No, I don’t mean THAT kinda pirate.

I mean THIS kinda pirate:

Look, I’m against piracy, illegal bootlegging, and file-sharing of intellectual property, be it music, movies, ebooks, or whatever. But I don’t really want to argue about that right now. My confusion is about the motivation of the uploaders. I totally get the downloaders, I know why they do it (&, for the record, I HAVE DONE IT TOO, so I’m not holding myself up as some sort of paragon), they want something for free. That makes sense. But for every file that is out there, able to be downloaded for free, someone had to pay for it the very first time. So then why do they put it online? I mean, back in the old days, when everything was in some physical copy, that was different. If someone was selling bootleg CDs or DVDs, or even software pre-internet, they had an object, which they could then sell to others. But now on the internet, it’s just free. So where’s the benefit for that original buyer?

I mean, I’ve copied stuff for individual friends, and given it to them for free. Like I’ve made copies of some of Stacy Clark’s music over the years, to give away to friends to get them interested in her music. But that’s on a one-on-one basis. But I’m not going to upload her music to some file-sharing site so that anyone in the world can just download it. Then it’s like, I’m the chump who paid for it, while everyone else just got it for free. So I don’t get the point of that?

Then there are the special sites out there, dedicated to sharing various files (no, I won’t link to any of them), many of which offer “premium” membership, which allows you to download multiple files at once, much faster than if you just use their free service, but I can’t imagine that many people sign up for that sort of thing. The kind of folks who go to those sites are there in the first place because they don’t want to spend money, otherwise they’d just go to iTunes and pay there, and that’s safer.