The Open Source Movie

NOTE: It appears that the website “mixeye” is no longer. Here’s the original article in it’s entirety:

The Bread Duplicator

According to the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), “(piracy) is no different from stealing a person’s shoes or stereo”. At the risk of stating the obvious: When you knick somebody’s shoes, you’re depriving the rightful owner of her footwear. But when you’re downloading a piece of software or a song, you’re creating a brand new copy for yourself. This is a crucial difference, if ever there was such a thing.

If I had access to a bread duplicator that could copy a baguette with the same ease with which one can replicate a digital file, would the MPAA argue that using this technology to feed the hungry is in some way damaging to the creator of the original? How much energy would they invest in the quest for a copy-protected baguette?

Why does virtually everyone I know share music? How can undiscovered digital artists afford to run expensive software such as Photoshop or Final Cut Pro on their machines? Are we all criminals by nature? Is our respect for the law directly proportional to the chance of getting caught, and the fact that some crimes are riskier than others the only reason we ever obey any laws at all?

I doubt it.

Perhaps my generation’s willingness to sidestep copyright is actually a  conscious rejection of a capitalist utopia founded in artificial scarcity and gauging.

The word “piracy” traditionally referred to “robbery at sea”, which is indeed a form of stealing. Now the word is used to describe many things from pirate radio to yoga piracy. Each of these different types of “piracy” carries its own set of moral quandaries, and it is important not to confuse them with each other, or with theft in general.

The “piracy” that has the MPAA tied in knots is copyright infringement. Is it wrong? Perhaps. But copyright infringement is not the same as stealing and to claim otherwise mires the issue in absurdity, which is not helpful to anyone.

The old-style capitalists are dinosaurs. In their world, scarcity has always been the natural order of things – something they could exploit by controlling access to limited resources. They set the price and reaped the benefits.

In the face of new technologies, they are hopelessly lost. Their instinctual response is to create an artificial scarcity where none should exist, failing to acknowledge that their model represents the worst of all possible worlds.

No one is suggesting that digital media ought to be free or that content creators shouldn’t be paid. But no one should be denied access to something that exists in infinite supply for the mere inability to pay.

Content creators don’t benefit by depriving those who can’t afford the going rate.

The dinosaurs, of course, believe that if you make something abundantly available, people will take freely without giving anything in return. Such a lack of imagination is the hallmark of the shallow and the greedy who imagine all of humanity in their image. Scarcity is of no concern to those whose greed has made them rich.

Where does this leave the greater half of humanity, who have been generous enough to remain poor?

The dinosaurs fear abundance above all else, because in a world of abundance, greed becomes meaningless. What they fail to grasp, however, is that the model they so desperately cling to is already dead. The capitalism they love is a utopia of cutthroat competition where only the most successful candidates can live comfortably. But we’ve competed ourselves to the brink of extinction. Their utopia implies the end of the species.

Since survival has become our common purpose, continued mindless competition over dwindling resources is antithetical to the kind of cooperation that is now required. Consider the complexity of our current technology: There is not a genius alive, who has the combined knowledge to construct something as simple even as a blender without leaning on the help of others who have constructed the various component parts.

The future requires the unimpeded flow of information. The future is open source, because it has to be.