because my stance on internet privacy has always been a simple one: there isn't any, get over it.

I do take issue, however, with giving the title of "pirate" to people who distribute copies of music files. That is a dysphemism and it's being used by the RIAA as part of a marketing campaign. To accept and employ that term for such actions is to grant a basic premise underlying the RIAA's arguments. I do not accept that premise.

Quick vocabulary lesson: every year out in the open sea, even in these modern times, people have their ships targeted and boarded by real pirates. Pirates are people who rape, murder, and plunder on the open water. That's what a pirate is.

A pirate is not some kid living in his parent's basement trading Eminem MP3s over Kazaa.

The RIAA wants to call them pirates because it's a nice scary word with dark undertones. It makes the file traders sound like a bunch of burly, tattooed sea dogs who clench knives between their teeth and who are bent on the overthrow of all that is decent.

Of course, the RIAA didn't initiate this usage. Decades ago software hackers brought it on themselves because it sounded so much cooler than "Person whose combination of Commodore 64 ownership and puberty has removed any chance of a social life, thus resulting in sufficient free time to crack the copy protection scheme on this floppy disk."

And now it has come back to bite us on our collective spotty asses.

File-traders are not pirates. It's easy to argue that they're not even thieves, depending on how you define property and its loss. They are simply copiers and distributors.

I wish the judge who has to sit through the next woe-is-multi-billionaire-me RIAA lawsuit would call them to task on their use of the term pirate. I'd love it if they were forced to use a more accurate term, such as "alleged unlicensed distributor."

Maybe "unlicensed distributor with an eyepatch." I might give in on that one.

If they get to pick their term for us then we should get to pick our term for them. And that term should be just as prevalent in the media as theirs has been. I would suggest, in keeping with the theme the RIAA has itself already instituted, that the RIAA are referred to henceforth as slavers.

Bear with me. I think I can back that up:

Any sufficiently loose system of allegory which permits the equation of the term pirate with file traders is equally useful to justify an accusation of slavery for an organization like the RIAA. They make their profits off a combination of an hierarchical price-control system and the exploitation of people indentured to them; they defend the exclusivity of their trade routes and operations with all the force available to them; they compensate their production force a miniscule fraction of the product's sale price, often with little or no guarantee of compensation at all; and the metaphors go on and on.

I think we should hold out for media headlines like "Music Piracy Ring Broken Up By RIAA Slavers." That seems equally fair--and equally ridiculous--for both sides.

Of course, calling the RIAA slavers probably seems offensive, but that's just because we're not used to it. It's no more outrageous than the RIAA calling file traders pirates. What's good for the goose...can pull alongside the gander and fire broadsides at it in preparation for boarding.

I ain't gonna play Sun City, matey!

Carrington Vanston
carrington@carringtonvanston.net

[This article is released to the public domain.]