Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m work­ing on out­lin­ing a novel to which this issue is cen­tral, so I found my friend Paul’s mini essay a very inter­est­ing read.  I’m not ready to say any­thing about this issue, but you really should read Paul’s post:

Sure, there are peo­ple out there who believe every­thing should be free on the web… and sure, those peo­ple are pretty stu­pid (or extremely ide­al­is­tic and igno­rant of the most basic tenets of eco­nom­ics). However, the “shitstorm-​​generators” that Palmer refers to – the ones with any real influ­ence at all, rather than the lip-​​flapping skrip­tkid­diez who requote them out of con­text on their warez blogs – do not believe (or at least do not pub­licly claim) that “every­thing should be free on the web”.

And then there’s this bril­liant bit as well:

Digital media is a non-​​rival good; to take it for free is not theft but eva­sion of cost, and eva­sion of cost is a fun­da­men­tal tenet of eco­nomic behav­iour (with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of those with more money than sense); eco­nomic behav­iour is not ratio­nal but emo­tional, and bas­ing your response to a change in the under­pin­nings of an industry’s econ­omy on the hope that you can stop human beings behav­ing in the ways they always have done is to doom your­self to fail­ure. Successful busi­nesses work out ways to mon­e­tise desire, but busi­ness mod­els do not last for­ever; if they did, there wouldn’t be an inter­net (or cars, or elec­tric­ity, or, or, or). QED.

(empha­sis Paul’s).

So off you go then.  More here tomorrow.

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Tags: digital content, piracy