So I live in an area of the world where theft in general is kind of taboo. It has been that way for a very long time. If you go back to the days before nation states when people were organized into tribes, everything was communal and taking what you didn’t need was considered the most taboo thing you could do. This was before locks and keys, so if nobody was home, they’d leave a marker by the door to indicate they were gone, and people would just respect it and not enter anyone’s homes. Shame, especially shame of being called a thief, was so powerful that people effectively just never brought themselves to steal from others.

Fast forward to today (obviously) and the attitude has stuck around. People in my neighborhood have a habit of setting up stalls containing goods they’ve made and want to sell, and they’d just go inside their home and watch Netflix or something. The stalls are always left there, unmanned, unoccupied. There’s always a black box people could put money in to pay for whatever they want from the stall. Which again was unmanned and unoccupied. And people just kind of obey these boundaries. Nobody reports stolen baked goods or art or anything. They effectively run the equivalent of a full lemonade stand without actually being at the stand. And nobody exploits them. This becomes twice as fascinating when you realize these are parts of town that children pass by on their skateboards and whatnot. And even they don’t steal anything.

For some reason, I began thinking about copyright when thinking about this, since piracy is often likened to theft. Sure enough, cultural attitudes carry over to piracy. Ask anyone where I live about piracy, and in a world where many claim copyright is “universally outdated”, people here will tremble (not literally) at the thought of piracy. To the point where I imagine if someone is pressed about why they oppose piracy, the person from my area can say “it is not within our culture to advocate piracy; what, are you therefore against certain cultures now since you are pitting me against what is a pillar of our culture”. Piracy advocates often say copyright is “universally” a fallacy. How does culture therefore not undermine this statement as the “argument winner” piracy advocates claim it is? Could copyright be justified if you’re a part of these cultures, in the same way as cultural appropriation rules normally work?