This week, I was unable to log in to my Spotify account on my phone. I have had this account since 2011, and it has always been a free account, with certain premium features made available through a modified app. For years, I have wanted to quit Spotify, but the sheer convenience and affordability of it has kept me on the platform. As a musician, and being in conversation with musicians, I know just how poorly this convenience and affordability affects the livelihoods of musicians. So, the moral imperative was pretty clear. Digging further, one finds that it also does a lot of harm to the environment. Not just streaming music, but all data-heavy forms of streaming are harmful to the environment. Yet, we do not find ourselves thinking about this.

I distinctly remember the introduction and eventual wide-scale adoption of streaming services. It seemed so strange to me that I would have use up my monthly data allocation to “stream” media every time I felt like appreciating it. To the “consumer”, however, it is a no brainer. In 2016, I started using the Save Album function on Spotify to accumulate a collection of music. This week, I used Soundiiz to export that entire list as a .txt file. I had amassed a collection of 4076 albums. At USD 10 per album, this would have cost me USD 40,760 to legally own. That is LKR 13.3 million. On a good month, I make less than LKR 200,000 (USD 615). On average, closer to LKR 100,000 (USD 300). With Spotify, even if I was paying for the annual premium subscription at roughly LKR 6500 (USD 20), it would be 2000 years until I would spend that amount.

Still, the issue I see with streaming and how we have adopted it is that it abstracts our relationship to the consumption of media. We do not see the electricity bills and water use for cooling down servers. The materiality has all but vapourised into the cloud. It is easy for us to just appreciate the convenience, and a lot of users are not really bothered by the fact that it is a fraction of a US cent that goes to musicians per stream. Considering how poorly musicians are being paid, unless they are raking in millions upon millions of streams, does one really need to feel so bad about pirating music?

Is piracy ever ethical?

Growing up in Sri Lanka, introduced to the internet through a dial-up connection, and only getting ADSL after racking up a massive bill using Limewire to sluggishly download some MP3s, piracy came quite naturally. The CD stores that I could afford with my USD 1 (back then!) weekly allowance only sold pirated media. It was only when my father would return from overseas work engagements that we ever saw legally bought, original media. As a teenager, to make a little money, my friends and I would use our ADSL internet connections and CD burners to pirate music and sell it to our classmates in school. It was not even that it felt like a transgressive thing to do. It was more than normal; it was necessary.

Maybe it would be helpful to unpack what piracy really means in the world that we live in.

piracy (n.)

early 15c., “robbery upon the sea, the practice of robbing on the high seas,” from Medieval Latin piratia, from classical Latin, Greek peirateia “piracy,” from peiratēs “brigand, pirate” (see pirate (n.)).

Specifically, in the law of nations, the crime of depredations or wilful and aggressive destruction of life or property committed on the seas by persons having no commission or authority from any established state. As commonly used it implies something more than a simple theft with violence at sea, and includes something of the idea of general hostility to law. According to the opinion of some, it implies only unlawful interference with a vessel ; according to others, it includes also depredations on the coast by a force landing from the sea. [Century Dictionary]

Online Etymology Dictionary

It does seem apt that a word once used to describe robbery upon the sea is now used to refer to robbery from the internet, a global network that passes information through undersea cables. However, while we can understand the “loss” of a material good, it becomes less concrete when applied to something as easily reproducible as media and particularly digital files. The loss that is felt, however, is that of record labels and musicians. As a musician, however, perhaps I differ to many on whether I feel this loss at all. I do recognise that, having a roof over my head and more means than most, this is a privileged stance to take, but let me lay out more of the future I imagine.

Intellectual Property Vs. Piracy as Care

I have never claimed copyright over any of the work that I have produced. As a teenager, I would license all my works with Creative Commons licenses, allowing others freedom as to how they wished to use it. I learnt about the Copyleft movement where derivatives of a work have the same rights preserved. Today, however, I am firmly against copyright altogether. I do not consider the work that I produce to be “intellectual property”. A close look at how and what can be claimed to be intellectual property, and who has the power to deem that and enforce it, reveals a very unequal world. If we actually lived in a world where intellectual property was justly revered, then Western medicine would have so much to owe to indigenous knowledges. We know that it is not the case at all.

We live in a world where knowledge is secured behind ivory towers and news is secured behind paywalls. I do not have institutional access to either of these. So, of course, I resort to piracy. With no university education to speak of, most of my knowledge has been accrued through experience and what is graciously shared by others. If it were not for the generosity of others, I would have little access to information. So much of the global majority relies on piracy to afford even the educational books required to take university courses. There is a reason why you find photocopy shops next to universities. In such a world, piracy is not depravity, it is survival.

Thus pirate care, seen in the light of these processes – choosing illegality or existing in the grey areas of the law in order to organize solidarity – takes on a double meaning: Care as Piracy and Piracy as Care (Graziano, 2018)⁶.

There is a need to revisit piracy and its philosophical implications – such as sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to knowledge and tools (Hall, 2016)⁷ – in the light of transformations in access to social goods brought about by digital networks. It is important to bring into focus the modes of intervention and political struggle that collectivise access to welfare provisions as acts of custodianship (Custodians.online, 2015)⁸ and commoning (Caffentzis & Federici, 2014)⁹. As international networks of tinkerers and hackers are re-imagining their terrain of intervention, it becomes vital to experiment with a changed conceptual framework that speaks of the importance of the digital realm as a battlefield for the re-appropriation of the means not only of production, but increasingly, of social reproduction (Gutiérrez Aguilar et al., 2016)¹⁰. More broadly, media representations of these dynamics – for example in experimental visual arts and cinema – are of key importance. Bringing the idea of pirate ethics into resonance with contemporary modes of care thus invites different ways of imagining a paradigm change, sometimes occupying tricky positions vis-à-vis the law and the status quo.

The Pirate Care Project

So what is this future?

While I can not afford to acquire the entirety of my music collection legally, what I will be doing going forward is to allocate a certain sum annually to purchase music directly from artists. For now, I am allocating LKR 100,000 (USD 300) for the year 2024. Insha Allah, I will be able to afford more in the future. Until an actually just world is brought into fruition, I will not discourage those engaged in piracy, and will continue to share generously.

If you are looking for a more concrete solution to this predicament, I highly recommend giving ear to Benn Jordan, a musician and researcher, who has very generously crunched the numbers to imagine a world in which we have unlimited access to media and information.

In the future of my dua, there will be no need for piracy.

In the future of my dua, all artists (and intellectuals) will have their labour compensated for through tax revenue.

In the future of my dua, this tax revenue will come from the rich.

In the future of my dua, all states will be benevolent states.

In the future of my dua, all states will value the work of artists (and intellectuals).

In the future of my dua, all states will respect freedom of expression.

In the future of my dua, eventually, there will be no need for states.

In the future of my dua, all media and information is free.

In the future of my dua, we are all free.