Like it or not, internet piracy exists. So author Matt Mason asks: why not embrace it as a solution rather than a problem? As told to Laura Dannen

Matt Mason, the UK-born, Brooklynbased author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, says practically everyone’s a pirate – even Apple boss Steve Jobs. Give piracy – which he classifies as a youth-culture movement – another five years and it will run the way of punk and disco: it’ll go mainstream. (No! The horror!) Are we doomed to witness the extinction of the word ‘copyright’? Or is piracy just a new business model, a response to flailing film and record industries? Mason talks TOS through the pros and cons of plundering information.


Piracy has its good and bad side, says author Mason

What exactly is the pirate’s dilemma?
Part of what I talk about with people is the struggle over how we treat intellectual property and other people’s information. It’s not just [about] people with information that could be pirated, but that we can act like pirates ourselves. The question is: is this good or bad? In my book, I argue both. It’s very much a double-edged sword.

Okay, let’s take one side of it: in Singapore, downloading on iTunes is prohibited. What would you tell a local audience?
It is? Really? Yup.

You can only download music if you have a foreign credit card.
I had no idea. Is there anything else you can use?

If you know where to go. There are sites like BitTorrent…
That’s crazy! I would say go use BitTorrent then. You see, when the market’s not working properly, that’s when pirates manifest. It’s the perfect example. When you look at how downloading has wreaked havoc on the record industry for the past ten years, it’s been a comedy of errors. People reached out, tried to work together…[but] record labels couldn’t work out how to co-operate. So Steve Jobs stepped in with iTunes – which is essentially a pirated copy of a pirate music website as it’s based on Lime- Wire. Although it’s been updated, what it does is essentially the same as LimeWire. Not everyone wants to use pirate sites, but they’ll pay for convenience. They trust iTunes and don’t worry about getting viruses from it, so people are happy to use it.

Have you received any backlash from the record industry?
Not really, which is surprising. I thought big movie studios and the record industry would be throwing fruit at me. I actually get more backlash from pirates for saying that [piracy] is something that needs to be co-opted by the mainstream, because it started as a type of youth culture. It’s a way to try out subversive or challenging ideas, and if society picks them up, they become mainstream. It happened with punk and disco…the record industry is good at co-opting movements. A lot of young people are passionate about sharing news and information, but a lot are just in it for the stealing – like some people are into graffiti just to vandalise. Ultimately, it’s a movement, a culture, and we need to legitimise it.

How long will it take for piracy to go mainstream? Do you see it happening in the next five, ten years?
Definitely five years or less. The watershed moment is when someone noteworthy with something to lose puts their album online for free. If an up-and-coming band does it, we don’t care because they have nothing to lose. But when Radiohead does it, it stands out. It’s already happening. The pirates on Canal Street [in New York City] are complaining that people are downloading more at home and it’s cutting into their business! You know things are bad when pirates are complaining about other pirates. I think we’ll get to a point where a film comes out in the theatre, on DVD and online all at the same time. Hollywood needs a Radiohead moment, too – like a Harry Potter film getting released online.

You were in Singapore recently to speak at The Substation’s summit on the future of arts and culture in Asia. How’d it go?
It was great working with artists and people who use, make and distribute content here. Piracy is kind of okay if you’re an artist. If someone prints a copy of the ‘Mona Lisa’ and hangs it on their wall, it’s fine because for artists, the value is in the original work. Copies just increase the value of the original.

So in a way, piracy is the sincerest form of flattery?
Right. I agree that a lot of piracy is straight-up stealing, of someone doing something simply to make money. But there are unintended effects of piracy: people called Thomas Edison a pirate for creating the [gramophone]. Bands saw it as the end of live music, but then they found a way to negotiate royalties from the records that were made, and that was what started the record industry.

The Pirate’s Dilemma is available at amazon.com from US$16.50 (S$23.35).
For more on Mason, go to thepiratesdilemma.com.