The Profitable Piracy Argument

To what extent can a thing be an advertisement for itself? It's an old copyright debate and one generally lost by consumers, but one red-hot in these here days of internetting, when you can have a thing quite easily digitally, with no physical – or financial – intrusion. And this ease of access can quite suddenly make absolutely anything very, very popular in no time at all. Like, say Rebecca Black, who has most likely turned her negative internet meme into a lucrative career making (terrible) music.

Or this book, Go the Fuck To Sleep, which went viral in PDF form and now sits at the top of the Amazon best-seller list. Fast Company blames the PDF for that, which seems fair.

The line is between piracy hurting sales because pirates aren't buying a cultural product, and piracy making said product viral and boosting sales via the contagion effect. The book is a novelty, the sort of thing that might look cool on a coffee-table or toilet tank in the Brooklyn apartment of a 30-year-old freelance photographer with a newborn. It has value as an object. Which is probably the thing that sketches that line out more than anything else, at least in the culture industry: object-value.

But other, father-reaching questions. Can any product – CD, book, movie, whatever – have its particular line redrawn with enough viral power? Like, could a Britney Spears cassingle ever catch fire enough online as an mp3 to boost sales of its polymer partner?

Is there a level of viral-ness that can outweigh even the most worthless physical product? I'm not at all a marketing expect, just a guy that buys stuff, but it's most interesting to consider a "yes" answer, if only because it might seem to suggest a more random culture (within the bounds of the randomness of viral memes) and bottom-up mass culture. Both of which would be nice for a change: I’d take the internet’s novelty culture over corporately-fed culture any day, and I’m not convinced it’s totally possibly to co-opt the former by the latter. Also: I dare you to imagine culture in the future that isn’t one of those two.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.