Thread: Some reflections on piracy, anti-piracy and governments

Reading through the recent threads at T-I about anti-piracy campaigns, government and police actions to support it etc, it got me started thinking how deeply ridiculous all this is. Actually, we all know that, but the depth of that state is what impressed me most...

And so I started thinking:

Wow and Lol!... I did not expect governments to go that far to protect the private interests of a few very rich and powerful against an imaginary threat and imaginary reason for profit losses that these few rich and powerful think it to be real... I did not expect that goverments would go that far to protect the greed and imaginary fear of a few rich and powerful to not lose a few pennies out of billions... But I was naive!

When a government jumps in to protect the private interests of a few rich and powerful, consider this the end of the democracy as we all have been striving to achieve for centuries now! Certain instances have been spreading and spreading lies about how much money the software, movie and music industries are losing due to torrent "piracy", where in fact no one has ever been able to prove any real connection between both, maybe a correlation but not a connection. Why is this so doubtful?

If one looks carefully into things, one will see that the good software, good music and good movies have always been paid for by consumers well and have always brought fortune to their producers. If these industries are making losses, that is because of all the crap they are producing, which seems to outnumber the good stuff lately... No one wants to pay for crap, but they want to make us pay for it too. They want to make us pay for everything they produce, no matter we really want it or like it...

Take any torrent, be it software, music or movie, and count the total number of peers since the beginning of the torrent. Then substract from it the number of users that actually cannot afford buying the product anyway or are not willing to buy it in any case. Believe me, this is not a small number! Bittorrent has brought and is still bringing things to many people who woud otherwise not have (had) the possibility to have these at all (more about in the next paragraphs). From the resulting number substract all the users who have already bought the product or are for certain going to buy it after "testing it out". If it is good, there will be a good amount of such users, just as it has always been so. Yes, certainly not all of them would do that, but just as certainly many would in fact do it. If the product is crap, why does it matter anyhow?! The remaining amount of users are then the actual pirates. Tell me now, you would think there are so great many of them that they actually constitute any noticeable loss of profit for a multi-billion industry?

That is why the torrent "threat" is an imaginary threat. Their fear comes from their greed for every last penny they could grab from somewhere, anywhere. Anti-piracy lawsuits are nothing else but just another way to make a profit from a segment that these industries do not produce anything in - the internet and privacy segment (=hosting, various platforms, internet advertising, file sharing). All these lawsuits are simply another way of doing business: you make Pirate Bay pay, say, 10 Mio, the lawsuit costs are 1 Mio, and here you go with 9 Mio to spend on another private jet... That new business is labeled now anti-piracy.



Now, what do I mean by privacy business? Here it is: they simple want to monitor all IP-s and they are actually doing it! Anti-Piracy is just an excuse for Anti-Privacy! Just think about how they actually catch pirates. They want to know who is sitting behind a particular IP, what he or she is downloading, what he or she likes, dislikes and hates, so that "they can suit their offers better to you", lol, I am ironic of course. As always, it is all about information and its control and subsequently your control. What makes them more angry than the imaginary losses of profit, is the fact that they cannot control the torrent sharing stream, that they cannot say who will get what and under what conditions, that they cannot put different prices on their same-cost-product for different regions or classes. They are angry, because they cannot discriminate you in price or availability, so they could eat all your consumer surplus.

But could they be really that blind out of greed. Kind of unlikely! There has to be something else behind all that action, an additional incentive for all that aggression against file-sharing itself and file-sharing communities. That incentive is really simple. What they fear more than everything, is transperancy. It is the transperancy of knowledge whether a certain product (software, album, movie) is good or crap. Because if it is crap, no one would pay for it. But, as already pointed out, unfortunately it seems as of now that the crap outnumbers the quality stuff. And their aggression against file-sharing, while being supposedly only against the file-sharing itself, is actually against the file-sharing community. Maybe not that surprising is the fact the the file-sharing community appears to be one of the strongest communities in history, being a social phenomenon of the internet era. What they are aiming at: Devide and Conquer!

They want to make us buy everything they produce (at the cost of our full consumer surplus, that actually in total constitutes the measurable wealth of a market society) no matter if we want, like or even can afford it... You pay for the movie, then you are allowed to watch it. You pay for the album, then you are allowed to listen to it.

Food for thought!