Why Is Music Piracy Socially Accepted?
MP3s aren’t free and Piracy is, as of this moment and for want of a better word, theft. Is there any other crime people are so completely and disarmingly blasé about committing?
Almost uniquely among criminal offences, illegal downloading is considered normal and acceptable. On the internet, it’s even cool: look at the glee with which people joke about their torrents on Twitter. You can’t tell me there isn’t a grain of truth (or, more likely, a 2TB external hard drive bursting at the seams) behind all that snickering. It amazes me how open people are about it. So what’s going on? One explanation is that people view digital content as worthless, because it can be painlessly duplicated and effortlessly shared. It’s tough to get too worked up about infinitely replicable.
