The Conscience of a Customer

(after The Mentor, 1986)

Another one got sued today. It’s in every feed. “Streaming Giant Cracks Down on Piracy Sites.” “Studio Credits Anti-Piracy Push for Subscriber Growth.”

Entitled gamers. They want everything for free.

But did you, with your quarterly earnings calls and your retention dashboards, ever look at the person on the other side of the paywall? Did you ever ask who they were before you made them a pirate?

They were your customer. Start there.

I grew up with things I owned. A cartridge I blew into until it worked. A VHS tape copied off the TV with the commercials still in it. A paperback with a cracked spine and my name inside the cover. When I paid for something, it came home with me and it stayed home. Nobody in an office could reach into my room and take it back.

Entitled kid. Thinks he owns things.

Then everything moved online, and you told me it was better. No discs to scratch, no shelves to fill. My library in the cloud, on every device, forever. I believed you. I clicked “Buy.” Not “Rent.” Not “License for a period we may change at our sole discretion.” Buy. You chose that word because it was the one I trusted.

In 2009 you reached into a million e-readers and deleted 1984. Nobody at the meeting caught the irony. I did.

That was the warning, and for twenty years we ignored it. A racing game I paid for went dark, then vanished from my library as if I had never owned it. A video store told me shows I had purchased would be removed because of a licensing dispute between two companies I had never heard of. An anime service shut down, and its owner, who also owned the service replacing it, decided my purchases wouldn’t make the move. An e-reader quietly took away my ability to back up my own books. Finished films, paid for and ready to release, were shelved and written off for a tax break, so nobody would ever see them at any price.

Entitled customers. Read the terms of service.

I did read them. That’s the problem. The terms say I own nothing. The button says “Buy.” One of those is a lie, and it isn’t the one I signed. Two decades later, one state finally made you print the word “license” on the button. Thanks. It doesn’t give back anything you already took.

So here is my offer, and it’s a modest one. I don’t ask for forever. A game I bought stays playable as long as its servers run. A movie I bought stays watchable as long as the store that sold it exists. And when you sell the store, merge the service, or hand the catalog to someone else, my purchase goes with it. You already know how to do that. You built the system that lets a movie bought on one store play on another. You use it when it helps you and skip it when it doesn’t.

That’s the floor. It’s less than a cartridge ever gave me. And you won’t even promise that.

So I kept a copy.

And it isn’t only games and movies. A student pays two hundred dollars for a textbook the professor required, plus an access code that expires when the semester ends. Her parents’ taxes paid for the research the book summarizes. Scientists wrote those papers and reviewed them for free, then signed the copyright over to a publisher that charges forty dollars to read eight pages. The knowledge was paid for three times before anyone put a lock on it. We make use of something that could be close to free if gatekeepers didn’t sit on top of it, and you call us criminals. One of us downloaded too many journal articles, and you threatened him with decades in prison. We remember his name.

You call it theft. Theft means you lost something. You still have the master, the rights, the catalog, and my money. What I took was continuity. What I took was the thing you sold me and then decided I shouldn’t have. If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t theft. You wrote the first half of that sentence. I only finished it.

You merge and consolidate until three companies own every story my generation grew up on. You rotate catalogs to manufacture scarcity. You raise prices, split services, and add ads to the tier I already paid to keep ad-free. You lobby to make it a crime to break the lock on a disc I own, even to make a backup, even to play it on a machine you no longer support. You let the history of an art form rot on dead servers because preserving it doesn’t move the stock price. And I’m the criminal.

Yes, I’m a pirate. My crime is remembering what “buy” used to mean. My crime is keeping what I paid for. My crime is archiving what you were happy to let disappear, and reading what my own taxes already paid for. The libraries and the preservationists will thank me in thirty years, and you will still be explaining to shareholders why the back catalog is worth nothing.

I am a customer, and this is my receipt. You can revoke the license. You can’t revoke the copy.

And there are more of us every time you hit delete.

+++ The Licensee +++

Peter Thiel’s second lecture in Nashville, entitled “The End of Empire,” reached a level of coherence that the first lecture did not, proving definitively that this lecture series represents Thiel’s unvarnished thoughts on American empire, Enlightenment literature, and the status of One Piece as a pro-science, pro-Christian manga that underwrites the continued existence of The West.

Thiel’s Oct. 5 lecture was quite preoccupied with the relationship between literature and empire, as he proposed that the horizons of possibility for the American empire could be sketched by considering the relationships between literature, scientific progress, and Christianity.

That I am even able to pull a thesis statement from this lecture indicates its superiority compared to the first, which was meandering and, at times, redundant. This lecture breezed right along, with Thiel’s thesis supported by a series of readings of a selection of canonical classics: Sir Francis Bacon’s unfinished The New Atlantis, Swift’s masterful satire, Gulliver’s Travels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and, of course, Eiichiro Oda’s long-running manga, One Piece.

I'd bet 75% on yes.