Pirating

Pirate-One and Pirate-Two, two individuals with whom I interact with on a daily basis. For all intents and purposes they are my friends, and therefore they see no reason not to be honest with me about their activities.

Activities meaning pirating. Pirate-One has four file-sharing systems running on his computer; although these programs are capable of downloading any digital media, Pirate-One's specialty is music. With a high-speed internet connection to his home, he's capable of downloading an entire album in less than fifteen minutes. "It's all copyrighted, yeah," he says, "but albums these days are really expensive. iTunes is the cheapest outlet for buying music--but that's still buying. If you go to a retail store you'll probably find the average CD costs between ten to twelve dollars. All that money for three good songs? Forget it."

Pirate-One has over two thousand songs downloaded from his file-sharing programs. "I have four of them because it throws off FCC. They hire techies to browse these programs. The people who have the most songs in a playlist for sharing are the ones that usually get busted. That's why I have four, to divide the amount I have with each and also to increase my chances of finding a hard song. I also disable my sharing so that no one else can see how many songs I have."

Pirate-One chalks up prices and mediocre album content as means to steal music. Pirate-Two is similar in the fact that she sells bootleg films. With her digital moviemaker software and a high bit torrent, she's able to download a full film sometimes in less than ten minutes. She pieces together the parts of the movie in moviemaker and burns the copy onto a blank disc, making a complete bootleg film. Of the film that I watched, the sound and video quality was something I'd expect to see in a real DVD. "Going to the movies is ridiculously expensive. You go to watch a film on the weekend and the tickets are ten bucks. Then you have snacks to pay for, which are Disney prices. After the day is done you've spent twenty bucks. Most college kids can live off of twenty bucks a week!"

Pirate-Two sells her bootlegs to friends and acquiantances, but does no real mass marketing. She says it's fun to sell "good films" to people she knows cannot afford the high theatre prices.

Let's face it: most young adults have pirated something that was copyrighted, especially if they were around long enough for the Napster phase. These two pirates are only a representation of others who have not wanted to pay the high price for entertainment, and I assume those who do also pirate for this reason.