Blog Assignment Week 9

In his book, Free Culture Lessig defines piracy that is just plain wrong as taking another person’s copyrighted material, copying it, and selling it. He mentions that there is no truly accurate way to condone this type of piracy, though there are a few arguments that could be made for it. The first that he mentions is the fact that the United States did not honor foreign copyrights, but this doesn’t really work since technically our law only dealt with American copyrights. Next he says that this piracy might be condoned since it does little harm to the industry, but this isn’t true in all cases. Finally Lessig shows how this piracy can often have a positive effect on the industry. He gives an example using Microsoft Windows. If a bunch of Chinese acquire Windows through piracy and use it then later on when those people actually buy software then they are more likely to buy Windows than any other software. In the end it is clear that these attempted justifications for piracy just do not work. In the end Lessig points out that this is still piracy, and it is wrong.
Lessig thinks that peer to peer sharing is a completely different case, though. First, he points out that peer to peer sharing is a means to escape the recording industry which has a monopoly on recorded material. He also explains that it is another exploitation of a new technology, and that one major difference is that the material being shared is not actually being sold. I do not necessarily agree with this because although the material is not sold directly sharers are usually required to pay some fee to use the file sharing software.
Finally, Lessig warns that we must decide how much peer to peer file sharing hurts the artist before we decide how to regulate it.