Media Piracy: Good Economics?

Originally Posted by Night Phoenix

As an underground hip-hop artist, I've come to understand one thing - Anyone who is going to pirate your music is someone who wasn't going to buy your shit in the first place.

I don't think I've read anything that you've said that was anymore agreeable.

However I would like to say that while most of the stuff I pirate is shit I wouldn't have bought anyway, ocassionally I do download stuff as a try-before-I-buy. I had no idea I would like certain artists/albums until I listened to them. That said, there is stuff I never owuld have bought had I not been able to listen to it all the way through. Stores with the "listening stations" that give you a poorly downgraded 30 second sample of a song don't do the album justice. You can't listen to say, a Pink Floyd album and hear a random 30 second clip from "Time" and be satisfied. You'd walk away thinking, why the fuck is this song just a cocaphony of clock chimes?

But, for everything I've pirated and truly enjoyed, I've eventually bought or intend to buy. Not even really for the artist (and fuck God no for the label) but for collection purposes. $20 is a fine enough price for a CD I will listen to 10-1000 times throughout my life. $20 for a one or two good songs, though?

Based on what I've read - and perhaps it's all or partially just pro-piracy propaganda - the artists aren't really getting shit for their CD sales, but CD sales are an idication of which artists need to be nixed and which ones don't. If you want to support an artist, that's all an album sale is ever good for. If an artist isn't at least selling albums then they might never make it that far. So I try to buy a good album especially when the artist is obscure.

Piracy isn't unethical. People claim it is the same as stealing, but it's not. If I download an album, somewhere in the world where I might have bought that CD, that CD is still sitting on the shelf. Eventually, after collecting dust (or perhaps not) it will be sent back to the label (I actually didn't know this until I saw it happen while working retail; massive amounts of CDs gather, boxed, and shipped). The store itself gets its money back, and the record label has lost the money for its shitty item. But I have not taken anything physical, therefore I don't think it counts as stealing.

Let's say I have the magical ability of alchemy and I could turn dirt into food. Would it be fair to accuse me of stealing from the local grocery store because I have replicated the essence of food instead of buying it? What if I start sharing alchemized food items and giving them to people who don't want to pay for them? Am I doing something wrong because me giving away which rightfully belongs to no one causes the original creator to not get paid?

Filesharing, in my opinion, is indeed a very pure form of communism. People don't want to admit it, and lots of people have an automatic bias toward communism, but I feel that's what filesharing and the free trade of information is leading to. There will (perhaps very soon) come an age where we don't need people to mop our floors or slap together our fast food. Only the most complex physical tasks (like surgery) won't be automated. Perhaps even those tasks will be automated and merely only watched over.

As cliche as it sounds, I can easily imagine machines mopping the floors and our fast food being made on conveyor belts. It's a logical progression as the cost of technology and its repairs becomes cheaper than the cost of paying real humans.

So, in an age where physical work and physical property cannot be sold because they are of no value, what will be left to sell? Information; intellectual property. Music, books, paintings, etc.

But information can be duplicated, and at an alarming rate. Likewise, our world is becoming so connected due to the internet and cellular technology, it will be impossible to keep it under control. Unless the future is Orwellian, there will be no way to keep us from broadcasting music that we've heard right out of our own brains and into the brains of others.

So the end result no sale of information, no sale of physical goods. At that point we'd have no choice but to throw away our selfishness and share what we know, what we've thought of, and what we've experienced.

It's a scary thought, indeed, but only because we were born into a selfish world. Or perhaps we are inherently selfish and can never be content unless we know that if we truly wnt something we can have it?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I left a chunk out of my reasoning, yes. My point was the replacement of humans with machines and AI; the replacement of salespeople with online interactive demos and music samples, etc, will make a lot of jobs nonexistent (unless companies are forced to employ humans over machines) and eventually there would be so few jobs that cannot be performed by humans for the most part, having a 9-5 steady job would be a thing of the past, and only maintenance and surveillance of machines would be necessary. Surely we will need programmers and scientists, but burger flippers and janitors?

I'm not entirely sure how this would play out, when the only jobs are the jobs that require true human intellect and fuzzy logic beyond that of a machine; I'm just saying that there's going to be significantly less work to go around (let's also add in a growing population into the equation.)

Less physical work means increases sales in intellectual property.

"I designed this new robot; not only does it mop floors but it waxes them."

Company A buys it, Company B reverse engineers it and makes an imitation/improvement and sells it. Perhaps the tools are available to make one in your house, so a "pirate" takes the concept and tells you how to make a mopbot in your house for cheap instead of buying one. Another dude creates custom firmware for it, now it will mow your lawn too. You no longer need to buy that lawnmower bot, that's a sale lost for Company C. Needless to say, you can't do this type of thing with real people.

You can't even say this shit is ridiculous. Robots that sweep floors are already available; they just aren't mainstream.

Originally Posted by Ridan Krad

By the same token, no matter how far technology increases, I think humans will always find themselves facing a full workweek. Looking at the current trend, if anything, the industrial and information ages have only increased the speed at which things occur, and how efficiently. The workload itself, however, remains constant.

So do you think it's accurate to say that the amount of work we find ourselves doing today is nearly the same as the amount we would typically be doing, say, a hundred years ago (on any given part of the planet)? Several hundred years ago? Certainly this is easier and less time consuming than foraging for food and trying to find fallen pieces of wood suitable for making fire.

Originally Posted by Ridan Krad

In spite of its utopian illusions, technology will never eliminate or even significantly reduce humanity's workload

I don't consider my vision of the future "utopian", I look at it as very scary but realistic. Granted, a lot of things don't turn out like they're supposed to because of singular grand events that alter the course of time. I'm saying if things keep going the way they do now, society will eventually be this way or something like it.

Secondly, I think our workload is reduced constantly thanks to technology. We have the potential to get any song we want for free right off the internet, at our convenience. Previously - say, twenty years ago - how easy was it to get a copy of a book or tape you didn't want to pay for? You might go the library, but that takes physical effort and some time. You might copy a tape by connecting two tape players, but that takes effort and time as well.

Today, I can download a book in maybe thirty seconds, I can acquire nearly any album I want in thirty minutes. I could theoretically gather more (subjectively) useful information in a week, maybe in a day than I could process in perhaps my entire lifetime.

This doesn't necessarily count as "work". I'm not getting paid for it, but it just shows how thanks to the internet and digital technology I can do shit exponentially faster than I could in the past. This has, does, and will apply to all things we do, as time moves on.

So, I've just pointed out examples of how quickly I could use computers/the internet/software to accomplish tasks that previously took hours, days, or weeks. I ask you, what has come to be as a direct result or indirect result of such technologies that has slowed us down and given us just as much work to do today as we had to do in previous decades?

Originally Posted by Ridan Krad

nor the capitalist drive within its entrepreneurs.

You might not be able to take the drive out of the entrepreneurs, but with the right effort you can inadvertently have them shove it up their asses.

Rant:
I think, if anything, a larger number of people are getting fed up with capitalism and what it's brought about. (I consider the concept of communism every day.) One of those things are $20 CDs with 1-3 good tracks, $9 movie tickets to blatantly shitty ass movies that they practically have no choice to see because nothing better came out that Friday, gas prices, etc. But no one wants to step up their game and make good shit, they just want to sue kids and hope it'll stop if the sue enough people to scare millions of users off of The Pirate Bay so they stop downloading their shitty movies.

Go to a fast food joint and get the same goop on top of goop on wedged between a stale bun with a piece of microwaved soybeef in the middle of it. This is capitalism. You can tell these kids are getting paid well and they haven't lost the will to work because they took turns spitting in my burger.

Can't buy a jar of mayo and a box of toaster waffles without knowing either item is probably paying the same conglomerate that's ultimately going to buy another conglomerate until I'm buying my jeans, tootbrushes, and waffles from the same conglomerate.

Capitalism sucks ass.

There's nowhere I can't reach.