David Penberthy Analysis

David Penberthy’s article ‘Web of piracy makes us all partners in crime’ (The Advertiser, 29 September 2013, p. 25) appears in The Advertiser, a popular tabloid News Limited newspaper published in Adelaide, SA, and distributed throughout South Australia and neighbouring towns. Its readership, according to News Limited, are 1,751,000 members of ‘families with children under 18’, baby boomers, over 65s, home owners and ‘all people 25-54’ (News Limited, 2014). Penberthy is a former political correspondent and editor for The Daily Telegraph and editor-in-chief of a News Limited opinion site, The Punch (ABC 2014). He is writing to persuade both pirates and non-pirates that piracy is wrong. Penberthy is writing to persuade readers against the

Penberthy also argues that something should be done to reduce it. The initial argument constructed is that we should not accept copyright infringement. We do not accept theft, he argues, and therefore we should not accept copyright infringement. As an appeal to analogy, this argument is weak. Theft, the ‘felonious taking and carrying away of the personal goods of another with intent to convert them to the taker's use’ (OED, ‘theft’), is not equivalent to copyright infringement (‘piracy’), which concerns the unauthorised reproduction of intellectual property (OED, ‘piracy’). Penberthy does not provide any evidence to support this analogy other than hyperbolic examples of theft of clothes and

One stronger piece of evidence he gives is a survey based on interviews of 600 teenagers in which 150 admitted to regularly downloading pirated material, although we are not told what ‘based on’ or ‘regularly’ mean, or how participants were selected. Penberthy also makes several other appeals to support his central argument, none of which seem to be strong. His appeal to authority regarding the Napster court case incorrectly reports that the finding came down to a matter of theft (A & M RECORDS, INC. v. Napster, Inc., 2000), but it was not determined by case that either Napster’s or its users’ actives included theft. Other arguments he uses are faulty. He claims never to have downloaded anything illegal, with an implication that others should not either—this is an appeal to authority, anecdotal and is