Piracy

The hot topic of january certainly has been piracy. No less than three bills, SOPA PIPA and ACTA, have been discussed in order to further combat piracy. You may recall the Pirate Bay trial of 2009 and 2010. The case was appealed twice and in 2012 the supreme court in Sweden will provide a response.

The point brought forth by the defense lawyer is applicable as a general idea of why file sharing should be completely legal. It is no different than producing cars that can drive faster than the speed limit, he says. I would then start comparing that to owning a gun and other non-sense like that, but I am sure you got the point.

What is relevant to this blog is to discuss is how piracy can been understood. Obviously it can be stealing. But it has other facets to it as well. Socially it is an expression that consumers want easier access. Whether this means cheaper, completely for free, without the hassle of getting physical copies or whatever else we certainly do not know at this point. It is, however, obvious that these could be issues that made piracy so prevalent in the first place.

Regarding whether pirates are thieves you have to step outside the traditional mindset for a second to fully grasp the situation. This author agrees that stealing something physically is quite different from copying something digitally accessible. Certainly something can be said for the fact that the copy right owner may have been deprived of some income had his legal property not been copied. He may have. He probably has to some extent. But is the extent as vast as the expanded exposure his work recieved? And is that not a relevant question?

You have to remember that the entertainment industry (which holds the majority of complaints towards piracy) is more interested in keeping their produce solely for paying costumers, than they are in promoting their subjects, the artists that actually create the expressions the industry is profiting from. This means that if the industry gets to earn x amount of dollars on a product with a 0% piracy rate, that is more interesting for them than to earn x amount of dollars on the same product with a 50% piracy rate. In essense they want to fence down their work, because they see the pirates also as potential costumers, so what they want is for pirates to stop pirating and start spending money instead.
Again it is of no interest to achieve the possibly massive exposure that free file sharing can offer for the work of the artists. What is interesting is to earn as much money as possible.

I doubt they expect piracy rates to completely convert into paying costumers, but even if one pirate is turned (or discouraged through increasingly tougher regulations) then it is a win for the share holders expecting bigger turn outs.

Not only is this greed socially offensive on multiple levels it is also directly harmful. Just like the Pirate Bay regular people are being made an example of by the twisting of the legal system which is extremely toxic. It may function as an immediate detergent, but just as when you bring the millitary into another country to fight a war, you may win it in a couple of weeks, but you will have your work cut out for you with the uprisings your transgrassion will spark.

A final point that I will make is that you should consider that piracy rates far exceed what is possibly consumable, both economically but also in simple human life. The sea of content available is simply too vast. And quite a lot of that content is of medium and lower quality. Probably the majority of the content. Artists are not all Van Goghs, and a lot of them would be stretching it calling themselves artists in the first place. So in this world of currency drains I can certainly see the logic in the consumer crowd moving away from traditional patterns of purchase towards more egoistic ones. It makes perfect sense that as soon as technology arose to offer deliverance from wrongful purchases, in this time when wrongful purchases could be among the most prevalent, people starting utilising this tool to avoid disappointment.
A lot more could be said on this part of the discussion, but I will leave it here and we can discuss the issue of boredom and entertainment another time.

Also, this post will most likely be used to vault off into another post outlining an alternative system based on access rather than ownership, but since that will take some effort to piece together it might not be the subsequent one.

V For Revolution

Another great movie from the Wachowski brothers, also holding a great deal of social commentary beneath the initial layers of visually well made action, is the movie V For Vendetta. This movie is certainly one of my favorites, and it achieves such status with me because of how it propels an alternate perspective on these increasingly harsher measures being taken in the time of crisis. All in the name of seizing control of the issue before it gets out of hand.

While I can sympathise with the inherit logic in such a sentence that is it for the good of the people and the good of society, it simply fails to roll out in such a fashion in quite a few attempts. As we have discussed prior terrorism is not just some random idea brown people start thinking about out of nowhere. It takes a big spark to motivate such violence. Most of them have witnessed horrible things to get to where they needed to be to make such drastic moves.
To be clear I am not condoning any act of terrorism, but I will certainly be the one to argue for the understanding of the core nature of it. The media portrays it as close to being the number one issue for any contemporary society.


So to spread it out even thinner one could theorise that terrorism can be diluted and "fought" in this manner, by reducing the amount and size of the measures being taken to prevent it. Perhaps the resistance movements would have been less prevalent if the germans had been more civil in occupied territories during the war? Inhumanity can easily stir violence where otherwise there was no basis for it.


Something else to think about is also the fact that too many people are labelled terrorists when they are no such thing. The rebels in Iraq for instance might consist somewhat of organized terror cells still fighting for Al Qaeda or Saddams memory or whatever, but would you not even consider that some of them just fight the occupation because of the endless stream of unfortunate events the millitary has been involved in ever since the beginning of this pitiful war?


And with that I think I will let V talk to you all about the very possible future of our society, assuming no measures are taken to remove this inconsistent fear that makes us grip the hands of any who endows to save us. He is talking to you about you and it is relevant for you because you are the one who will bring yourself in this situation.