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AUSTRALIA

The people power of Game of Thrones pirates

  • 14 April 2014

Last week's Game of Thrones series four premiere revealed Melbourne as the pirate capital of the world. An analysis published on the website TorrentFreak shows Melbourne, followed by Athens and Sydney, as the top city in the world for downloading the show without paying.

It's debatable whether it is technically illegal to download media content from sites such as Pirate Bay, rather than purchasing, in this case, a $35 per month minimum Foxtel subscription. Choice magazine says it's a grey area, but gives qualified sanction to consumers who circumvent the strategies of online media companies and retailers that play hard ball to squeeze consumers in small markets such as Australia, where it's easy to create monopolies. 

With this series of Game of Thrones, the Murdoch half-owned Foxtel negotiated exclusive, or monopoly, rights, so that it could charge what it wanted. But Foxtel knows that it doesn't really have a monopoly because it is competing against the likes of Pirate Bay. 

The downloaders make a 'people power' claim to moral legitimacy because they think Foxtel's business model undermines the access they believe they are entitled to. Meanwhile Foxtel corporate affairs director Bruce Meagher says 'that's like justifying stealing a Ferrari on the basis that the waiting list is too long or the price is too high (maybe it's because you don't want all of the features)'. 

Perhaps they're both correct. 

It appears Meagher fails to appreciate that the human act of telling and listening to stories is essentially organic, and that the ability and right to buy and sell stories cannot be assumed. Since the beginning of human civilisation, stories have defined our identity and brought us together as social animals. Stories are not a cultural form of terra nullius, and human nature will not allow them to be wholly appropriated by business interests.

What the downloaders don't understand is the difference between a story and its telling. Story tellers don't own the stories but they should be paid for telling them. 

The commodification of stories is in itself a product of human industry and the dignity of work. It's fair to expect us to pay a reasonable price to access particular 'tellings' of stories. Media production creates work for actors, writers and producers, and expands our horizons with a greater range of stories. It is a matter of regret that globalisation has killed many languages and folk traditions, but a fact of life that mass media products
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