1:10 AM -:- Posted by Allen    

It's the Underlying Principle

My buddy Doug Kenline says, speaking of downloading music from the net without paying for it,

I just don't see it as stealing or as murder or as dropping a nuke on Hiroshima.

You have to look at the underlying principle. The line I kept repeating, the justification that just because you can do something, it's okay to do it. That's wrong.

Truman didn't have to drop the bomb on people. He could have done a demo that stopped the world's heartbeat, and walked away the humanitarian of the century in the eyes of the entire world.

I can kill your lover 50 ways before breakfast. Not one of those is a reason for doing it.

That's the point. There are things we can do, and among those are the things we don't do. That's the principle in common, no matter how different the severity of each type of crime. The principle's name is honesty.

And when I was a kid and I taped songs off of the radio was I stealing?

In the most technical sense of the word, yes, but not quite breaking the law because you were taping for yourself and not reselling. The industry mostly looked away on that one. Of course, we must admit that one reason was that they knew they couldn't force an end to it even then.

But here's the difference. You had to make a big effort to tape a song off the radio. You had to wait for it to come around, and then tape it live. Or you had to tape several hours of airplay and then sort through, and if you could manage it technically, copy the songs you wanted onto a second tape. The labels knew you'd never get the same quality that way, and they also knew that the hours you were scouting out the songs you wanted, you were also listening to other songs, adding yourself to the listener base of the radio station. That drove up the ad rates the station could charge its advertisers, and in turn, produced a higher level of revenue to be shared with the labels and their artists.

So the labels and artists could hope to break even on your petty theft. And they got further around the potential of loss by buying into the companies that made adiotape and recorders. Sometimes they even got bought by those tape and recorder manufacturers. SONY comes to mind, a gadget-maker that bought the music and film makers.
Certainly, labels and artists with brains should be buying into CD and CD-burner manufacturers. Although that won't help much this time around.

Anyway, you were socially okay with the labels if you taped the songs for yourself. They saw it as small potatoes. But had you begun to make copies available to anyone who wanted one, and then all your friends started doing it too, they'd have taken notice, told you to stop, and then gone after you if you didn't.

Of course, you never did that, because only the mafia could afford that much tape. So in the end, it was only organized and well-financed criminals who bootlegged music. And they did get sued, and sometimes went to jail.

Now, enter the internet. No tape to buy. Don't even need a CD disc. Just whine at the parents how you need a multimedia PC with a huge hard drive "for school", and then rip all your CDs and start file-sharing with all your friends who do likewise. Instant no-personal-cost mass subversion of an industry.

Mix in a situational-ethics anti-integrity educational system that has already produced its third dumbed-down generation, and you get a bunch of people who don't get it, unless it's being done to them personally.

The result? A sudden visible reversal in the historical growth of music sales, and no way for the industry to compensate.

Their only solution is to go after the file-sharing servers. No different than going after looters who give some of their goodies to the neighbors. That they didn't make money on the stolen goods is irrelevant.

Napster was easy. They were making money off the illegal trade, even if indirectly from ads sold on the basis of visitors drawn in by the freebies.

Distributed systems, however, where the network is the computer, each computer a node in a huge phantom server, will not be so easy.

But answer me this one big guy. How are you going to stop it?

By resuming the social drive toward civilization.

By terminating government schools and all the other tax-sucking agencies that advocate for weakness, for theft of producers' wealth, and for codependence.

By putting our arrogant self-centered youth earlier and earlier into the position of having to take responsibility for itself until it begins to comprehend that there is no free lunch and that if you don't cooperate with the hunting party you'll eat at the end of the line with the dogs.

By prosecuting parents for their minor children's crimes.

By prosecuting teachers for the crimes of their students, until the teachers stop trying to replace parents.

By prosecuting government employees for the crimes of their wards, charges and parolees.

By shunning people who are known to disrespect the rights and property of others.

By publicly accusing criminality everywhere you find it, regardless whose feelings might get hurt, knowing that people will behave themselves to avoid humiliation when they won't behave for any other reason.

By living as an example of astute judgement.

By supporting and investing in and otherwise encouraging people who do the right thing.

By continuing to work toward a non-coercive psychaeology that actually works, so that people can find their way home from confusion.
By blogging with you.

\;-)>