Ahoy! Thar be Pirates Everywhere

04-28-2008 | 06:00 PM EST

These are dangerous times. From a Canadian Parliament member worrying about Canada's flagging global image as a result of its current copyright laws to China's recent "self-imposed" nationwide crackdown (more here and here) to the Bush administration's new "priority watch list," it seems that everywhere we turn these days, we're told that pirates abound. They're illegally trading music and movies in cafes, libraries, and at work. They're stealing our jobs and generally hurting our economies. They're threatening our health and safety. And the worst part is, they're anyone and everyone! Long gone are the innocent days when we believed pirates to simply be disgruntled, socially awkward young males sitting in dark bedrooms in front of brightly lit computer monitors. No, we now know that pirates are organized crime syndicates, children, grandparents, soccer moms, college students, politicians, and every other demographic you can name. They're even hired by large corporations to do their bidding. (Which, ironically, is a little like the historical relationship between nautical pirates and privateers, I guess.) Simply put, there is much to fear.

Oddly enough, what I find myself fearing more than the piracy itself are the lobbyists and mouthpieces of the IP owners that are selling this message of fear. Now, I'm not in anyway trying to make a case for "piracy." For one thing, I think that the term itself is practically ambiguous at best and meaningless at worst. "Pirates" and "piracy" seem to get conflated with other (possibly similar) words like "counterfeiters," hackers/crackers, and much more. For another thing, through these bait and switch linguistical tactics, it's easy to get mislabeled as being in favor of something entirely different than what you really do support. For example, does the person who supports the call for relaxed laws on reproducing music and movies also, by necessity, advocate for black market pharmaceutical creators and distributors? I don't think so, but I think some other people do.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) have spent a lot of time, money, and other resources over the course of the last few years doing what they can to "educate" the world's youth on the evils of copyright infringement. To be fair, I get why copyright issues are of paramount concern to them, and I get why they want to target future generations as early as they possibly can. And, in all honesty, I don't even have a problem with it when they argue that copyright infringement hurts their bottom line. (To people on the pro-consumer side of the argument, it's not about economics as much as it's about personal liberty and freedom.) What does bother me greatly, though, is what I perceive as the purposeful campaign to confuse the language, pepper the message with fear, and advocate for stricter laws with harsher punishments across the entire spectrum of "piracy." What good could come from living in a world where people are so afraid of being mislabeld that they're afraid to speak their minds? Or, how about a world where dissenting voices are simply excluded from the debate? Unfortunately, both of those already happen all too frequently, as in the case of the copyright scholar, Howard Knopf's, uninvation to the INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REFORM: INNOVATION AND THE ECONOMY program.

In the end, my message is really pretty simple: don't let fear inform your decisions. By reacting quickly and emotionally to exaggerated and vague claims, you lose part of your own power to make up your own mind and decide what you really believe. The sky may be falling, but is it the underground bunker makers telling you that?

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