Shiver me timbers - how business can learn to love the pirates

BOOK REVIEW: The Pirate'sDilemma, by Matt Mason, Allen Lane; €19

PIRACY HAS always caused chaos. Down through the ages, pirates have disrupted trade, damaged the business of merchants and caused consternation on the high seas by attacking and robbing ships transporting goods from one community to another. As long as there have been ships lugging cargo from port to port, there have been rogues flying the Jolly Roger.

Such sea-borne piracy still occurs on oceans around the world, but you don't have to go to sea to find pirates. As Matt Mason explains in the introduction to his provocative and lively treatise on modern-day piracy, pirates can be found at every turn.

The author defines a pirate as "anyone who broadcasts or copies someone else's creative property without paying for it or obtaining permission". Advances in technology and how technology is applied have allowed these new pirates to thrive. Suddenly, everyone from individuals to companies can be pirates.

But instead of seeing such buccaneering as something to be feared, thwarted and defeated, Mason feels piracy may be more about solutions than problems.

To him, pirates are engaged in a form of free-market economics - they spot a demand and respond to it as quickly as they can. By virtue of scale, such rapid turnaround in response to demand is something traditional companies and business models have problems with. Mason believes that studying and imitating how piracy deals with, for example, distribution can be more beneficial to businesses than resorting to lawyers.

Of course, such a position is not one which will find widespread favour within the business community, so Mason has quite a hill to climb with this theory. While he does bookend his tale with quotes from Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to back up his ideas, the real heavy lifting is done by delving into a number of underground scenes and cultures where the author believes piracy has played a vital role in their growth. These snapshots provide the reader with a history of how such scenes have developed, propagated and ultimately dovetailed with the mainstream economy as they've begun to make money.

Mason used to be a pirate radio DJ, club runner, journalist and editor, so he has ready access to good source material and examples. He looks at how punk capitalism's DIY ethics and low barriers to entry have empowered such streetwise brands as Vice magazine and the American Apparel clothing range.

There are some fine first-hand examples of how pirate radio stations in London accelerated and accentuated certain musical nanocultures and paved the way for these to have a commercial breakthrough.

Mason is also very good when it comes to deconstructing how some rappers have become hip-hop entrepreneurs and have successfully negotiated the jump to big money deals without losing any of their credibility. He also points to how both the work and the methods of graffiti artists have been co-opted by mainstream businesses to sell their wares. Mason makes the case for the plucky little outsider taking on the big guns and winning.

Yet Mason's book often seems more concerned with the development of various DIY movements than with the Zen of piracy. But bloggers, citizen journalists, coders developing open-source software, would-be TV stars using YouTube to get attention and the people behind the hugely successful low-cost Starbury sneakers may be unconventional entrepreneurs, but they're not pirates. By trying to lump so many DIY scenes together to augment his tale, Mason ends up confusing the reader a little. Is this about pirates or DIY activists?

He's on slightly surer ground when it comes to scrutinising the dilemma that arises when IP owners and content creators come face to face with piracy. Mason sees pirates responding to a demand in the market that conventional businesses have either failed to identify or are not meeting with their own products and services.

Such embattled businesses can respond to this attack by either taking the fight to court or, as Mason reasons, to the marketplace. He believes that competing with the pirates for their newly minted marketshare is a far more profitable route to take than the legal one, as it may lead to better efficiencies and greater profits for the incumbent and even better value for society.

It's a persuasive argument, especially when you examine how piracy changed the music industry. A file-sharing network such as Napster demonstrated a huge consumer demand for music downloads that the music industry is only now beginning to address. Mason would argue the industry should have responded much earlier and not just by sending in its legal eagles.

Piracy is a hugely complex area and one which raises far more questions than Mason can get around to answering. There's little here, for example, about the motivation which drives pirates or the effects of piracy on those smaller DIY businesses which perhaps can't afford to compete with piracy's free-for-all swashbuckling.

Yet Mason does a good job of mapping out some of the key issues and areas, especially regarding the impact of piracy on digital media. The Pirate's Dilemma is also a useful primer on how businesses can incorporate unorthodox thinking and theories into how they run their ships.