So we’re in the middle of an organized boycott of Disney products because of their response to government pressure to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Great cool. Kimmel’s back on the air as I write this, so it looks like it might have worked. But honestly, who knows! Yay government overreach!
In those exact same conversations, though, there’s a commiserate amount of “I’ll just pirate xyz show I would normally stream” which is…eh…Even in a post in one of the comic subs on Reddit about how to use Libby to read trade paperbacks and collections, there’s a comment saying “if you’re going to go through that, just pirate it.” I saw a thread on Bluesky where someone said they weren’t going to “throw-in with Capitalism” just because “you want to sell a few more books.”
This reveals that underneath this surface level activism-via-spending, we’re still really struggling with the more complex ethics of art as a consumer good and source of income under the throes of capitalism.
Because saying a person should be appropriately compensated for their artistic labor shouldn’t be a radical statement in and of itself.
There’s been a conversation going on for a decade and a half about the way people feel entitled to digital content, even at the expense of the artist. At a large scale, we should always be looking for ways to increase access to art and, particularly, informative media. At an individual scale, though, any given, say, fiction book is a luxury item. Movies, video games, streaming services are luxury items. When you can’t afford them that sucks. Duh. Of course. But that’s why things like second-hand shops and libraries exist to fill those gaps. It’s why so many small creators seek out pay what you want options to better serve their customer base. It is what it is. You kind of have to face that truth in order to have this conversation at all.
In simple terms, piracy arises as a response to a lack of access, and that looks different for different creative industries.
The slew of musical theater recordings uploaded to YouTube under the guise of “slime tutorials” brought those productions to people who were never going to be physically able to go to the location to see that specific production, anyway. It’s really difficult to say that anyone actually lost money on those, and now they’re all mostly gone.
For video games, it was “common knowledge” for a long while that anyone who pirated a game wasn’t going to buy it anyway, so it didn’t really matter. Some data around DRM implementation suggests, however, that this isn’t the case at all. Instead, early cracks of a game lead to a measurable loss in revenue as the weeks progress. At the same time, not every game is available for purchase in every language market, and a cracked game may become the only access point. Piracy has also created archived versions of games that would otherwise be lost to time. So piracy, in this context, presents a double-edge sword: filling in a gap that doesn’t exist otherwise while still simultaneously hampering income that could be used to make more games going forward. In short, it’s complicated, but you should probably pay for shit if you can and really want to see a smaller studio succeed and make more games.
If you pirate a book, that’s very literally money denied the author. That’s royalties they never get. A big name author might be okay; a small or independent one is going to feel that hit really hard. A lot of independent authors require a pretty high number of sales to even break even on the overhead costs it takes to put a book out there on your own.
Say you have an indie author who’s currently relying on Amazon for distribution. Amazon was the only game in town for a long time, and is still very often the biggest driver of sales depending on genre. When your book sales are helping put food on the table, there is some very delicate risk management in moving to a new sales platform. You, as a reader, don’t want to support Amazon, so you don’t buy their book. Alright. It is what it is. You are more than welcome to make that choice; that’s why it’s such a tricky situation for everyone.
You still want to read it, though, so you pirate it. You’ve now fucked over that author more than you realize. Amazon’s web crawlers find that the text is offered for free and shut down that author completely on top of other penalties. You are actively engaging in harm on that author. You are making it actively more difficult for them to make art.
And every industry works a little differently in how that money flows from the large corporate studios to the artists who created a thing. Actors and directors make points on the back end of movies. Cable and network TV shows that don’t pull in enough advertising dollars might not get renewed. Even comic books writers and artists who make a flat per page fee still have to prove to some degree that they can make their parent companies money to continue to get work. And obviously there’s a whole bunch of other stuff happening in the background that creates successes or failures, but we as consumers are a variable in that. When you get through all the corpo bullshit, there are still artists at the bottom that your money is funneling down into. The details of ethical spending come down to navigating those logistics and figuring out how to close the gap between artist and third party distributor.
Are you savvy enough to actually pick through all that? Do you have enough knowledge of the system to account for the nuances inherent to it?
When faced with a media distributor boycott, the first thought shouldn’t be “I’ll just pirate it.” It should be “what is the alternate ethical method of consuming this while supporting creators that are suffering for decisions made by their bosses?”
At some point we all resort to piracy and other sort of borderline methods of access. It’s not about ideological purity. Watching a ten year old move on Soad2Day because it’s not on a streaming service is not the problem in and of itself. It’s about keeping in mind there are people behind the creation of the consumer art we partake in. It’s about understanding the extent of our power as consumers and how we’re all bent low under the yoke of capitalism together.
Numerically, most people trying to make money in creative and adjacent fields are your fellow working class. Even if you can’t full-throat support your favorite artist financially, you can, at minimum, do your best to limit your contributions to the system that exploits them.
Pixels and Pins Studio 