I’m going to touch on something which have been on my mind for a long time, and I’ve debated with others – namely piracy and copying of material without the right to do so.
One of the most common arguments I hear when debating piracy with anybody is that “It is not stealing”, and well, I do not know other countries legislation well enough, but in Denmark that is technically true.
No actual physical entity of the product have been removed without paying for it, it is “just a copy”.
Our legislation and society takes its foundation in the days of yonder, where a goat was a goat and if you removed said goat, it was gone. Our – well most of us – ethics tell us that stealing is wrong, because you haven’t paid for it and somebody else is going to lose their stuff.
I am wondering if it isn’t time for a completely new way of thinking. This way of thinking strikes me as completely out of tune with the modern day and reality.
Our world is moving to an increasingly technologistic world, where virtual money carries real life implications, virtual goods are sold for millions and companies base their entire existing on these virtual goods.
I myself am a programmer. My company lives by making software. We basically sell 0 and 1s which on their own hold no value what so ever. It is just numbers – however put together they serve a purpose; whether it is to display a webpage, generate an electronic catalogue or as a gateway to buy physical goods and all such things.
It is however “not real” in the essences of a physical world. You can’t touch a webpage, or another piece of software. Yet, we sell this and people buy it, and many more people use it – it is creating income (or at least redistributing it :D) from customers to vendors.
Similar, this income is often also handled electronically – it is 0 and 1s moved from one bank account, a virtual place, to another – not physical money actually changing hands, or no number of goats changing owners.
Thus we already have a mindset in our world where virtual goods are worth a bundle of money - If somebody hacked my bank and removed the 0 and 1s from my account – I would have lost no physical goods, yet I’d be a danged lot poorer.
Why then this difference when it comes to copying material without permission or piracy basically?
If a customer takes my software without paying us – my company loses money. If somebody else copy it and uses it, we lose potential money. Now I use the word “potential” because another argument in this piracy debate is that “a copied copy does not equal a lost sale”. And yes, that is also true …. technically.
However it also means somebody wanted the software/music – the 0 and 1s – bad enough they’d break the law to get it. So instead of paying for it, they copy it.
And this is where my fascination comes into play. Suppose a piece of music – it is much more accepted in our societies to copy the work of the web, downloading the music as a file, then stealing the physical disc it is placed on, even though the value of the disc itself is marginally.
When we buy music we buy the content of the disc as well as the disc, but the disc makes up for a very low percentage of the price – it is the content, the music, which holds the value we pay money for. So why this different perception of ethics?
I think it is because we – as society – are still locked in a way of thinking which is outdated. We no longer live exclusively in a physical world – much of our existence is based on virtual goods and money.
We need a new way of thinking. It was the same which happened once we moved from a barter system to paying with a metal because “somebody” deemed that metal valuable. You can’t eat the metal, it doesn’t grow if you plant it – yet we somehow accepted this metal was worth something which could buy a goat. A goat was no longer a goat, it was interchangeable with metal …. for some.
It was again the same when we switched the metal out for paper. Paper which were valuable because somebody specific had printed some numbers on it. A goat was now interchangeable with paper. It was again the same which happened once electronic cards were introduced. These 0 and 1s on my credit card was now worth something.
Virtual goods are worth something, each and every copy is worth something. Even if somebody never planned on buying said copy but “took” it anyway – that copy represent value, somebody have put value into the copy , others pay for similar copies.
We need a new way of thinking. We need a paradigm change of our mindset, as we have before. I just wonder when society and ethics catches up with reality.