Ok so I still don’t know what I think about piracy. One thing that does annoy me is the “you wouldn’t steal a handbag” line of reasoning that hopes to make people question the morality of creative piracy.

At first glance this is a compelling point. I certainly wouldn’t dream of stealing someone’s handbag, I wouldn’t smash a car window and take a stereo and when a man hit me in the face and ran off with my laptop I found the whole experience to be “very unsatisfactory” (as I put it in the hour long IPSO/Mori phone poll that seems to come as a sort of special but pointless extra feature of the contemporary legal process.)

However, the point is that in downloading a pirated song or film you are not stealing someone else’s handbag. When self-styled “musical expeditionary” Bob Dylan felt that he needed to have Paul Nelson’s rare folk records more than Paul Nelson, he had no option open to him but to deprive Nelson of them. If the same need struck the great man today he could simply go online and download the same music without having to disturb Nelson at all.

Pirating in the internet sense is not stealing a handbag, it is the magical creation of an identical handbag. The important ethical implication of this is that it pushes the crime out of the window.

Pirating involves neither violence nor depriving someone of their property. Rather the crime is that of stopping a creator earning the full market value of their work – a role more traditionally fulfilled by record labels, film studios, distributors and broadcasters all of whom exist by piggybacking off someone else’s talent and skill.

Now obviously that’s a sweeping statement and one I don’t intend to stand by. I fully accept that the great majority of distributors, agents, labels and studios act with their artist’s best interests at heart and it is only through their hard work that the artist is really able to bring their creativity to a commercial audience. This is especially the case of my agent.

However the history of film is littered with notable examples to the contrary. If you are looking for the traditional and historical role of user than I give you Colonel Tom Parker who almost single-handedly hamstrung the King of Rock and Roll, limited his creative scope, controlled his every waking act and got very rich whilst his meal-ticket was kept in the relative poverty of extreme luxury.

If you are looking for an ethical model to shame people with then don’t say that pirates are stealing handbags. Pirating makes you into a Colonel Tom.