Online piracy is practiced nearly everywhere. If someone wanted to watch the classic Tyra Banks movie Life Size and had no luck finding it on the myriad of paid streaming platforms, they could easily break the law and acquire it for free using a system that allows user-to-user sharing of files: torrents. Often, people get away with torrenting. In fact, the practice is so prevalent that most governments do little to enforce it. But beyond legality, what good can piracy be used for?
It would be hard to find a college student who has never partaken in pirating. Someone without the financial means to pay for Netflix, Apple TV, and Disney+ may have, at one point, used pirating software like BitTorrent to download media. Even students able to afford said services may be tempted to pirate a digital copy of their expensive Organic Chemistry textbook. Doing so would not even be that difficult. Any content that exists online has the potential to be stolen by someone. While the motivation behind piracy is usually financial, critics would be quick to point out that poverty is not an excuse to break the law so freely. While that is valid, cost is not always a factor in pirating, and the practice can actually be used as a way to support art.
Pirating started to dip in popularity back in the heyday of Netflix. For a fraction of the cost of cable, people could view countless titles whenever they pleased, without computer viruses or legal repercussions. Nevertheless, that allure has since lost its luster as more and more streaming services popped up since. Nowadays, content is spread across numerous platforms, and getting subscriptions to them all could rack up a bill that rivals good old cable. Because the market is so competitive, each streaming service scrambles to find its edge by investing more in popular titles. This may sound harmless at face value, but the true, underlying victim in all of this is unpopular art.
Life Size starring Tyra Banks and Lindsay Lohan is an early 2000s film that underperformed at the box office but remains a nostalgic classic. No streaming service in Korea carries it, as of writing this piece, and using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) does not help in accessing a country where it does exist. So, the remaining options are either illegally streaming or downloading a copy. A movie starring two of these once-A-list actresses being completely inaccessible without breaking the law is unsettling. However, the more pressing issue surrounds the incredible art in the world with less-famous names attached to it that are at a higher risk of disappearing forever.
When a title is not generating enough revenue, streaming services will often remove it. If a removed title was made within the past decade, it has very poor chances of having a physical copy, such as a CD. If no one has the physical form of this piece, then pirating is the last chance to obtain it, and even that is not foolproof. Torrents that do not have any “peers”, meaning people who have the file already downloaded, are considered “dead torrents”. Once a torrent dies, it can never be brought back. Hence, if a fantastic show did not generate enough revenue on Netflix, for example, and was then abandoned by the people who originally downloaded it, no one will be able to discover it moving forward. This future is not too far away, and it will be devastating for all art that does not find its audience. It just may be that increased internet piracy is unpopular art’s last hope.