My latest piece is up on The Everyman, discussing the topic of Online Piracy.

Online piracy is on the rise again, accounting, by some measures, for over a quarter of all internet downloads. This topic is usually spoken about in terms of the harm it does the economy, or jobs lost, or whether or not it counts as theft. But what is actually being revealed here is something much more complex and fundamentally dangerous.

The first question to ask is why piracy is on the rise. After peaking in the early 2010s, piracy rates trended sharply down from 2013 onward, before shooting back up in the past couple years, raising the question of what has changed.

The truth is that, while there will always be a subset of people who will just try to get whatever they can for free, the majority of people are perfectly willing to pay for the things they want… if (and this is the vital point) they feel they are being treated fairly.

This concept is what we might term the ‘commercial contract:’ the customer pays the vendor, and the vendor provides a good or service. The customer respects the vendor’s right to be paid for what he provides, and the vendor respects the customer’s right to receive what he paid for. The customer recognizes that the vendor owns the thing before the transaction, and the vendor recognizes that the customer owns the thing after the transaction. Otherwise the transaction could not reasonably take place at all.

Again, most people recognize the justice of this contractual relationship and are willing to uphold their end of it. That is why the majority of people don’t engage in shoplifting even when they could get away with it.

The rise of online piracy is a consequence of this contract breaking down in the digital sphere.

Read the rest here