Editorial: Piracy is a crime... and 7-year-old me is guilty
At 7-years-old, my dad introduced me to this small rectangle black box. Looking at it, it looked simple and boring. But inside lay a world of childhood entertainment. But unfortunately, *The Hard Drive* wasn’t allowed. It was like my super-secret first boyfriend who I would love and leave at home.
Movie piracy has been around for generations, and today it's easier than ever. In 2010, global online TV and movie lost $6.7 billion through piracy, according to Statista. But more recently in 2022, we lost $51.6 billion.
This means revenue losses from piracy have grown by more than 500% from 2010 to 2022.
I call Dad, *The Hard Drive* mastermind, and ask him how everyone pirated films before the internet.
He explains that they would use two VHS machines, one with the movie and a second blank one. They would play the film and record it from the other tape.
Then came to VHS or VCR to DVD recorder, where you’d insert the DVD into a computer and transfer the movie over from there.
But when it came to *The Hard Drive*, Dad says Pirate Bay was the ultimate website. He says he downloaded around 150 movies, and as long as you weren’t selling the films, you weren’t likely to get in trouble.
He says the good files were hard to find, with lots of recordings in the cinema and people walking across the screen. “You’d try your luck and download two or three different files.” Sometimes it would take up to two days for the download to complete, “It was slower than watching the actual movie.”
I ask him why he wanted to download all those movies for me and my sisters. He says, “So that you could watch them whenever you wanted, and I could feed your lifelong obsession with Barbie movies.”
“We didn’t have heaps of money, and we couldn’t afford to rent heaps of movies, so by pirating them it was a way to give a gift.”
I ask Dad if there’s anything he misses about that era of pirating. He complains that with so many streaming sites and so many options, it's hard to figure out what to watch. “The internets got better, so now instead of downloading it, you can just watch it.”
I know he’s right when I see my recent search history includes Soap2Day and 123Movies. And I also know that pirating isn’t particularly ethical when it leaves people without jobs, and profit is lost for hard working film and TV makers.
So perhaps I’ll stop streaming new movies for a while. I’ll ask Dad to send me that old rectangle black box, where the pirating damage is already done, and I can feel nostalgic one more time.
— Love, Sammy
