Piracy
Merry Holidays and all that noise. I wanna talk about copyright today. Everyone and their Mom is talking about copyright and piracy recently, so I thought I’d join the fun. Keep in mind, these musings are long (as all my musings tend to be), so please bear with me.
We begin personally, as all my musings begin. I believe that the individual viewpoint is how we all see the world first, so it’s a comfortable and easy place to begin. So let’s start by talking about how I came to this in the first place.
It’s hard for me, as a content producer (sure, maybe the content is bad, but I’m still producing it) and also a content consumer, to understand how I feel about copyright and piracy (also called file sharing). I’ve thought about it a lot, because I am the guy who releases content I spend hours (months) on to people on the internet for free. I’m also the guy who will read/watch things that are legally available for free (Doctorow’s fiction, Hulu content) and sometimes pay if I like it and sometimes not. I’m also the guy who would someday like to be compensated for my work, at least to a level that I could scrape by an income and do it full time.
So…mix all those things together and you’ll soon realize that the ideas don’t jive with any logical consistency, not without some creative and double-sided accounting. I’m on the verge of releasing a new novel for free on the internet, a work that took me the better part of 18 months, and before I do that I feel like I should get my head on straight about copyright and file sharing. I wanna know how I feel about it so I can stick to my guns and also not feel like I wasted my time or limited my options in a way I’m uncomfortable with.
The real issue goes beyond digital piracy to copyright itself. Now, I don’t believe that digital file sharing, even of copyrighted materials, is theft. That’s probably a generational thing, but we’re gonna do our best to suss out as much meaning as possible. Keep in mind, this entry is a fluid conversation, so comment if you wanna participate.
So, theft seems to me like it is inherently defined by defined by the taking of something from someone else, depriving them of it. Theft is a physical concept, based on a starvation economy, that there is a finite amount of resources to go around, and possessing resources means someone else will not possess them.
Information used to be like that, too, since information was passed on via physical items. The price of a book was determined by two things: the cost of production and the cost of the information. The starvation economy also played into this, because there were only so many copies of the book. Stealing a book from a shop meant that the shop owner no longer had a copy to sell.
But the thing is, a starvation economy does not apply in a digital age. Or, at the very least, the costs are so absurdly low that the profit margins are absurdly high in monetized digital distribution. We exist in a world where time is monetized, and that’s the only cost for me to release a book. The fifty bucks a year hosting costs I pay to the website company are nothing. So all it costs me to put a book out on the internet is time, the time to write the book, edit it, and format it for distribution. Putting a copy of my book on someone else’s hard drive costs nothing and does not take the book from my possession. I’ve made a copy at no cost.
But it’s still theft, people say, because although file sharing piracy does not steal a physical object from someone else, there is something that is stolen – the sale, and more importantly, the money from that sale. The sale of a copyrighted item has never been about the physical object, not really, so we’re not really sailing in different waters here, or so people say.
Now, the fact is, our society is based on two concepts, and those things, boiled down to simplicity, are idealism and pragmatism. All humans possess the capacity for both concepts, and we operate on both, too. Our laws are based on idealism – we put artificial ideals on behavior and attempt to base our society on them. We say in America that all men are created equal, even though we know that’s not true. Some people are better at math, some have better social skills, some people are born with genetic defects, and no logical person can say that everyone is created equal. Life isn’t fair. However, our idealism says that we all are, because our society hinges on the idea that we shouldn’t be penalized because of inborn defects or treated better because of inborn talents. We say that under no circumstances should murder or theft be correct actions, even though we understand that pragmatically there are exceptions to those things, such as war and self-defense.
So, ideally, theft is wrong, but pragmatically, people steal. It’s no surprise this has translated to the digital realm, because the same operator, good ole human nature, is still there. Only the medium changed. Now, ideally, in our justice system, all injustice is punished, and all innocent go free. Ideally, a proper defense is available to any and all. Pragmatically, more money gets you a better defense. There is a ideal of the thing, and then there is the thing itself. Sometimes they jive and sometimes they don’t. Our duty as good citizens and good humans is to do the best we can, ferret out injustice where we find it, hold up the ideal as best we can, but also constantly examine the ideal in light of the pragmatic, in order to understand how to improve the ideal. This is the nature of the entire enterprise here, folks – it keeps us alive and moving forward as a species.
Now, the fact of the matter is, the paradigm has shifted. If we’re looking at it pragmatically, there can be no other conclusion given the data we have. Although the old guard sees physical theft and digital theft as the same thing – my generation does not and never will. Generations younger than mine also do not, and despite copyright theft merit badges and kindergarten “understanding copyright” training, this is not going to change. The paradigm has shifted. the pragmatic data doesn’t lie. People are sharing files at record rates, countermeasures are only small speed bumps, and unplugging the whole internet is the only thing that’s gonna slow it down. Obviously, that’s not gonna happen.
So, the real choice now is whether to allow the ideal, the law, to change. We must examine the cause of this paradigm shift, but also examine the economics and social impact of the thing to determine if the shift is for the better or the worse. Humanity doesn’t always make the best choices, sometimes it moves in the wrong direction, but sometimes it moves in a positive direction. Our goal is to determine if the current direction is a good thing. That means looking at the reasons some people think file sharing is theft and the reasons some people don’t think it’s theft.
Our task is difficult, because the media landscape is full of nothing but shouters. Newscasters are shouting their ideals on television, bloggers are shouting on the internet, people are shouting on the street, even congressmen are shouting at each other on the senate floor – we’re all shouting so loud and so powerfully that we can’t sit down calmly to discuss things logically anymore. It’s impossible, if for no other reason than calm talk quickly drowns in the overwhelming noise. No doubt our calm discussion will be drowned out also, but we must try.
So let’s move on. Let’s first collect all the things that we need to add to our conversation: the possible reasons for this paradigm shift, a logical discussion of how the ideal could change, and further, what that change could look like. After all that, we’ll see where we are once the dust clears.
Now, copyright has existed for a long time, say about four hundred years, give or take a score of decades. That’s the real conversation we should be having, not about costs of distribution, but the time/money costs of the production staff – the writers, artist, and technical people needed to produce a work of art. Since I am concerned mostly with writing let’s narrow it down to that.
At some point, if we want professional works of art, the artist must be compensated. I read somewhere that it takes 10,000 hours to master an art. That’s about a year and a half of solid time, with no time spent on sleeping, work, eating, or anything else. Obviously, that’s physically impossible, so let’s take it at a more reasonable level: two hours a day. That 10,000 hours is a little less than fourteen years at two hours a day. That’s a lot, but possible, if one is dedicated, but it would still take an absurdly dedicated person to do that pro bono. The love would have to be the whole thing, at that point. If forty hours a week are spent, the artist is able to reach mastery in a much shorter timeline, a little less than 5 years. That teaches us another point to apply to our discussion – if we want professional work, the artist must be able to monetize at some point during those 10,000 hours.
So let’s run down the points we need to cover right now:
- The theft paradigm has changed or has become such an open floodgate as to become a wash.
- Distribution costs nothing.
- The artist must be able to monetize in order to reach a professional level in a reasonable amount of time.
So at this point our discussion is about finding a business model that will allow artists to monetize in order to produce professional content. But that’s not all of our discussion – there’s more that enters into it, so let’s get started on that: Business. Because, make no mistake, it is a business, after all. Professional writers are like professional athletes – it may have started as a love of the game, but eventually it also became about the numbers. Cash money. It seems like half of the appeal of the artist lifestyle is the lottery effect, the startup ethic, or whatever else you want to call it – the hope that you can live through lean times in order to later reap big, fat times, possibly over and above the hardships you experienced. Basically, the hope to live off what you already created with little maintenance work.
So, there has to be a place in our discussion for an acceptable artist lifestyle. How much is enough? I’m sure there are artists who will protest what I’m saying, who say that it is all about the love, but really, if it was, they would work a 9-5, put in their two hours a day at becoming a master, and reach their goal in a little under 14 years. Even if it is all about the love, at best those protesters are impatient, and at worst, they are secretly greedy.
So let’s add in the third thing: Artists want to make more money than the amount of time they spend would make them at a reasonable, middle-income 9-5. At some point, it has to be about business, and it has to be about money. But how much money? That’s what we need to answer. That needs to be in our conversation, too.
Now the conversation gets really really big, really, really fast. It starts to include things like reasonable income, and, even bigger, what monetary amount you can put on pleasure. Now, all these things can be quantified – you can do a income study for a location, and ask people how much they are willing to pay for two hours of entertainment, for three hours, for ten hours – you can average all those things out, subtract costs, and see where you are at. That’s business, right? That’s what business does.
So how do we even begin to approach this conversation now? Let’s break it down and start with small questions and answers.
Why did the theft paradigm change?
First, I’m not sure it did. I think we just think it did. Humans are physical beings and we understand, evolutionarily, physical things. We’ve always struggled with ideas and “content” because they are not physical things. A child can understand from a pretty early age that she can’t have the new toy she wants at Toys R Us without paying for it. However, try to explain to a child that she’s not allowed to hear the story her mommy reads her at night before bed without paying for it. That’s a harder notion to understand because there is no physical item exchanged.
We are not children, but as ideas get more complex, there are thresholds of understanding. We’ve already removed the concept of theft back one step, from the theft of a physical item to the theft of a sale. Some people cannot make that leap – it’s too far, even if it seems short to most of us. There are a number of pro piracy arguments levied against this concept – pirates wouldn’t have bought the content anyway, piracy actually encourages sales, content creators have created ill-will in consumers and are now getting their comeuppance – all have varying degrees of truth, but none feel like they fully address the issue, and worse, something about them smell like compensation, not real answers.
So the ideal of the situation is this: civil copyright law says file sharing is wrong, that it is theft. The pragmatic situation says that millions of people are doing it because they do not feel it is wrong. There is a disconnect here, so much so, that’s it time to examine the ideal. That’s the pragmatic situation we’re in. Trying to turn back the clock to a time before the internet is impossible. It’s not going to happen. Instead, we need to address the realities of the thing – the root of the reason content costs money is because we, as consumers, want professional content. If you cut away all the profit margins, corporate BS, and all that other junk to boil it down to what the consumer wants – we want professional content. This means we need to pay creators so they can become professional.
It remains to be seen what the business model looks like that pays content creators to a level that allows them to be professionals. With writing this is less of an issue than other mediums, since with digital distribution all that needs to be paid is the author’s living expenses. With video games and movies, the issue is stickier, since those things cost much more. However, I do believe there is a business model out there that allows for professional writing to be created without trying to fight the idea that file sharing is theft, or trying to stem the tide.
I don’t have a direct answer, but I have a few ideas:
A donation/performance based revenue structure – musicians do this already, so why can’t writers do it? Some people say that the performance is the thing with music and that doesn’t apply to books, since with books, the book is the thing. However, donation buttons, live readings, and other forms of compensation are possible. I don’t think they’ve been fully exploited yet as a possible revenue stream, if for no other reason than there is no easy business model and aggregate structure that allows consumers an easy donation interface. If there was a site like Scribd.com that allowed artists to both sell their work and be donated to, that would be a first step. As for my part, I emailed a woman I know at Scribd.com this morning with the suggestion that they add a “Donate to Author” button to their site for all authors who want it as a supplement tobuying digital works on their site. If you think this is a good idea, email them, too.
Secondly, I think that the old model of sponsored art is a possibility. Why can’t charities buy works of art and release them for free? Why can’t the local library hold a fundraiser to buy the latest book from a local author, stock that book on their shelves, and put it out on the internet for free? Why can’t entertainment be a cause for the public good? Well, we don’t know, but damn, let’s try it already.
Also, I’ve been talking about sponsored e-books for awhile. Why can’t the artists be compensated through advertising, just as other content creators (like television and news websites) have been doing for a long time? Why can’t websites pay for content that drives people to their site? Why can’t Pepsi pay an author to release a “branded” e-book for free on the internet? People put up with advertising if it’s unobtrusive and tasteful. Pepsi sponsor’s musicians, why can’t they sponsor an author? Is it any different than the Pope paying Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?
I’m willing to try this, too. I’m about to release a novel on the internet. If you wanna sponsor it, spend me an email and we’ll talk. If you’re not ready, that’s fine. I’m halfway through writing a second one, too. I plan to keep writing them and trying to figure out a new way to monetize my work without forsaking my ideals, which say that ideas should be offered free, as long as I can afford to do that. Right now I can. We’ll see about the future.
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“Although the old guard sees physical theft and digital theft as the same thing – my generation does not and never will.”
I’m betting this will change over time.
Why? Because if I knock you over the head and stick you in the trunk of my car and drive you into the woods and hold you for ransom, it’s not a whole lot different than when I rip off your social security number and hijack your bank account and cripple your ability to pay for things or get a loan because I’ve stolen your identity.
Your body is a physical object. If I steal it and hold it for ransom it’s called kidnapping. But your identity — all those pieces of paper and digital artifacts that define YOU to THEM — can also be stolen, and nobody in any generation is making the case that identity theft is okay simply because it’s digital.
I agree that there’s a generational schism right now. My suspicion is that this generational schism is not generational but age-dependent. As new generations age they will become less confident that stealing data is not stealing. And particularly so when someone steals their data. (And there’s going to be a lot more data to steal.)
I see your point. However, those numbers in my bank account theoretically represent physical objects, I can go to the bank and ask for them to be handed to me, even if the are just paper.
The idea of stealing my ability to get a loan or purchase things does hold some water against my beliefs, that’s true, since the ability to sell content is what pirates “steal” if they steal anything.
But simply equating “stealing” a digital copy with stealing a car, or my body, is silly. The issue is much more complicated than that, since if you stole my car, I wouldn’t have it anymore. If you steal my content (which really isn’t possible, since I’m giving it away for free, but for the sake of argument, let’s say I wasn’t), I still have my content. At worst, you’ve stolen an opportunity from me. At best, you’ve shared it with your friends and purchased something from me in the attention economy.
It’s the idea of “stealing” opportunity that can’t really be defined, at least with the data we currently have. So I guess, as a pragmatist, until that data is there and hard, I think we should be looking for business models that throw out the whole worry about it altogether. Building better locks is one thing, but locks only keep honest people honest. Instead, we should be trying to figure out if we really need to keep things locked up in the first place. Isn’t there a better way?
“The idea of stealing my ability to get a loan or purchase things does hold some water against my beliefs, that’s true, since the ability to sell content is what pirates “steal” if they steal anything.”
Exactly. Your name is not a real object. Or you address, or any other identifier that could be leveraged against you for money. If I steal your identity (a non-object), I can conceivably take out a line of credit and profit from my theft.
“But simply equating ‘stealing’ a digital copy with stealing a car, or my body, is silly. The issue is much more complicated than that, since if you stole my car, I wouldn’t have it anymore. If you steal my content (which really isn’t possible, since I’m giving it away for free, but for the sake of argument, let’s say I wasn’t), I still have my content.”
I understand your argument here, but I have to say that I don’t think this has anything to do with the internet or digital technology. Long before computers and the internet it was illegal to put on a stage production of a copyrighted play without compensating the author (or owner). Even if you were out in the fields of Nebraska on your family farm, you couldn’t put on a charity production of Death of a Salesman without paying a royalty to (or getting a waiver from) Arthur Miller. Leaving aside whether you think that should or shouldn’t be the case, it was (and is) the case apart from any technology extant then or now.
Because this example would still meet your test — i.e. Arthur Miller would still ‘have his content’ — it seems to me that you are not making a new, generational argument about digital content, but rather one about copyright ownership itself.
“It’s the idea of ‘stealing’ opportunity that can’t really be defined, at least with the data we currently have.”
As you might guess, I have to disagree here. The idea of stealing opportunity has long been codified through copyright law. That’s really what the law says: you are not allowed to exploit someone else’s intellectual property for x years — because doing so might deprive them of that opportunity.
“So I guess, as a pragmatist, until that data is there and hard, I think we should be looking for business models that throw out the whole worry about it altogether.”
I see myself as a pragmatist as well. But I tend to look in both directions: into the past as well as into the future. It seems to me that there was probably a period in human history where people felt about real objects the way you feel about digital/intellectual rights. That nobody really owned anything, and that taking something — physically depriving them of a specific object (say, berries, or an arrowhead) — didn’t preclude them from going out and getting more. Over time, however, it seems to me that all cultures evolved to embrace the right to own stuff primarily because any other system would collapse on itself. (If I don’t own my house and you can just take it, what’s my reason for building it, yet along buying into your society? And: why don’t I just kill you?)
It seems to me that we have yet to evolve culturally to a place where we treat intellectual rights the same as physical-property rights, but that we will (and must) inevitably get there. One big reason: if we don’t, then all that non-real-object stuff everybody is doing and saying online really doesn’t belong to them, and companies and the government can take your secret emails and your drunk-on-your-ass photos and do whatever they want with them. (I can’t imagine a definition of digital property that allows for privacy but not copyright, or vice versa. If you can’t ‘own’ an idea or expression of an idea, you can’t own the content of your emails.)
What’s happening right now is that for the first time in history it’s not just the lawyers and content developers and distributors that are having to interact with the reality of copyright law, it’s everybody. Every single person is now the equivalent of a driver on a highway having to decide whether to obey the speed limit. At first, you’re going to get a lot of ha-ha-ha…but after a while I think the law takes hold. In part because that’s what the law does, but in part because that’s what works.
“Instead, we should be trying to figure out if we really need to keep things locked up in the first place. Isn’t there a better way?”
I agree this is a fair question. But looking backward I can’t imagine a way in which this would actually work relative to physical property, and that makes me dubious that it will work with intellectual ownership. Where is the functional civilization where nobody cares who owns what?
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_sharing_system
(My home town has a bike library, where you can check out a bike just like you check out a book. But you have to check it out: it’s not just there for the taking.)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by luke t. bergeron, Mark Barrett. Mark Barrett said: An interesting post on Piracy at Mispeled.net — http://bit.ly/7h2BoS — prompting an interesting generational discussion in the comments. [...]
This is a fascinating conversation. I don’t have any solid answers but I suspect that these things are going to have to be sorted out from the ground up, which may mean a collapse of the system as it stands will have to come first. That sucks for established authors who make a living from writing, but for me, who’s on the work 9-5, write two hours a day, 14 year master plan, it’s not so big a deal. Pay for my stuff (preferred), or steal it, just read it.
@Mark – I see your point about Death of a Salesman (through I prefer The Crucible), but here, with respect to copyright and intellectual property, I believe we’ve come to an innate philosophical impasse. You mentioned that our disagreement was about ownership itself and I agree with you. I don’t think that school in Nebraska owes anything to Arthur Miller, especially since he’s dead.
I respect what you’re saying about physical ownership and it being a necessity for an ordered society. We agree there. You mentioned privacy concerns – if a private citizen can “steal” a corporation’s intellectual property, then there is nothing stopping corporations from doing the same, say, stealing my facebook photos and using them to sell vodka, or suits, or whathaveyou.
However, I suppose I believe there is an implicit social contract that discontinues my ownership of something like my facebook photos once I release them to the public. If I put them on the internet, enter them into the global conversation, if you will, they are no longer mine. I do not own them, any more than I own my verbal speech in a conversation. If I tell a friend something I wish to keep secret, and express my wishes to her that I’d like to keep it secret, I can be upset with her when everyone knows, but I can’t be surprised or have any recourse aside from guilting her into negative feelings . I released that information into the wild. The same with my facebook photos. I’ve released them into the global conversation. If I wanted to keep them secret, I would have kept them off the internet.
Now, I can see that this raises privacy concerns. Some people want their places on the internet to be much like their houses – with digital walls instead of sheetrock (or brick, wood, mud, or stone), but I think this is a idealistic view that is unsustainable. The internet was created as a medium of information exchange. If I want to show my friends drunk photos, I have other channels, but all communication inherently holds risks. We are social beings and must learn as logical adults how to weigh those risks.
We have this idea in America that we should be protected from ourselves and that we don’t have to make logical, reasoned choices. We have signs on slick floors and hot coffee cups because people can’t be bothered to walk slowly or not spill on themselves. That feeling has moved to the internet. It’s a gigantic beast, but at its heart, it is a conversation. If I don’t want my mother to read my drunken status updates or Google to read my emails, I wouldn’t be using facebook or gmail. Those services cost nothing monetarily, but they are not free. Speech in the global internet conversation is the same.
Alas, my views are not everyone’s, and we live (or hope, pretend, etc.) to live in a democratic republic, at least in America. Other countries are different, of course. So I cannot hope to press my ideas on everyone else. Pragmatically, the floodgates have opened and there will always be people like me fighting on one side, and people like you fighting on the other. That battle is gonna rage for awhile. In the meantime, other options should also be pursued.
@Don: I’m on the same plan as you, or so it seems, so I feel the same. I’d rather be read right now than make money. However, should I get impatient, I’d like to understand the other side, too.
Super interesting.
There are so many resources to draw on when considering this debate, and I’m only just thinking of the recent scuffle between Lily Allen and the Featured Artists Coalition (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE58K3RM20090921).
Anyway, Allen says something I found particularly interesting as she sympathizes with the British Government’s attempt to curb illegal file sharing:
“The proposal is to look at P2P (peer-to-peer) sites — which are public anyway — to identify people who are acting unlawfully, so they can be asked, and then made, to stop. Not really an attack on civil liberties there,” she added.
She iterates that P2P sites “are public anyway,” and so people ought to abide by the laws or be punished. I think an important facet of this discussion is what exactly “public” means regarding the world wide web. Luke, I think you’re spot-on with the idea that when you put things on facebook, they are no longer your things. And wouldn’t you go further to say that this is the nature of the internet?
Let’s imagine for a moment a physical version of a P2P site. So we have some sort of public building where people can show up at any time and steal stuff and break the law. Thousands of times over. We have a public, easily-recognizable entity which provides the illegal service, and we have lots of eager customers who are eating up the product. Obviously, the product is in endless supply, but the fact I’m looking to emphasis is the astonishingly blatant production of illegal activity on a monumental scale. Maybe I’m the only one, but I find it amusing that some of us like to hold the same ideals for both the physical public sphere, and an electronic public sphere where public sites can go on blatantly breaking laws, willfully incriminating millions (to the delight of most everyone, mind).
///I don’t know very much about this stuff…much less than Luke or Mark. And I’m certainly not as clever. I’m worried that I’ve totally missed the boat with my particular muse, but I’m hoping to provoke more interesting tidbits from you others. As always, thank you Luke for writing — I love these unrecompensed musings of yours.
That’s the idea, Jesup, is that this type of thing cannot happen physically, because the things being stolen are not physical things. They are either purely mental things like ideas or opportunities for sale. To put in science terms, they are potential energy.
To use your example, if there was a warehouse with infinite goods that facilitated breaking the law on a grand scale, that would be a different discussion, because 1. the supply of physical goods cannot ever be infinite, despite seemingly approaching infinity on some things, like, you know, air. 2. If something is in infinite supply – supply and demand says it will eventually become free, because if there is no limit on how many goods we can have, the price will drop to nothing. So, it’s not really possible with physical things.
But even if it was, the real question we should be asking is not whether P2P sites are breaking the law and how they are getting away with it. Right now they are breaking the law, that’s true. What we should be asking is if the law they are breaking is valid. Are so many people breaking it because they think the law is wrong? Is this a case of civil disobedience? Or is this just a case of people liking to get shit for free? I imagine it’s a mix of both, but probably a little closer to people liking to get shit for free.
The thing is, you’re never going to stop people from liking to get shit for free. In a physical realm, stopping people from getting shit for free is pretty feasible – our locks are okay, our safes are decent, and our police can run pretty fast. But more importantly, we have a vested interest in stopping people from getting something for free if getting it for free means taking it from someone else.
But in the digital realm, it’s a different story. Our locks suck, our safes get hacked, and our cops run as fast as slow molasses on a cold day. But simple inability to enforce our laws doesn’t mean they are wrong. That’s Mark’s point (or at least, how I understand it by reading the DRM posts on his blog – I don’t want to speak for him). However, my argument is that the physical parallel doesn’t really exist here. Maybe our cops are slow because it’s not stealing. It’s not taking something from someone else. It’s taking potential energy and I don’t know that potential is something that should be paid for. If it was, my boss owes me a huge friggin’ raise, coz I got a lot of potential.
I think copyright law is what’s wrong. I think we should be looking at the law to see if it’s valid, examining the point of the thing in the first place. That’s the purpose of this whole discussion – trying to find a way to still get what we want, professionally produced content, without copyright.
[...] the heels of a recent conversation I understand that there is a contemporary belief that copyright law is antiquated, if not [...]
[...] been engaged in a conversation that declared copyright antiquated, he linked to my post about piracy. I was flattered, because I respect Mark’s posts on his site and his comments here, but a little [...]
I’d like, if I may, to join this Chautauqua with a few random tidbits I derived from this very lengthy blog. You certainly do know how to test a cat’s patience.
I have to disagree with you that idealism and pragmatism are the key concepts of human society. Idealism I can understand, but pragmatism is not a common human-strong point. Humans are selfish creatures who need to find reasons to justify their selfishness in order to reconcile who they are with who they would like to be. This selfishness does not necessarily conflict with acting pragmatically, but it better explains the motives behind the actions.
From what I’ve retained of human philosophy, the main preoccupation is to fill in the gaps. There is always a gap in what is possessed and what is desired, and there is a gap between reality and the ideal. There is a gap between who a person is and how that person expresses themselves to the world.
Humans pride themselves on their trophy shelves and marks of fashion, but this has now been translated into the digital world. Pages of profiles showing interests and digital shelves carry favorite books, movies, and music to share with those in the same social network, letting people quickly learn what another wants to reveal to the world. Digital shelves now take the place of bookcases to fulfill the need for expression.
The desire to collect “stuff” is lessened by the realization that all knowledge can be googled and your creative and intellectual interests can be documented and shared online. Producers of stuff are panicking, and throwing their stuff at people at bargain prices. For the most part, many people still want to own this stuff, but this is shifting. People are becoming more comfortable with their stuffless digital content. If only the information mattered, a downloaded copy would suffice, but many people need the trophy too and now they can use their digital profiles to share.
Now the idea of theft itself. Theft from a store is interesting because, from what I understand, it hurts the middleman. The shops, big or small, take the hit. I like to think that in the future the middleman’s part will be slim to none, giving the largest chuck of proceeds to the creator of the content. Will quality be able to stand out in the immense quantity of digital content?
Does there have to be a set price for everyone or can it vary depending on the individual consumer and what they feel it is worth?
So is not paying for a store item just as wrong as not paying for something online. The internet provides a bizarre layer of anonymity that makes people act in ways they wouldn’t act in public. They feel less need to worry about the gap between how they’d like to be seen and how they are seen, because nobody is watching. When I see the humans and dogs walking together on the sidewalk below my loft, the responsible human always picks up the dog’s poop, because that is what is expected of them. But, I get the feeling that if they knew there was a 0% chance that anybody was looking, more dog poop would be left behind.
But I think I’m just asking more questions and not solving anything.
Also, let’s hope the sponsors of writing and the arts aren’t as cruel as the Pope was to Michelangelo. While, that’s all I have for today. All this thinking has made me hungry.
Meow.
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