There is just a mind bogglingly high amount of discussion on the Internet about PIPA [Protect-IP Act] and SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act]. It is great that people are getting involved in this, even though a bigger problem, the latest iteration of the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act], was passed without even a whisper outside of conspiracy theory websites.
Ignoring NDAA which requires only a waiver to make a person disappear without trial while lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks over PIPA and SOPA can be described as…
“You can take my neighbor, but you can’t take my Facebook!”
Anyway, the NDAA is here to stay. Sites like Reddit, Google and many others, have banded together in an effort to raise awareness over the two acts, PIPA and SOPA. Both of which attempt to extend copyright law into a draconian form of criminalizing and bringing down what amounts to the stealing of intellectual property which has gone so far as to eliminate the ability for IP to ever enter the public domain during the lifetime of the creator and his/her offspring. Once media companies tie the Citizens United case of creating a person out of a corporation to the PIPA/SOPA concepts and copyrights will never expire.
The problem everyone has with this is akin to the problem consumers had with protesting gas prices. They didn’t buy gas for a day in some places. Big deal. You still want it, you still need it. You can’t get away from it. I understand that in the sense of gasoline. You can’t get to work without it. Even if you use public transport, they still need gas too. But this is digital copies of music and movies. No one needs it. It’s a want. It isn’t a right. But lets ignore the rights aspect for now. That is a different argument.
So, you want movies and music. They, the media companies, want to maximize profits for shareholders. They are legally bound to do so by their investors contract. So, they lobby to get laws changed to more draconian form. While they are spending money, the same money that you consumers are spending on the products, they are seeking to limit consumer ability to consume how they want. Then they go after “pirates” which, although I agree with stopping piracy, is a moral/ethical dilemma, not a legal one. You can’t stop a person from pirating something with law. It hasn’t stopped murder theft, rape, abduction or anything else.
Nothing will stop it unless it’s committed by an ethically fringe case.
What do I mean by that? It means that the person is ethically sound, but has been jaded to the point where they don’t care about it at the time of the criminal act. Ethics takes time to brew in a person. When a person is young, they don’t know about right and wrong, or care enough about it because of some threshold. Like a balk-rate in economics; the point at which a person will step out of line to avoid the cost of waiting. There is also price apprehension or the rate that makes a person pause to sell or buy.
When I was younger, piracy was a very underground scene. You had to dial into a website on a telephone line and download whatever you wanted at a rate that would require being connected sometimes for days. Now it’s just faster. At that time, the price for a game was $30-50 per title. Now it is about $40-60. 25 years later, the price for distributing has nearly vanished, the consumer base has grown exponentially, and speed has increased at what seems like a record pace, but when compared to foreign countries the US is really slow. There are also MMO [Massively Multiplayer Online] Games which aren’t as threatened by piracy since their content is socialized on what amounts to a central server.
So, piracy is primarily a socio-economic event. If a person makes enough money, they’ll buy it. Even if they pirated a copy previously, they want to play it first to see if they like it and can pass their balk rate. A person will buy an item if the price is below their balk rate. How do I know? iTunes is a perfect example. Economics tell me that as well. Books are priced outrageously for mass consumption, the same with magazines. Outrageously for digital versions. The print versions are fairly cheap even though the cost of production and distribution is phenomenal. iTunes and Amazon are going to prove that the low cost, mass digital sale and distribution model will be beneficial. What throws a corkscrew into any economic analysis of this, even at this cursory unscientific level, are ethics.
Ethics, simply put, describe moral conduct. Morals are culture based. So a person who grows up thinking that software piracy [or the devaluation of the work of others to the benefit of your own] is okay, it will be okay. Like a train, that thought bias will be difficult to derail. For some, even the lowest of price will not justify paying for an item. But then, they would pirate no matter what.
There is a political aspect to all of this “How to truly stop them” talk. But should it really take millions of people struggling to stop just a small segment of people looking to keep their status quo going? I don’t think so. But if you look at the money that is involved, it will take 80% of the population to speak out against the millions of dollars spent lobbying to get SOPA and PIPA in place.
And that is where my way of stopping PIPA and SOPA [unfortunately it won't stop NDAA expansion from happening]… don’t buy from any company that supports SOPA and PIPA. Not now, not ever. That is the only way to stop from funding the very lobbying that is extending the very limitations you fight against.