Economics, Piracy and Choice
I’m not going to lie to you… I come from the Napster generation. I discovered early on after I entered collage that if I applied a little brainpower, I could get most digital content for free. Software, Games, Movies, Music… it didn’t matter. If it was in digital form, and I desired it, I simply just downloaded it.
Fast forward to today. I may be unemployed at the moment, but I’m still used to having way more money than I did in college. If I really wanted a particular song, I could probably pay for it. But that’s just the problem… I still know how to get things for free. It’s hard to really want to pay for things if you know you can get them for free. Morality doesn’t enter into it. It’s simply economics– free beats paid, always and forever.
Some people will call it stealing. Like you wouldn’t walk into a CD store and just take a CD off the shelf. Would you do it if nobody stopped you? Me personally, I wouldn’t. For some reason that feels wrong to me (I don’t know why). Maybe its because there’s a store that will be hurt if I steal from them. There are real people there- the employees, the managers, etc. (Personally I couldn’t give a flip about the company itself.)
Where downloading something for free doesn’t feel wrong. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been doing it so long. Is it an addiction, that I can’t stop? No. I’ve paid for a few programs I thought were pretty good. And sometimes I decide that it sucks “stealing” things and I want to take the high road, so I pay for whatever it is. But it doesn’t happen that often. (How many movies out there do you desire watching vs how many do you have the money to pay for?)
The problem is, I now have the power to choose, where I didn’t before. If I was broke and couldn’t afford a CD, I had to let it sit on the shelf. I was forced to restrain myself and not partake in life. But the power has shifted. Now I feel like I can choose to pay for it, or I can choose not to. If I don’t like what a company is doing or how they are presenting their product, I can still enjoy the thing I love (like watching a movie) without doing some kind of political message… not paying for the content, in some mis-guided attempt to get the company to change (like that will ever happen.)
This is the real reason why executives want to label people who download as criminals. They have to make it sound evil to try to guilt you into stop doing it. Because they know if you decide to continue, their very fabric of doing things will come crumbling down.
What the downloading generation has taught us is that the middlemen will die. If I want content, I want it now. And if you don’t do it my way, then I’ll just pirate it. That the other real advantage pirating has. If I want some content, I fire up bittorrent and just download it. I don’t have to wait, I don’t have to worry about DRM, I just get what I want.
Most companies are not in the business of really providing exactly what people want. They make it “good enough” that you will accept the price for it, or the method they decide. The downloading generation will force companies to become like real companies again– providing a superior product/service the public actually wants. Not like these fake companies out there that tried to rig the system so that you have no choice but to do things their way. Those companies will die. And so they should.
Businesses, products are about economics. And economics say that the best solution wins. Piracy has real advantages over doing things the old way. I get lots of content, for free, whenever I want and in the method I want. It is not bad to want the best solution for yourself. And you can’t shame people into being “moral” or some crap. It just won’t work. If you were a good little robot, you’d go out and buy every “cool” product the second it came out, because the nice little companies tell you to. If you don’t do that, then you’re ripping the company off from the sale.
Me personally, I just want to enjoy life. If a company gets in the way of me doing that, then goodbye company.
