We should have seen it coming. The advent and popularisation of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s was the tell. Here was an invention devised by a scientist in order to share information, because without sharing information, how are new ideas born?
These days the concept of sharing information on the Web ranges from innocent to nefarious, and every stop in between. One of these ways is piracy, which lives more towards the nefarious end of the scale. Unauthorised reproduction or use of copyrighted material has always been a sticking point for content producers and consumers alike, with legislators sprinting to catch up with technology. In some cases, you get what happened in New Zealand this year with The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill, which puts the onus of proving innocence onto the accused. Controversial, to say the least, as it would seem to contradict the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. But I digress.
On 8 December 2011, Derek DelGaudio posted this on Twitter:
Then, about five hours later,
After this campaign gained groundswell on Twitter, the offending site was gone by 9 December 2011, replaced with a domain parking page:
It’s difficult to prove a causative link between DelGaudio’s crusade and the site forced offline. Still, support grew. Within a day or two, many names in magic – famous and non – had contributed prizes to the ‘contest’. People like Jamy Ian Swiss, David Blaine, William Kalush, Helder Guimares, R Paul Wilson, Michael Weber, The Buck Twins, Andi Gladwin, and Daniel Garcia all chipped in. This unity of purpose astounded me. (As of this writing, it doesn’t look like anyone has collected the bounty on the disestablished site’s owner.)
I know magic, like other creative endeavours, has been affected by digital copyright infringement. Why buy when you can download? To be honest, I always thought the arguments put forward by motion picture studios and record companies were hollow, just a remnant of centralised control of product and profit in an increasingly decentralised world. I sided with those claiming piracy and theft are not the same thing. In the conjuring world, though, I don’t know about this position. A relatively small community with a limited economic influx sees the downstream impact of copyright infringement quite quickly. It was this small community that gathered, and essentially caused the site to vanish, without the weight of entertainment cartels or legislatures.
Ultimately, I don’t know if this is a win for DelGaudio. Anyone with a Google and a bit of intuition can find what are presumably the files formerly hosted on the shuttered site. Because of peer-to-peer file sharing, no longer is there one place where the files are kept, so removing them from the Internet becomes nigh impossible. Of course, that won’t stop governments from crafting laws with unanticipated side effects. After all, long-term thinking isn’t something in which governments excel.
So what, then? Has what has happened with Derek DelGaudio’s magic change the face of piracy? Doubtful. For some, information is meant to be free, and to that end it will be made so. Technology will outpace law, and people will have their intellectual property taken beyond their control. But the idea of a community policing itself seems far less problematic than sweeping legislation that risks the democratisation of information.
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