Interesting discussion, I have some content that would add yet another point of view.
The common view would be that theft is bad, however there is a transitional phase where it will happen until the system corrects itself and a new steady state is established. Here is an example, the movie industry was scream bloody hell when the vcr came out - the premise was that people would copy movies and they would lose revenue. In reality what happen was that people did copy movies and they lost some revenue. From their point of view it was lost of revenue but it is only a real lost if there was a potential buyer that no longer bought. On the flip side, it create huge opportunities where it created a multi-billion dollar industry. The increase exposure create a market that far exceeded what they lost. When I was young, there were not a lot of movies in a year - today you need a small fortune to own all the movies produced in a year. From an economic point of view, with a greater market and consumer base, you would expect prices to drop. The prices have not dropped significantly (at least upon initial release). As the movie industry moves to bigger budget movies and stars demanding bigger dollars, the movie industry continues to point their fingers at the downloaders as the problem. Corporate social responsibility is as close a name as I can think of for this phenomenon. (not in all cases) don't spend big bucks producing something mediocre and expect consumers to compensate you. Don't produce something that costs 0.50 and expect payment of $30. I am not saying that profit is bad, just that exhorbant profit is bad as the public will find alternative action be it legal or illegal. People have talked about theft and contract of the Internet but no one has talked about the Internet as an enabler to create for the first time equality between big and small business. Today, you can be a publisher, a movie producer, a software company, a music producer. Today you can do all this in direct competition with big business. This concept is well covered in a book called Wikinomics. In there it outlines a paradigm shift where the importance is exposure and not compensation. (Starting to sound like Star Trek.) One author states that he writes a book and sells it through traditional means but he also allows it to be downloaded from his website for free. He is also not too concern that someone on the other side of the world may download, print and sell his book without him seeing a dime. To him, the world is his market and his main concern is will his thoughts and notions be heard in a sea of me too voices. At some point if people like his ideas, they will se ek him out and will buy a book from him. This is also very much true with up and coming struggling artists. Any exposure is good exposure even intentionally allowing people to 'steal' your music. >From my point of view, the open market dictates what is ethical and what is >not over time. Ethics is not dictated by a single point of view or artificial >oversight committees or government but by societies collective view over time. > Lastly, ethics is a matter of affordability - we can certainly feel very smug >looking at what is ethical and what is not living is a warm house with 3 or >more square meals a day. Take away all the comforts of life then theft of the >basic living requirements like food now becomes a right. That certainly did not clear anything up - just thought I would broaden the subject matter. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Z. (If forwarding, PLEASE delete address from body of e-mail!)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "CLUG General" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2008 9:32:16 AM (GMT-0700) America/Chihuahua Subject: Re: [clug-talk] Open WiFi (shift from clug-tech discussion) _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying -- Regards, Kin W _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
