Piracy will eventually evolve…
I found this post over at streetvisuals.posterous.com that brings up a great point about piracy. But before I get to it, I’d just like to point out that what piracy literally is has always existed in some form even if it was legally allowed (via libraries or just borrowing/gifting books from/to friends) and will never go away as long as tools exist for making it possible. That said, what can IP (Intellectual Property) owners do about it? Street Visuals suggests we all just chill and treat it as reasonably in expensive advertising.
The blog post mentions a guy called Markus Persson, developer of the game Minecraft who doesn’t like piracy, but understands that: things, they are a’ changin’.
From StreetVisuals:
Persson says in a blog post that the digital world simply doesn’t mesh with an economic system that was designed around physical goods that can only exist in one place at a time, and can’t be easily copied. “We’ve got an amazingly effective way of distributing culture that is extremely beneficial for humanity, but it clashes with our current economical models,” he writes. The ability to quickly and easily make identical copies of movies, books, games and other content is something we don’t want to give up, Persson says, but “to people who want to get paid for their digital works, myself included, that is a bit of a problem.”
On Persson’s original blog post he even says:
All of society and economics is based on an old outdated model where giving something to someone would rid the original owner of their copy, so everyone who wanted a copy had to buy one from someone else who would lose theirs, and the only source of new copies was you.
I love that he calls it an “old outdated model” because, of course, it is—for exactly the reasons he cites.
But what can we do about it? Neither Persson’s post or the post on Street Visuals really suggests any solution to this problem aside from ignoring it—which is essentially what you do when you treat it as advertising. The only thing you need to do, actively, is make sure there are benefits to buying the legit copy—like extra trinkets that come with the DVD or things you can do online only by registering a legit copy. However, this doesn’t begin to approach the bigger problem facing society:
What do we do with this “old outdated model” of economics that we still practice?
The fact that no one has really gotten farther than this point in the discussion (and most folks aren’t even aware that this discussion is taking place) speaks to our sad and near complete lack of cultural imagination.
The only thing I can think of is something like a UK-style NHS but instead of providing national health services, it’ll provide income for content creators. The system would go like this:
The creator produces the content without compensation to start with. After a certain number of downloads they can apply for government sponsorship. From there, tax money gets shunted to the creator.
Sure, lots of folks would be annoyed that their tax dollars are going to pay for someone to make content that offends them, but the way I see it, they should shut up and grow up since, for ten years, my tax dollars have been helping pay for two wars that I morally and logically object to. Everything is a trade-off when you live in a world with adults. I pay for your content, you pay for mine. We may not agree, but we both agree we should all be able to feed ourselves and our families.
And that’s ultimately the point: we all agree that movies, shows, music, games, books, and software applications are important and useful to humanity as a whole, so why don’t we just agree that this is an industry that absolutely needs to exist and support it with our tax dollars?
The idea that this antiquated old system just went through a massive upheaval should give us a big heads-up that shit needs to change. I mean, banks are too big to fail, but thanks to a lack of money, our creative industry is too big and is failing. We’ve got to do something, kids.
