Piracy, good or bad?

          Lawrence Lessig’s writings about Piracy are very interesting because after weighing the benefits and downsides of peer to peer sharing, he eventually arrives at the conclusion that it is not wrong. The definition of piracy is this; “Commercial piracy is the unauthorized taking of other people's content with a commercial context.” This definition is being warped and taken advantage of by even the radio itself. Technically, whenever the radio plays a song, the radio station gets listeners and thus makes a profit off of playing that artist’s song, but they only have to play the composer of the song in order to avoid a lawsuit. This hardly seems fair, because if a popular song is covered by a different popular band, even if the radio gets thousands of new listeners due to their playing of the song, the band actually performing it doesn’t make any money except through selling the rights to their songs. This fits in with the definition of piracy since the bands work is being  used in a commercial context and they are making nothing from it. This radio piracy phenomenon also  fits right in with Lawrence Lessig’s argument in Free Culture because he argues the point that piracy is beneficial to the artists since it spreads their work to a wider audience and allows for their fan base to grow. As Lessig puts it, “Every important sector of Big Media today was born out of a kind of Piracy.” (Lessig, 53) Lessig also mentions the benefits of Piracy as allowing users to find and download content that has lost its copyright and thus is unavailable in stores. This makes old artists or writers avoid becoming obsolete by keeping their work in a readily available state, and allows for even the rarest of old albums to be uploaded on a p2p sharing site and be maintained.

                There are many artists who understand how popular p2p sharing is, and especially recognize its benefits. One such artist, who is also an actor working for a major television network, is Donald Glover (AKA Childish Gambino). Glover originally profited from online sharing by becoming part of a comedy sketch group that gained thousands of viewers from Youtube. They gained so many viewers that they created their own web site and grew in popularity even more. I remember when some of their videos were all that kids my age would joke about, and quotes from their sketches were known by anyone my age with a computer. The next time I saw Glover was on the show Community on NBC, and I was amazed. The sketch group had gained enough popularity that Glover was able to make it onto an NBC show. The way that they were able to make it so big was through a type of Piracy, since the people who uploaded their sketch videos onto Youtube were not even always affiliated with the group. They allowed for them to upload their content, however, because it widened their audience. They realized early on what Lessig also noticed, that by allowing others to spread your work for you, you are basically getting advertised to different audiences for free. I loved the show that Donald Glover acted in as a major role, and then was even more enthused when I heard that he also rapped and had a musical identity, Childish Gambino. He has allowed for almost all of his music to be released on a blog account, but has asked for no money. He is allowing his own music to be shared online for free on this blog;

http://www.childishgambino.blogspot.com/

It’s a genius way of spreading his music, since after hearing about him, people have little reason not to get his music since it is free and easy to download legally. Thus is an example of how Piracy can help make an artist popular, and gain enough fame to make it into major corporations like NBC.

                Without the ability to share music online through peer to peer sharing, there are tons of television shows, music albums, and movies that would not have gotten much recognition, but thanks to the internet’s ability to spread things to large audiences with ease, these artists, filmmakers, and other beneficiaries are able to “make it big.” Besides, artists have no good reason to be bothered by peer to peer sharing, since the only people that lose money because of it are the labels that have already purchased the rights to the artist’s music anyway. Artists make a tiny percentage of what the labels make off CD sales, so the Artist mainly profits from going on tours and gaining more and more popularity and becoming worth more to their labels. As was the case with Donald Glover, artists can develop a huge fan base through Piracy, because all it essentially does is provide them with free advertisement. After understanding how the media industry works and makes profit, it is hard to not agree with Lessig’s argument that Piracy is beneficial. Especially once the fact is learned that when buying a CD, you’re supporting the label rather than the artist themselves, and since the laws make it illegal to make mixtapes to give to your friends or spread (as we heard about in the Civil War within Sony), the buying of a CD doesn’t really help the artist become more recognized.