Reply To: Piracy good or bad

In the old days, people exchanged bits of physical stuff like gold. But as time passes, we increasingly exchange “information”, i.e. physical patterns rather than stuff. The big difference between them is that patterns can be reproduced, but stuff can't be reproduced (apart from in science-fiction “transporters” and “replicators”). Importantly, the patterns can often be reproduced at negligible cost.

So we can't really treat patterns in the same way as we treat stuff, with parties to a transaction gaining and losing the same thing. It's tempting to treat patterns like stuff, because it's more familiar after all those centuries of exchanging stuff instead of patterns. Instead, we need to understand what makes patterns valuable to people, and what someone loses or gains when someone else gets a reproduced pattern.

In my opinion, the very idea of “intellectual property” is on its last legs, because patterns just aren't enough like stuff to count as property. Consider the way (in Europe) an author dies (or a band breaks up), then someone else buys the copyright, rides their new “property” for all it's worth, until exactly 70 years after the author died, when — poof! — their “property” suddenly disappears. This sort of thing irritates librarians (I know because I'm married to one) and explains why anthologies of “recent authors” are heavily skewed towards those who died more than 70 years ago. It's really pretty ridiculous.

Publishing is increasingly becoming a matter of “making patterns available” rather than “selling stuff”, and it's going to take a long time to adapt, but we may as well get started by admitting that huge conceptual changes are on the way, some of which are quite hard to grasp.

It's true that piracy is usually an evil, just as theft is usually an evil. Both should be against the law. But laws can and should be fine-tuned, so that wholly unacceptable cases of flagrant plagiarism (such as hit Jongware) can be dealt with properly — by which I mean harshly — as can cases of non-student beginners “delaying” (ahem) their registration a bit, to the eventual advantage of everyone concerned.

Have a nice weekend! BTW David, I know from my years in Chicago that Guinness is cheaper in most of the US than here in Ireland. If only everything could be like Guinness! But you may as well enjoy it, grumble…