Laws, morals and flowers | 2and2's Blog

Let's examine two other factors in the software piracy arena today. Law is a 4500 year old command line shell to human society. Its core is a set of two commands saying, a person killing another is wrong, but thousands killing thousands isn't if renamed a war. A person robbing another is wrong, but thousands robbing thousands isn't if renamed taxation. This core being written by an author responsible for thousands of murders on his own, our beloved Void ab initio legal code (to use its own expression) commands obedience worldwide by the fact that the less sense people find in something the more they fear and respect it.

The core logic fail however offers a significant benefit in that laws and their enforcement can be applied with equal success to *any* problem by simply outlawing it. You don't have to restrict yourself to fighting only murder with laws. Outlaw anything that bugs you - the cycle of seasons, river floods, inner city poverty, common cold, software piracy - and voilá, it's now illegal! "Bud dis didn'd sdop by cold ad all!" - I hear a nasal whine from the back. I never claimed laws will *stop* any problem. They didn't even dent murder in 4500 years, there's more of it today than ever. I only stated, you can apply laws to any problem with equal success. This I firmly uphold.

The next factor in software piracy is people's moral values. These are often based on a revered ancient scripture or saga whose number and size of miracles seems to correspond proportionally to the ancient availability of hard narcotics. As a result, even the extreme moral values of right of wrong often differ arbitrarily between geographic regions. Robert Anton Wilson remarked, "Morality today, allows Moslems to stone women to death, as it once fueled the Christian witch-hunts. "Morality" has excused every war, and glorified some of them. "Morality" inspires gay-bashing and the bombing of women's clinics. Why, without "morality" we might all suddenly go stark staring sane." On the positive side, morality makes people feel better by giving an illusion of control and of having chosen well; think of the happy bliss the Skoptsy undoubtedly felt, lopping their executive members off. All in all, morality, like BDSM is a fine, heartwarming pursuit as long as people who don't want to get hurt, don't get hurt. A rational system it ain't.

Well, if one doesn't buy a legit Program X because the laws order so, and if one doesn't buy it either because some preach it's the moral thing to do (mostly the ones who would get the money.. hmm) what criteria remains to go by? Self interest, which says we either find a way for everyone to benefit from sharing the fruits of his work or soon there will be no fruits to share (which was the main test result of Soviet Communism). The hard part may be how to impart this insight to the younger generation which sees nothing else on TV but a "plunder everything you can today, never mind the tomorrow" mentality from the older generation as soon as they turn on C-SPAN.

Let's get scientific and begin looking at the causes of piracy. It exists because the current intellectual content distribution system, and the financial system are flawed. People's intellectual wants and their financial resources to satisfy them don't match. If you can't solve this imbalance, you'll never solve piracy by any other method. Poverty is a manmade misery, it doesn't exist in nature. My suggestion? First, make intellectual property affordable overall with a utility-like distribution system. When water became a public utility, its price fell so low due to everyone sharing the costs, it became senseless to steal it anymore. Next, make people better-off overall by defining intellectual content as a global currency, in a whole new economic sector called the ideosphere. Anyone can create intellectual content on Earth in some function or other. That's billions of new jobs with income! As long as anyone's intellectual creation has demand, it has a value, and its creator/s have a business. Imagine letting billions of flowers bloom... makes Mao with his "hundreds" sound like a beginner.