"Piracy" Should be Legal

First of all, the word "should" implies an action and the word "legal" implies a question of public policy, so this should be evaluated as an issue of policy. Since Pro did not provide a criterion in their constructive speech, the criterion for this round should default to net benefits, which is the standard in competitive debates on public policy, used by debate leagues such as CEDA, NFL, AFA, and NPDA. Net benefits is a good standard for debate because it allows us to consider all of the potential good and bad consequences for a potential policy change and weigh them against each other. I will be attempting to prove that the world will be worse off if all intellectual piracy is legalized. I shall begin by answering Pro's contentions and then I will present some contentions of my own. I agree that the situation of copyright is very different now than in the 1700's. Back then, copying a creative work took a considerable amount of effort, even for publishers. But now, it is very easy to copy something electronically - it just takes a few clicks of a mouse. Copyright has changed from something that encourages the development of creative works into a practical necessity for many people's economic livelihood, since copying is so much easier now. On their first contention "Creative works are an abstract existence akin to property": They say that the government takes away people's intellectual property in violation of the Constitution because copyright exists for a limited time and the work goes into the public domain. That is not true. Copyright in the United States lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years (1), so if copyright protects the right of authors to the intellectual property they create, authors retain ownership of the property they create for their entire lifetimes, without the government taking it away. They say that the Constitution disagrees with the idea of intellectual property, but it does not. There is nothing in the Constitution that contradicts the belief that someone can own the right to profit off an idea. On their second contention "Every shared copy is a lost sale": They admit that piracy could have had a role in the 3% decrease in lost revenue. yet they are incorrect when they imply that a 3% decrease in revenue is insignificant. It actually is significant. Industries usually increase their revenue rather than decreasing it, and 2005 was a good year for the economy. Total US GDP grew by 3.3% in 2005, according to data from the World Bank. Since the music industry should have grown by 3.3%, this is actually a 6.3% decrease in revenue that could have been caused by piracy. The music industry operates under a low profit margin, where only 11% of their revenue actually becomes profit(2), so 6% of their revenue could be an amount equal to up to half of their profit. Since Pro cites the RIAA as a source of information about statistics regarding music piracy, I shall do the same. According to the RIAA, global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year, 71,060 U.S. jobs lost, a loss of $2.7 billion in workers' earnings, and a loss of $422 million in tax revenues, $291 million in personal income tax and $131 million in lost corporate income and production taxes (3). These statistics can also be applied as an answer to their third contention, "Sharing is Stealing". On their fourth contention "If sharing isn't illegal, artists won't create culture": It is true that artists would still create culture if copyright was abolished, but they would create less culture. Pro cites examples of free intellectual property that exist, but that does not cover all creative works. Most authors of books do not start out wealthy, and cannot put in the time that is necessary to write books of the quality necessary to be bestsellers if they do not expect a financial reward. In a world without copyright, piracy would become so common that a lot fewer people could expect to earn a living as writers, resulting in a significant reduction in the amount and quality of new literary fiction being published. Some people who are willing to spend eight dollars for a book on Amazon and Barnes and Noble would be stuck reading free work of inferior quality that is made as a hobby rather than a profession. Writing a high-quality novel is a full-time job, and most authors can't be expected to do it for free. On their fifth contention, "Current copyright law also allows the copyright holder an unjust control over the viewer, reader, or listener of their work": Their claim that copying the artist's non-commercial property cannot harm the artist is impossible to prove, because what is harmful to the artist depends on the artist's situation, intentions, and feelings. For instance, a Jewish writer may feel harmed if his work is copied and used by Neo-Nazis. In most cases when an artist is creating art for non-commercial purposes they would not object to it being shared or copied, so this is a very minor issue. I have created works of fiction for free and I usually am fine with them being copied, except for one time when I showed a story I wrote to a friend before I was going to submit it to a creative writing contest. Had my friend shared it, the people he shared it with could have plagiarized it and submitted it in the creative writing contest before I did, which would have caused me harm. In their conclusion, the claim that "We need to consider both sides if we are to achieve the equal balance that the United State's framers wanted for copyright, and today we are leaning much too far toward the copyright holders" actually weakens their case, because they are arguing that piracy ought to be completely legal, which would be an extreme step in the other direction, and would not consider both sides. They contradict themselves here. In order to evaluate this issue, we should consider the potential effects of a world where there are no intellectual property laws. In such a world, there would be much more piracy. It would be easier to do and people would be more willing to do it since they do not face the risk of legal consequences, and they are more likely to feel morally justified. According to the RIAA's analysis, piracy already costs 71,060 US jobs, and even more jobs would be lost if it became more common. When we pick up a book or listen to a song, we are just engaging in a leisurely activity. To the people in the entertainment industry, being able to make money from their work is not leisure, it is their livelihood. Whether or not capitalism is good, it is an undeniable fact that we live in a capitalist system, and in capitalism, goods and services are only produced if there is a financial reward for doing so. Without the financial incentive associated with copyright, the amount of culture produced would significantly decline. This would be particularly bad for books, video games, and other computer software. At least movies and music can be played in theaters or concert halls which cannot be pirated, but even those industries would be harmed. To conclude, based on the reasons I have given above, complete legalization of piracy would be bad for the world. 1. http://fairuse.stanford.edu... 2. http://www.billboard.com... 3. http://www.riaa.com...