Are YOU a music or video pirate??

Australia launched a newly updated "Music Industry Piracy Investigations" site today and sent us all an email which claimed that one of the big features of the site was helping you to determine if YOU are a music pirate. This type of site is yet another "let's criminilize the public" website, just like the SPA.

Featured on the site is an "Am I a Pirate?" page which invites us to ask ourselves questions which should, hopefully, reveal whether we have been infected with this little-understood disease.  Plus, they encourage us to report anybody we spot!

I think their list is missing some items.  So, in the interest of the public good, I put forward my own...

Questions to Ask Yourself If You Think You Might Be A Pirate

1. When iTunes tells you to insert any CD into your computer and makes it playable on your iPod, are you tempted to believe what you are told and click "yes"?
2. If your phone comes with software that lets you take a CD you own and make it into a ringtone, do you try it?
3. When you buy music from iTunes, and discover it won't play on your PSP, are you tempted to convert it to a format that allows you to play it?
4. When a television program you love is released two years later in your country than it is in the rest of the world, are you tempted to go to Google and search for it?
5. When you go to a band website and there is a music download, are you tempted to click on it without hiring legal investigators first?
6. After losing digitally purchased music several times because of "software bugs", are you tempted to make back up copies?
7. When a video starts playing on a MySpace page you visit, do you continue to listen, or instantly close your browser?

While I am certainly an advocate of legal media use, it's important to realize that the industry is sending consumers very mixed messages.  Stakeholders like Apple, Microsoft, and Nokia have a lot to lose if consumers "avoid" their new media features, so they encourage consumers to copy, encode, create ringtones.  In addition, none of the promises of technology are panning out for consumers.  So, people buy something, then discover the things they bought don't work where they expect them to.  No wonder people seek alternatives, and no wonder the integrity of "industry promises" is in doubt.  Consumers are just behaving normally, following the path of least resistance, and glad to open their wallets if they get something useful for a reasonable price.

Most people are inherently honest.  Let's start giving them credit for that.  If there are problems to fix, they're problems with the industry, not the consumer.