I know a lot of us, myself included, like to believe that piracy allows us to consume problematic media without supporting artists we do not like. But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product. HBO is absolutely keeping tabs on piracy of their show now and seeing our traffic the same way Crunchyroll used to keep tabs on pirated fan-translated anime back when they cared.
Also, there is a similar ethical zero-sum game with all other Harry Potter media and products. Normally we can buy on the secondary market if we need a hard copy to scan and rip but don’t want to support the creators. But almost every Harry Potter book in circulation is purchased by someone with intention to sell for a profit, and HBO is also likely keeping tabs on sales and resales of DVDs of the old movies. Every time money leaves your bank account for Harry Potter media, you are directly feeding the ecosystem which sustains the Queen of the TERFs.
It’s honestly pretty incredible how morally radioactive this one human is. Orson Scott Card is equally repugnant, but the Ender’s Game series doesn’t even have a small fraction of the market share of Harry Potter (IMHO this is the fault of that movie being just okayish, not good or bad, but that’s another topic.) Trump’s MAGA movement is comparable in badness, but there really isn’t much most of us can do other than voting and never shutting up about how unconstitutional the things he is doing is. Rowling really is comparable to Disney or Nestlé, and she’s just one person, not a whole company.
Right now, the only ethical way to consume Harry Potter is watching or reading movies and books on your copies that either:
- you obtained before 2020
- were given to you for free in some non-trackable way, e.g. offline or sneakernet.
There is no ethical Harry Potter consumption within capitalism. We will have to see if this changes once she is dead.
Capitalism is going to happen regardless of piracy. HBO is going to make the show regardless of how many people pirate it.
They don’t need to know either of those things
It kinda does, but that’s not really the point
Piracy is in a sense the purest form of capitalism. It costs slightly more than nothing to send a file over the internet, and so if the efficient market hypothesis was true everyone would be pirating all the time. The suits and the corpos know full well that their products compete with piracy’s offerings at the low, low price of free + a VPN or Usenet subscription or a 3D printer. The smarter corpos know that they can gague a market by keeping track of torrents of their movies/shows. We aren’t insulated from the free market down here just because we don’t pay for shit.
Piracy is anti-capitalism. And while it may cost you something to send a file over the Internet, it doesn’t necessarily cost me anything. And if capitalism is producing something and selling it for a profit, piracy is the opposite of that: taking a copy for free, regardless of the method. Thus: anti-capitalism
Just because of the method of piracy you happen to choose may cost you money doesn’t change those underlying facts. especially because it is perfectly possible to engage in piracy without engaging in capitalism whatsoever. just because in the example you have cited, you have chosen to commingle the two does not mean they cannot be mutually exclusive.
I think you are equating capitalism to money changing hands instead of the generation of capital. The glib version of my argument is “Piracy drives word-of-mouth advertisement which drives sales, therefore piracy increases sales.” Its obviously more complex than that, but I hope you see my position.
I don’t see the difference between the two things you just described, no… except for the circuitousness of the path of the profit/value generation. The end result is the same.
But the argument you’re making also makes a huge amount of assumptions about the individual versus about engagement in piracy by society in general. On the micro scale versus the macro scale. Is piracy of a particular piece of media ethical as an individual versus is piracy of a particular piece of media ethical at scale. The crux of your argument seems to be the value generation of “word-of-mouth“. So now you’re just arguing a matter of degrees and pedagogy.
So you’re not really arguing about capitalism or piracy at all, now you’re arguing about passing undeserved value, and the methods by which that is done and how piracy is being co-opted via capitalism.
And what this whole argument really is about is whether or not you can separate the art from the artist and still appreciate a piece of work, even though you find the artist repulsive. And none of this has to do with piracy at all, but whether you can find a way to consume an artist work without endorsing the artist. where piracy comes into the conversation is whether or not that is an acceptable means to that end, and people will always disagree on that.
The whole “capitalism” chestnut isn’t a means to untangle that because piracy is, as I’ve said, mostly anti-capitalism, and isn’t self reliant on capitalism, so the logic of that argument doesn’t really work out. It’s mostly down to personal opinion, and there really isn’t any logic to that at all.