Brad Kuziel

Bart the Black plundered over 470 ships. Henry Morgan burned Panama City to the ground. Captain Jack Sparrow is set to sail the silver screen a fourth time this summer.  However, Brad Kuziel, junior, has more booty than any of these pirates combined. He and his brother Jason, senior, had downloaded thousands of songs and videos illegally before plotting a course to attain their biggest prize of all: acquiring 2008 Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight on the eve of its release. Unfortunately for the swashbuckling brothers, a letter of warning came into their mailbox like a cannonball into their ship.

“We got a letter from Charter, our Internet provider. Somebody on a computer in our house had violated the federal copyright law. If we didn’t delete the program, [Charter] would drop us as a customer,” Brad said.

Although they were not overly angry at their sons, the Kuziels’ parents had to apologize to Charter and Warner Brothers, owner of the rights to The Dark Knight. Without the apology, the brothers could have been fined $100,000 and spent two years in prison.

“Since the company did not know who illegally downloaded the movie, my parents would have had to choose between sending me or Jason to jail for two years,” Brad said.

Although Brad will never sail the world-wide web pillaging media again, he advises other sea dogs to carefully sniff the files they are about to download.

“Just don’t download movies,” Kuziel said, “Companies will watch the most popular and see which are being downloaded.”

Ultimately, Kuziel has another stat that gives him a peg-leg up over other pirates: he escaped punishment for his crimes.

Max Kramer

Although he himself is not a pirate, Max Kramer sees the appeal of being a scallywag of the web.

“Downloading music is less expensive,” Kramer, junior, said. “And it exposes people to new music. Also, as long as you’re not dumb you will not get caught.”

Kramer’s decision to not prey on the open internet is a moral one, though. He believes downloading music as a whole hurts the music industry, specifically the artists.

“[Buying albums] is the only way the artists make money,” Kramer said. “Otherwise, they have to tour constantly and release singles instead of albums.”

Kramer believes that legal forms of downloading music, such as itunes, and Zune Marketplace,  harm the industry just as much as pirates do.

“Most people buy only the one or two songs that they heard on the radio from itunes, not the band’s whole album,” Kramer said. “This not only takes away from the band’s profits, bands will come out with an album of filler tracks and one or two hit singles. It decreases the quality of the music.”

Kramer has various methods for buying his albums. He will often go to Movie Nut in Kirkwood and have them order whatever Cd he wants. Sometimes he will head over to Vintage Vinyl, a music store which still sells records. Kramer’s methods for purchasing music may be as expensive and archaic as sailing across the Caribbean, but he is happy to say he is not a pirate.

Ben Koethe

Like any form of organized crime, the illegal downloading industry requires teamwork to be successful. This is certainly the case for Ben Kothe, junior and his crew of pirates. While he no longer downloads the music himself, Kothe is still on board the ship, taking music downloaded by his mates.

“I have dial-up Internet, so I can’t download music,” Kothe said. “What I do is bring my flash drive to friends’ houses and take music off their computers.”

The kind of illegal downloading Kothe participates in, using torrent files, is itself a community activity.

“A bunch of different people, lets say the file is a movie, have the movie on their computer,” Kothe said. “And they’re all uploading the movie to a torrent web site. The person downloading the movie takes pieces of the file from all these different computers via the Internet.”

The security this method provides is the reason torrents have become the most popular way to illegally download media files. Yet even a salty old sea dog like Kothe knows torrent’s are no treasure Island. He acknowledges the quality of illegally downloaded treasure is not always the shiniest.

“If I really like an album that I’ve downloaded, I’ll go out and buy the hard copy of it, just because the sound quality is better,” Kothe said.

Kothe feels no moral pain from stealing the media of other people. He said that if he was a musical artist, he would rather have people come to his concerts and purchase merchandise then buy a couple of songs off itunes. Kothe has no plans to stop acquiring illegally downloaded media, and why would he when he has a whole crew of pirates behind him?