Guilty Pirates, Line Up Over Here
I almost titled this post, “Wut?”, but decided against it. It was, however, my initial reaction to this ArsTechnica story, Feeling guilt over P2P use? Piracy Payback wants to help. From the article:
Feeling a sense of remorse, contrition, guilt, shame, and self-loathing over all that unauthorized peer-to-peer downloading you’ve been doing? Salve that stinging conscience by giving some cash back to artists!
That’s the pitch behind Piracy Payback, a website that collects donations from downloaders and distributes them to rightsholder organizations in Europe and North America (where much of the content originates).
The basic idea seems to be: if you download, and then you feel guilty, you can give some money to the artists you’ve “stolen” from by giving money to Piracy Payback, which will cheerfully pass it along to the artists. Except the basic idea is not the one that has been implemented. Piracy Payback does not give money to artists. It gives money to “rightsholder organizations.” This is not, in any way, the same. Will this money in any way filter through to the artist you “stole” from? Not likely. Why not? Because you don’t, you can’t, tell them which artist you stole from (just the medium you stole from, if you want to list it, choosing from music, film, television, software, gaming, or all of the above). We’re not even sure which rightsholders organizations cooperate with the site. Any “trickling down” of revenue to the relevant artist or creator would have to be happenstance (artists might as well play the lottery). What you’re really doing is giving money to the organizations that might later sue you for copyright infringement. Just melts that guilt away, doesn’t it?
Why would anyone do this? Let’s look at one possible reason after the jump.