Boetema Boateng is but one of many severe critics of DRM as a means of maintaining US dominance in the entertainment industry, especially to the disadvantage of developing countries, as we will explore more fully below.
A potentially important development in these struggles is the establishment of the Pirate Party. Most readers will know that Pirate Bay is one of the primary sites for sharing files via peer-to-peer (p2p) networking, using BitTorrent or similar file-sharing software. Despite ongoing blocking efforts worldwide, the Pirate Bay website is alive and well – sort of. The site itself is often down or blocked; alternative approaches via proxies pop up on a daily basis (Moseley 2019). Along the way, the Pirate Party was founded as a political party, first in Sweden in 2006. The basic principles of the Party are clear: reform of copyright law, abolition of the patent system, and respect for the right to privacy (www2.piratpartiet.se/international/english). The Party’s most striking success has been in Iceland: in 2016, the Party won 10 Parliamentary seats out of 63 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party_(Iceland)). Since then, however, the Party has apparently receded somewhat. How far the Pirate parties might manage to transform the current laws regarding copyright and patents thus remains very much an open question.
The polarities exemplified by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) vs. the EFF and the Pirate parties in fact entail at least three major positions or streams of response that we can consider as ethical responses to these sorts of dilemmas.