In this post I will discuss three of the essential parts in the filesharing debate.
*Consumers show a need that is not satisfied by the market,
*The intellectual property law needs to change.
*The need for control to maintain power.
———–

A Need

The filesharing is a result of improvements in technology and a need to share and be social with each other. When new technology emerges and it is superior to existing technology the market needs to adapt to the new needs of citizens in our digital society. People don’t want to wait another few days (or weeks) for the end of the show they are watching. A lot of people would rather enjoy music digitally right away instead of buying a CD and converting it themselves. People have a need to be spontaneous at home and deciding what movie they would like to see now instead of planning it beforehand or having to walk off to rent a movie somewhere.

Intellectual Property Law

As I see it copyright is a ”monologue” where people are meant to consume instead of participating in the further shaping of the copyrighted piece. This limits the communication and creativity that would otherwise take place. Before our digital age copyright had a good place in our society preventing physical copies to be made elsewhere which was directly damaging to the sales. Today when a technological change has made copying of digital material almost costless the old copyright law no longer applies in the same way it used to. The intellectual property law needs to change to reflect this but the established companies are happy with the profits from their old business model and do what they can to maintain this model. For society to adapt copyright to our digital age we need to either change intellectual copyright law or we are forced to change other existing rights such as Secrecy of Letters (Brevhemligheten), Source Protection (källskydd) and Mere Conduit.

A Need For Control

The filesharing debate is essentially about the right to knowledge and the sharing of it. Today knowledge-hoarders have power since they are the ones sitting on more knowledge than others have. With a bigger access to knowledge the society gets more equal. Inside larger corporations they have the possibilities of remixing each others work with that corporation. Having an opportunity of remixing leads to an increased creativity. The creation of copyright was meant to allow creativity but today it acts more as a restrictor of creativity. ”To discuss the actual conditions of creation, one should also discuss how the act of creation is done”

[Pics: Movie watching, CC-BY-NC-SA, julianrod / Leaf, CC-BY-ND, jaypeq21 / control, CC-BY-NC-ND, alphadesigner ]

For a further discussion around the need to change copyright take a look at my blog-post ”Copyright Worked In The Past But Not Anymore”
For more around the concept of copyright as a monologue listen to ”Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity”.]

Another post I wrote a few years ago about one of the branches of ethics. Enjoy.
————-

“That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing” – brilliantly said by Pliny the Younger, which wisdom acts as one of the cornerstones of Ethical Individualism. We believe that many people follow this principle to a degree in this world even though they are unaware of it themselves. These people are usually said to be forgetful, selfish, lazy, egocentric, greedy, and in more friendly words: laid-back and utterly enjoys fishing.

The Ethical Individualist tends to keep a positive attitude towards his own incompetency, especially when it comes to short-term memory. He is often considered to be street-smart, a scavenger, and a brute. In other-words, he is a survivor. He pillages the weak, trades with the strong; what he can’t remember, doesn’t exist; what he finds, is what he keeps. And of course, he likes to spend his days by the lake and fishing.

Most people mistake Ethical Individualism with Anarchy. Although similar, the statement is false. For example: an Ethical Individualist would never consider robbing a big bank. The bank is strong and therefore a true follower of Ethical Individualism would try to trade with the bank and rob the old lady coming out of the bank with her month’s pension in her purse instead.

If the Ethical Individualist doesn’t feel like going to school in the morning and instead wants to go fishing – he will. He will be considered selfish because now his lab partner will have to do without him and he will be considered a lazy and forgetful coward for not having done his English homework, skipping school and not facing the consequences of his actions. But to him, he is just enjoying life… and fishing.

Now one might also see Ethical Individualism as the ultimate ethical principle to follow. However it does have minor flaws. This is best demonstrated with another example: If our ideal Ethical Individualist wants to marry another person, he can no longer rely on Ethical Individualism for moral judgment. If the individual’s happiness depends on another individual, Ethical Individualism will not apply because according to the principle, it is oafish to depend on other people for your own happiness. This flaw is only minor because people “are dishonest and do not keep faith with [other people]” -Niccolo Machiavelli. These kind of foolish reliance will not occur often in this world, at least not by Ethical Individualists.

Another example would be using Ethical Individualism to judge the moral correctness of ”A Modest Proposal”. To those who are not familiar with this work by Jonathan Swift, here comes a brief summary:

“The author argues, by hard-edged economic reasoning as well as from a self-righteous moral stance, for a way to turn this problem into its own solution. His proposal, in effect, is to fatten up these undernourished children and feed them to Ireland’s rich land-owners. Children of the poor could be sold into a meat market at the age of one, he argues, thus combating overpopulation and unemployment, sparing families the expense of child-bearing while providing them with a little extra income, improving the culinary experience of the wealthy, and contributing to the overall economic well-being of the nation.”
-Jonathan Swift

To the Ethical Individualist this brilliant proposal by Jonathan Swift is arguably satirical. This way the poor people would transform their former financial burden into a profit, all for greed of money and every bit selfish. The rich would then have a delicacy on the dinner table for them to enjoy. This form of enjoyment would almost match fishing. According to Ethical Individualism, Jonathan Swift is quite ingenious in coming up with this proposal, making him the ideal Ethical Individualist. Eating babies might seem barbaric and inhuman, but it has to be taken account that just because something is judged to be morally correct doesn’t mean one has to actually perform these deeds for other reasons. One might not enjoy eating babies, therefore one might consider it to be morally incorrect because, in the end, one should enjoy life’s pleasantries.

Now.
Enjoy life, and remember:
your happiness is worth a thousand times the happiness from others.

[pic: CC-BY-ND, jaroslavd]

I’m reading a book called ”The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology”. One part of the book takes up an example that shows how a tool can be perceived very differently from a slight incident. They are unaware of the surveillance until they see it and they don’t like the spying on their every action even if they have nothing to hide.

”The case dealt with a fairly large application of Lotus Notes used for new product development within a worldwide team-based organization. Dedicated Notes applications were built to allow multidisciplinary and multinational teams to work jointly on common projects, regardless of distance between locations. Implementation of the new system was carried out according to a participative methodology, an incremental introduction of the system, and comprehensive training. Usage was immediate, ubiquitous, and successful. One day, however, a cheering message broadcasted over the network by a top marketing manager in London made every user realize that the new transparent platform could be deployed by headquarters as a powerful controlling eye, able to access any working document and local bulletin board of all the distant teams. Such a possibility made usage fall immediately and significantly. Attempts to revamp the system succeeded only when the applications were redesigned to replicate the pre-existing routines and organizational structures, thus losing much of the original innovative design, transparency, and collaboration opportunities.
This case provides evidence, among other things, about the ambiguity of new technology. Despite the careful planning and design, and the extensive training, the new groupware technology appeared to the user suddenly as an ambivalent, threatening stranger. The latent tensions between the professional dimension and the existential one exploded as a consequence of a small incident” (p. 26)

This story tells us a lot of useful things. One of the most significant ones being that the average user is very unaware of what the technique actually does and how it can be used until someone ”misuses” it. The surveillance of people is normally not a problem as long as they are not aware of it.

Another issue that becomes clear through this is that people are not comfortable sharing everything with others even if they have nothing to hide. Right now there is a lot of argument about not having to be afraid of surveillance unless you have something to hide. This is clearly not the case in this example.

The third thing we learn is how little is needed to shift the usage and opinions of people. Find the right thing to say and we can change everything instantly. One wrong (or right) thing to say changes the focus of the mass from seeing a productive and efficient tool to seeing a tool for controlling and spying.

Going against established laws and copyrights have throughout history enabled a higher level of innovation to take place then would otherwise have happened. The public needs pirates to enhance the market. Big firms with high profits tend to get satisfied instead of aiming to constantly improve upon their services.

If we didn’t have pirates and copying then Walt Disney would not be the empire it was today. 20th Century Fox is another major company today that started with pirating film since the Motion Picture Patent Company (MPPC), consisting of 10 major companies, was using bullying and monopolizing to keep small independent film companies out of the market. There are a few more that started of as pirates to later on go and build an empire. The problem is that they forget their past and act as the big bullying actors of the past.

Once a firm becomes an established entity with a good profit they often restrict innovation in order to maintain their business profits. New innovations means a shift of power which is often bad for established players. One example is the delaying of FM-technology that RCA did to keep their share on the AM market even though they realized that FM radio was clearly a superior alternative. This restriction and suing of people to delay progress keeps repeating at each introduction of a new innovation that shifts balance within the market (radio, tv, cds, mp3, torrents etc). Another way of restricting innovation is locking down content in complicated laws and bureaucracy needed to clear rights. Netflix is an innovator that has had to fight it’s way to the position it is in today but that still has a long bureaucratic path in order to launch their business more global.

Innovation shakes the profitability of the market for the established players, sometimes to the better but sometimes to the worse. It is often the small and new players that are most keen on evolving their business ideas in order to make their way into the market. The larger a firm gets the larger the bureaucracy becomes and this means that the organizational learning most of the times gets very limited in its possibilities. The bigger control a firm has over the supply to a certain market the harder they will sue and use dirty tricks to keep other out of this market. With only a few players in the market the power shifts away from the consumers and towards the suppliers.

Pic: CC-BY-NC-SA, .nele
Sources: History of Film – The History of the Movies , Piraterna : de svenska fildelarna som plundrade Hollywood , Edwin Armstrong: Genius of FM Radio

I got inspired to write this blog post about inspiration after reading another blog post about inspiration;) A lot of people think that inspiration comes and goes at it’s own accord but this is not entirely true. Some people are more in tune with their inspiration and it seems like they have a natural gift but if you want to be inspired as well there are a few tricks. In this post I’m going to discuss three tricks (exposing, limiting and no requirements) to enable inspiration.

The first trick is probably the easiest. By exposing yourself to other creative art you will be inspired by something in those pictures to create something of your own. I try to post some inspiration each Sunday to be stimulated and get a good start for the next week. When exposing yourself you need to combine, either your own thoughts or two other pieces, to create something new and unique. This kind of trick for inspiration is limited by current copyright laws that force you to not use too much of the picture that inspired you.

Second trick is limiting yourself. In this age of information there is always something going on which is easier to focus on then the current task. Thus we need to restrict what we can do until we are done with our work. If one limits the field of thought and use it to focus on inspiration one will find something. Sometimes this means limiting physical surroundings, sometimes it’s enough to just limit the cognitive focus of your thoughts.

The last trick to getting inspiration that I will talk about is having no requirements of what you produce. This approach almost always fails at the first approach where one comes up with something really bad. But from this failure one often remixes parts of it and comes up with something inspiring to create with. Fail a few times without limiting yourself to what is good and there will for sure be something of value in some part of the attempts.

[photo: CC-BY-NC-ND, Dia]