When my favorite torrent site, isoHunt.com, was back in the news thanks to yet another lawsuit over illegal downloading, I was reminded of a post on their blog from a few months ago. The poster quoted from Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture to define five kinds of file-sharers, and asked which kind most isoHunters were.
The choices were:
A.) You file-share instead of purchasing media
B.) You file-share to sample media you wouldn’t otherwise buy blind
C.) You file-share to get media that’s still in copyright, but no longer sold or sold at far too high a price
D.) You file-share to get media that’s not copyrighted or that the copyright holder is giving away
E.) You file-share to replace media you’ve previously bought―either you lost the original, or it was too crippled by DRM to be usable
The results of this little poll were quite interesting. Choice A (40%) was the runaway leader, but still less than half of respondents, and followed fairly closely by B (23%) and C (23%). D (3%) was predictably last, but there are many other ways to get non-copyrighted media. E got 8%. (And I couldn’t help noticing that there was no “all of the above” option―I have to imagine many, if not most, file-sharers have done all of these.)
More than half these anonymous, self-selected, admittedly file-sharing respondents described their sharing as not replacing a sale (i,e, not A), or what I would call non-malicious. The reasons behind that non-malicious file-sharing expose a backlash―intentional or not―against age-old media company practices that attempt to manipulate and deceive their customers.
If the RIAA and others really care about file-sharing, they’ll take an honest look at why their customers do it.
