libertalia

or, the pirate empire

We have tried to be nice and we have tried to play fair, but the consolidation of everything under a few companies is just begging everyone to start stealing all the media they want.

first

Hachette v Internet Archive threatens the backbone of the internet and the initial ruling is, as always, in favor of corporations.

The Internet Archive, for those who don’t know, is a non-profit digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Things like books, movies, TV shows, and music. If you’ve ever used the Wayback Machine, you’ve used The Internet Archive. If the Internet Archive goes away, we lose the history of the internet.

Hachette is the third largest publisher in the world and they took issue with the fact that The Internet Archive does what a library does, which is to provide people access to books.

In this particular case, the issue is that The Internet Archive allowed unlimited access to books during the pandemic, which Hachette and other publishers didn’t agree to.

Publishers put arbitrary limits on digital lending through libraries. Rather than allow anyone who wants to use the library the ability to access the ebook of, lets say, Lord of the Rings, Hachette and other publishers put a limit on a specific amount of copies that can be lent at one time.

In essence, this mimics what we all know about libraries when dealing with physical media. If every copy of War and Peace is checked out, you need to wait until someone brings the physical book back to the library.

Of course, the obvious difference is that an ebook is just a file, endlessly replicable. If you have the file of an ebook, you can share it with everyone you know via email or text or thumbdrive or floppy disk or whatever.

Publishers will tell you that allowing people access to their books for free is bad, but you shouldn’t believe them. The videogame industry actually argued successfully that lending digital copies of games ruins their ability to sell games. This argument has not been successful for books, movies, music, or any other kind of media format, but the reason you can’t download a game from your library website is because the videogame industry lobbied heavily against it.

And it’s just undeniably true that every industry would prefer the same rules for them.

second

Netflix ranges from $6.99 (with ads) to $19.99 per month.

Disney+ ranges from $7.99 (with ads) to $10.99 per month

HBO Max ranges from $9.99 (with ads) to $15.99 per month

Hulu ranges from $7.99 (with ads) to $14.99 per month (you can add live TV and pay $69.99 per month)

Amazon Prime is either $14.99 per month or $139 per year.

With just these five services, you’re paying between $44.54 and $76.95 per month. Yes, this is cheaper than cable but not by much and you can sort of pick up and drop services as you want them, keeping you in a constant rotation of canceling and resubscribing to services based on what you think you want for the coming month.

Of course, if you add Paramount+ or Peacock or Criterion or Apple TV or some other service I’ve never heard of, this price continues to balloon.

Now, the unspoken deal made between consumers and media companies when Netflix first stepped into streaming was that we were willing to pay (and stop illegally downloading) for legal access to the bulk of available movies and TV shows.

As streaming has matured, the market has fragmented to where we are now, which is at near-cable pricing for the available media we want access to.

And then as streaming has continued to mature, the economics of it have become less feasible. Netflix and Amazon pay billions for content because they can and Paramount and HBO and Disney have a century of back catalogue to keep them afloat, but we’re already hearing about these streaming services downsizing or even giving up the rights to shows and movies made for their services.

If Netflix someday goes under, what will happen to the billions of hours of TV and movies created and produced by Netflix Studios?

If these shows and movies have never been released as DVDs or Blue Rays, this media becomes essentially lost.

Unless pirates got their hands on it.

third

Nintendo recently shut down its Wii U and DS stores, permanently locking digital only games on those consoles into purgatory. Playstation attempted to shut down their Vita and PS3 stores a few years ago, but backed down when preservationists brought enough attention to all that would be lost¹.

The Video Game History Foundation sees this essentially as an attack against game preservationists and the history of the medium.

You see, video game publishers, like book publishers, would prefer that you buy everything directly from them and they sure would prefer you to never have access to anything for free. The difference between video games and most other media is that games are newer and generally not thought of something as culturally important in the way that movies and books are.

And so the history of the medium and its preservation relies video game companies preserving their own pasts. Which they’re not necessarily interested in, as it turns out.

And I get it. Modern AAA video games cost hundreds of millions of dollars and half a decade to produce, so they want you, the consumer, to always be chasing what’s new. If you look back and see the tens of thousands of great games made over the last 30+ years that you could play, you might not pick up the newest Call of Duty. Along with that, keeping the stores up and usable costs money.

On top of that, carrying physical inventory costs money. And while some of us may wish we could buy a new edition of Chrono Trigger’s SNES cartridge without paying absurd prices for something that may not actually work, Nintendo and/or Square Enix are not interested in holding stock for something 30 years old that may only sell a few copies per year.

But this also means that the history of video games is being lost.

Currently, it relies on the generosity of private collectors, pirates, and organizations like The Video Game History Foundation, which basically relies on private collectors and the legion of people who have ripped the digital guts from games for the last 40 years and uploaded them online.

And, really, the only way, now, to play many, many games is to download an emulator illegally and then illegally find a digital copy of the game you want. And that’s only possible for games that have been gobbled up by pirates, which means some amount of games are simply lost.

libertalia

I was a preteen when Napster changed music and I was mostly an adult when streaming first began, so I’ve spent most of my life stealing media but also paying for it legally.

Through file sharing, I discovered many of my favorite bands of all time. Through that exposure, I’ve now spent quite a significant amount of money on my favorite bands by seeing them live and buying their merchandise. The same is true, too, for filmmakers I’ve discovered through file sharing.

Access to music, movies, and books through libraries or through outright theft have opened up the entire world to me. It’s enriched my life and I’ve become, intentionally or not, an evangelist or at least advocate for these various artists.

And I believe this is the trend for most people.

There are exceptions, and we all know what they look like, but here’s an example of when I worked at Blockbuster:

Blockbuster had a movie pass, wherein you paid a monthly fee for unlimited rentals, but only one or two out at a time. Some of these dudes (all of them dudes, honestly) would come in multiple times per day and admitted to me that they weren’t watching the movies, just ripping them onto their harddrive.

These dudes were collecting rather than consuming.

Were they interested in movies?

I don’t know. Maybe. But they were way more interested in collecting and storing, hoarding.

And so, yes, there are people who just torrent and steal in order to hoard, but most of us downloaded Radiohead in the early 2000s as the beginning to our love story with Radiohead. Fill in the blank with an artist who changed your life.

Culture thrives on ease of access. And while I stopped torrenting when I got Netflix 15 years ago and especially once I got Spotify nearly 10 years ago, I also was in a position to pay monthly fees for access.

My suspicion is that teenagers never even slowed down illegally acquiring media, though I also suspect most of them switched to legal means once they got a job.

But there are always new teenagers and there is an infinite amount of digital media to pirate.

Which I bring up to explain that the infrastructure for piracy never went away or fell apart. If anything, it’s likely sturdier than it was before, though more reliant on VPN usage.

So I won’t exactly tell you to steal but I also gotta tell you that you may not have a choice, depending on what you’re looking for.

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Started publishing my serialized novel Emrys the Fool yesterday. You can read the first chapter right here.

You can listen to me narrate my own work. And, yes, I know—that’s just the way my voice sounds.

I’ve wanted to serialize a novel for a long time. Been thinking about it literally for years, so it’s fun to finally hop into it. I must say, I may still just be thinking about it if not for J David Osborne and Kelby Losack who are serializing their own novels over on their Patreon.

And now for some free books:

• Free Horror Stories

• Free SF

1. They did, however, stop updating the stores making them nearly unusable.