Cowardly "Pirates"
I believe I know one more reason why file-sharers can’t be pirates: Pirates are supposed to be at least somewhat brave! Yes, this is partially a joke, but the joke is mainly on us. Very few file-sharers are willing to stand up publicly for the practice, which generally creates stark contrasts between the results and the comments when any site has a poll on this issue. And the very low number of people who have uploaded their pictures on filesharer.org only supports this theory even more.
I’m quite sick and tired of often being the only one arguing with copyright holders and their defenders when there are such polls or articles. There are polls where most people, sometimes even the vast majority, clearly support file-sharing and oppose punishing those who take part in it in any way, but if you read the comments you could think it’s exactly the other way around!
This time it was a poll on Care 2… Once again, I was pretty much left to argue the case alone until I got too frustrated. Yes, the results do appear much tighter than I’m used to seeing, but that “it depends” option might have something to do with it. Considering my stance on this issue, that’s what I should have picked too, but I picked “no” in order to make a point, plus that I assumed it was mainly about the regular kind of file-sharing, for personal and non-commercial use. So I was hoping for more of those who picked “no” and “it depends” to speak out, but once again very few did and not even those really argued the case.
How are we going to change these laws and overthrow the greedy publishers if we won’t even speak out? They can just pick us off as they see fit and we won’t even stand up for each other! They couldn’t do that anymore if only we’d band together. We’re probably talking about hundreds of millions of people worldwide, so if even 10% would make a stand in public they probably couldn’t do much about it anymore. But what am I saying about 10%? Even 1% would probably be good enough, though that might be quite risky.
It’s just a question of numbers in the end. They can sue and even jail one person or perhaps even one thousand, but if one million would speak out to support them, revealing themselves as being guilty of the same “crime”, there’d be nothing they could do against us anymore. You can’t jail millions! And if those millions decide to truly fight for something they believe in, no influential individuals or authorities could hope to go against their will. The problem is that publishers know that terrorism works and file-sharers allow it to be so, staying quiet and only breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn’t them when another is being charged of this “crime”…
