Piracy: Stealing or Sharing?

In my last post I made a key assumption, that piracy is stealing.  Recently I was in a conversation where someone challenged that assumption and made me think.

Laws around the world are, by and large, representations or codifications of our collective sense of right and wrong, our morals in other words.  In my previous article I built on the assumption that piracy was stealing and therefore bad and consequently laws would eventually catch up to technology and find ways to legislate enforcement theft related crimes online as well as they do in the real world and that would lead to a reduction in piracy.

However, if you think back to when you were young, at the same time we are learning that stealing is bad we are also taught that sharing is good.  From when we are tots we are encouraged to play nice and share our toys with our friends.  Sub-cultures such as the Grateful Dead live tape trading scene were created around the idea of sharing.  Current social networking trends are built around sharing what we are doing, pictures of what we are doing, what bands we are fans of, our favorite movies, etc…

Today there are millions of people sharing files online.  Are they all morally corrupt, choosing to be bad and steal?  Or are they morally sound, being good and choosing to share?  If the latter then perhaps what’s being called piracy today falls into the moral bucket of sharing (good) vs. the moral bucket of stealing (bad).  If that’s the case then the industry cannot expect laws to eventually catch up and enforce anti-stealing laws online as a way to curb piracy since laws rarely make illegal what the moral majority considers right.  This would mean that the whole industry needs to think about radically new ideas for how to monetize content.

Obviously just because everyone is doing it doesn’t mean it’s right or good, so this train of thought also has flaws, but in a follow up post I want to explore some radically new monetization models or concepts that might stem from the assumption that piracy is sharing vs. stealing.