Pirates as pioneers - the link between the right to copy and the economic formation
At the time of the sea discoveries, pirates were often pioneers - they discovered something, conquered something, and often the crowned persons were in great friendship with them and supported them in every way. (Of course, if they did not touch their own. Such pirates were called corsairs).
Naturally, seeing this headline on Geektimes, everyone understood that this was not about militant seafarers, but about distributors of illegal content.
Why did I decide to talk about pirates? It seems they are such, syaky, byaki one word. Let me start from afar.
Let us conduct a small thought experiment: imagine that a teleport was invented. Yes, even with the free price of transportation and very cheap installation price. How will this affect our lives? Will our quality of life improve or deteriorate? From my point of view, it would rather improve the quality of our life. For example, one could live in a very quiet and small village with good nature and work in a big city like Moscow or New York. In the morning I got up, listened to the bird's trills at dawn, then dived into the teleport, and you're already in the office. And I’m already keeping quiet about the logistics - the ability to move cargoes in any direction instantly and free of charge ... So, imagine, one of your friends is the inventor of such a teleport: you came to visit him, and he showed you his work by moving you to New York Here you walk along the Brooklyn Bridge and think how nice it will be when it goes to the masses, and your friend the inventor suddenly says: “You know, I decided to break the installation and burn the drawings”. “But why?” You are amazed. “Well, you know, bus drivers will have to retrain, to conductors and machinists too. And banks will suffer losses as demand for mortgages will decrease. ” Would you agree with his arguments? Probably no. The growth of the economy, which will give such an invention, will allow not only to retrain drivers and machinists, but even simply to keep on the manual, if suddenly it does not work well with retraining. Here we finish the mental experiment and move on.
Do we really have such a breakthrough in any field? The answer is yes! We have such a breakthrough in the field of information. What was done in the first half of the last century was difficult, long and for big money - now it can be done quickly, easily and for free. Namely, the copying of various informational content, be it music, movies, books, software, databases or samples (in the sense of information to play an instance) of some objects and devices, can be copied without any technical problems. But instead of rejoicing at the new opportunities, the society for some reason was upset, and began to forbid them in every way. For example, earlier, in order for a musician to release an album or a writer to publish a book, a complicated, lengthy and humiliating procedure was required to convince some people that all this should and will be in demand. And now it would seem beautiful - recorded an album, threw it into torrents and it's done. Technologically, everything looks very good - the publication of the album will take place in several mouse movements, without any financial costs (no need to purchase records, tapes; record them, etc.). But for some reason these possibilities do not please the musicians, they howl with them a wolf. The same applies to other types of sample creation activities. Why did it happen? Such a discrepancy: technical capabilities have appeared, and people are forced to artificially restrict them, prohibit, prevent, call the police for help. And everything is very simple: the current economic formation of our civilization does not correspond to the current technological development. This has already happened more than once. The communal system, slave, feudal, bourgeois, were replaced. Now is the time for another change in the economic structure.
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And in the new formation, the mechanisms of free copying will not destroy the economy, but, on the contrary, will form its basis. There will be some kind of reward mechanism for sample authors in the society, which will work even with free copying. How this will happen at the moment - one can only guess. And this (change of formation) will inevitably occur. The whole question is whether these will be soft reforms or, as often happens in such cases, another, full-scale war will occur, the result of which will be a change of formation. To some extent, the changes are already underway, free software has appeared, but so far they are not sufficient.
In conclusion, I want to write about the purpose of the article: the opinion that illegal content is an absolute evil is formed in different media, and it must be treated accordingly. But this is not so - the distributors of illegal content are just pioneers of a new economic formation, and not demons of hell. And, of course, the authors should be rewarded for their work, but the fact that modern society practically does not provide means of reward for freely copied information is obviously the problems of society as a whole, and not of its individual representatives.
Naturally, seeing this headline on Geektimes, everyone understood that this was not about militant seafarers, but about distributors of illegal content.
Why did I decide to talk about pirates? It seems they are such, syaky, byaki one word. Let me start from afar.
Let us conduct a small thought experiment: imagine that a teleport was invented. Yes, even with the free price of transportation and very cheap installation price. How will this affect our lives? Will our quality of life improve or deteriorate? From my point of view, it would rather improve the quality of our life. For example, one could live in a very quiet and small village with good nature and work in a big city like Moscow or New York. In the morning I got up, listened to the bird's trills at dawn, then dived into the teleport, and you're already in the office. And I’m already keeping quiet about the logistics - the ability to move cargoes in any direction instantly and free of charge ... So, imagine, one of your friends is the inventor of such a teleport: you came to visit him, and he showed you his work by moving you to New York Here you walk along the Brooklyn Bridge and think how nice it will be when it goes to the masses, and your friend the inventor suddenly says: “You know, I decided to break the installation and burn the drawings”. “But why?” You are amazed. “Well, you know, bus drivers will have to retrain, to conductors and machinists too. And banks will suffer losses as demand for mortgages will decrease. ” Would you agree with his arguments? Probably no. The growth of the economy, which will give such an invention, will allow not only to retrain drivers and machinists, but even simply to keep on the manual, if suddenly it does not work well with retraining. Here we finish the mental experiment and move on.
Do we really have such a breakthrough in any field? The answer is yes! We have such a breakthrough in the field of information. What was done in the first half of the last century was difficult, long and for big money - now it can be done quickly, easily and for free. Namely, the copying of various informational content, be it music, movies, books, software, databases or samples (in the sense of information to play an instance) of some objects and devices, can be copied without any technical problems. But instead of rejoicing at the new opportunities, the society for some reason was upset, and began to forbid them in every way. For example, earlier, in order for a musician to release an album or a writer to publish a book, a complicated, lengthy and humiliating procedure was required to convince some people that all this should and will be in demand. And now it would seem beautiful - recorded an album, threw it into torrents and it's done. Technologically, everything looks very good - the publication of the album will take place in several mouse movements, without any financial costs (no need to purchase records, tapes; record them, etc.). But for some reason these possibilities do not please the musicians, they howl with them a wolf. The same applies to other types of sample creation activities. Why did it happen? Such a discrepancy: technical capabilities have appeared, and people are forced to artificially restrict them, prohibit, prevent, call the police for help. And everything is very simple: the current economic formation of our civilization does not correspond to the current technological development. This has already happened more than once. The communal system, slave, feudal, bourgeois, were replaced. Now is the time for another change in the economic structure.
')
And in the new formation, the mechanisms of free copying will not destroy the economy, but, on the contrary, will form its basis. There will be some kind of reward mechanism for sample authors in the society, which will work even with free copying. How this will happen at the moment - one can only guess. And this (change of formation) will inevitably occur. The whole question is whether these will be soft reforms or, as often happens in such cases, another, full-scale war will occur, the result of which will be a change of formation. To some extent, the changes are already underway, free software has appeared, but so far they are not sufficient.
In conclusion, I want to write about the purpose of the article: the opinion that illegal content is an absolute evil is formed in different media, and it must be treated accordingly. But this is not so - the distributors of illegal content are just pioneers of a new economic formation, and not demons of hell. And, of course, the authors should be rewarded for their work, but the fact that modern society practically does not provide means of reward for freely copied information is obviously the problems of society as a whole, and not of its individual representatives.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/364221/
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