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.

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.

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.