After years of trying to cloud the public mind by calling it “piracy” instead of “unauthorised downloading,” key copyright industry reps are starting to realize that “piracy” actually sounds kind of cool. So now they’re lobbying for the even less intellectually rigorous term “theft,” which describes an entirely different offence, enumerated in an altogether different section of the lawbooks.
This has all the dishonesty of calling everything you don’t like “terrorism” (or as my friend Ian Brown says, it’s like rebranding jaywalking as “road rape”).
“Piracy” sounds too sexy, say rightsholders
(Image: Pirate Cory, taken by Gordon Doctorow, Hallowe’en 1974)