Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) yesterday introduced the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act (PDF), with Leahy saying, "The PIRATE Act has passed the Senate on three separate occasions; this should be the Congress in which it becomes law." Like previous incarnations of the PIRATE Act, this one tries to force the Department of Justice to bring suits against individual file-swappers, something that could save the recording industry plenty of money and could also displace some of the "bad guy" stigma that the labels have acquired after suing people like Jammie Thomas. The bill would give the Department of Justice authority to bring civil (not just criminal) cases against infringers, though it does limit penalties to those that could be imposed in criminal proceedings. The Attorney General can also bring such civil suits only when the act in question constitutes a crime (such civil suits can be easier to win).
Once again, we have the age old debate: does innovation survive if it doesn't produce direct income? Well, once again, instead of thinking, our government has decided that they know the answer and are going to try to fix the "problem". What is this problem? The problem is that record executives don't have as much gold lining on their pockets (so they claim). Don't kid yourself - artists make obscene sums of money, they don't need to make any more. If they claim they do, they're lying. I promise. And if they're not making enough money, it's for one of two reasons. They're either being screwed by the record executives, or they're simply not good.
Why am I posting this? Well, it's not just about this issue. Piracy is a large part of this debate, but it's bigger than that. It includes open source versus closed source. It includes freeware versus paid software. If I'm not making money, why should I do anything to benefit anyone else? If record labels don't get paid to do.. whatever it is record labels do, then what motivation do they have to continue producing music? Well, first, record labels don't produce music. They just pay for it. Beethoven didn't sign with Sony or Universal, but somehow he managed to produce meaningful music that exists to this day. We find throughout history that money is not the motivator for true innovation - it's a motivator for mediocrity. If you're only working for money, you're not producing quality.
If you use FireFox and you don't agree with what I'm saying so far, I think you need to uninstall it right now. Why? Well, do you remember paying for FireFox? No? How about Opera? Didn't pay for that one either? Well, shit, I think we've found a flaw here. These two are (not even arguably) the best browsers out there today. And you didn't pay for them! Well, what went wrong? The process is so simple, but the people at Mozilla and Opera just had to go and fuck it up: code something, pay the coders by the hour, and at the end, charge an obscene amount of money per license in order to pay the coders back. Well, in this case, they produced a product to rival Microsoft (the reason we pay for software these days, by the way).. without charging people for their it. You're right, Mr. Gates. It's absolutely impossible to produce anything useful without paying for it. If you don't make money doing something, it's not worth doing. Does this all sound a little funny? Maybe it makes perfect sense to you - if you produce something, you should profit from it. To an extent, I agree. I'd like to reap what I sow just like anyone else. But at what point are you reaping more than you're sowing?
Do you think anyone needs 40 billion dollars to be happy? 50 billion, 100 billion, 500 billion, whatever the number is. Wealth won't make you a happier person. However, knowing that you produced something used the world over for the greater good, something of value just might. Here's the beauty here: instead of doing what you do as a job (we all hate that word - it makes us think of work, and we hate that too), do it as a hobby. But don't do it by yourself - do it with lots of people. Pool your leisure time to work on projects like this. What does this do? Well, it solves the money problem - you don't rely on things like software for your income, you rely on a real job for your income. Then you get to what really matters - your passion for software development. If you don't have the passion for that, then good riddance, you don't need to be writing software anyways.
One last point before I end this beast of a post, and that is how this all relates to blogging. Bloggers the world over write day after day on their personal or professional websites, letting you know what they think, or what they've done, or even what they think you should think or do. And for this, they feel that they are entitled to a reward. They feel that for simply writing something down, and later (hopefully) having someone read it, they should be paid. Well, unless they're working for a newspaper or something similar, no one is going to hand them a paycheck for their efforts at the end of the month. So what do bloggers do? They run ads on their website. In this way, they ostensibly make money without hurting the user in any way - everyone wins. Well then, whats the problem? You publish ads, I view ads, you make money, and I.. don't protest.
Well, until recently, this was the way it worked. There were popup blockers, of course, and though they couldn't keep out everything, they helped. But then came along something called "Adblock", a FireFox plugin (yup, these assholes are making trouble again!) to block the user from viewing the ads on websites. How dare anyone control what they view in their own browsers: they're reading my blog, by God, and that means that I am the one making the decisions. Well, here's the reality, and I'm sorry to anyone whose bubble I burst here. You're not that good at writing. Yes, I said it. If you write only for a personal blog (like.. THIS ONE!), chances are that you just couldn't hack it as a real writer for say a newspaper or magazine. So, yeah, your content is great and all, but do I feel like I owe you some debt for reading your work? Not in the least. And I don't feel like anyone here owes me a debt for reading my writing (in fact I probably owe you all one). And as for those ads, I don't like the idea of Google reading my mind some day, so I'll pass on that.
Nowhere else in the world is money just handed out so freely as on the internet. For essentially no work, you can make money online using ads, and that's great. But it shouldn't be the reason why you are writing. You don't see any ads on this site because I support it myself (for reasons I've yet to realize). If it's what you love, you should do it for free, not because you will get a pot of gold at the end, but because you love doing it. The rainbow, not the pot of gold should be the goal.
I'm sorry for anyone reading this wondering what in the hell it is I'm rambling about. To be honest, I don't even know; all I know is that I didn't make a cent writing this, I don't make a dime writing any of the posts or code here, and I probably never will. I do it because it's what I love, and I see several other people with the same idea out there, fighting the tide of people writing "sponsored posts" (the most vile, contemptible thing known to man) and selling links on their sites. This is for them, for us. I want to keep innovation alive. I even want to hear why I'm wrong. Just because it proves that people can have ideas independent of monetary gain. Just because it proves that there is still thought going on out there, somewhere.
November 9th, 2007 at 12:50 am
Some interesting thoughts. However, I think your reliance on the Mozilla Firefox argument is a little flawed - Firefox have used the following, in the past year:
Over $50million from Google;
Several of Google's best developers.
I think you see my point. It is easy to do something for free, if someone is bankrolling you, on the other hand, Google have got another weapon in their fight against Microsoft (and don't tell me Google don't have a say in what goes into Firefox, after stumping up that much cash).
I don't have a problem with Adblocker, or whatever its called, the people who use it wouldn't click on ads in any case, I do, however, have a problem with the assumption that running ads is indicative of a wish to be paid for one's content. Wrong. I run ads because I don't have a "Job" (those things we hate) other than running websites, which are free for the end user, who admitedly must put up with the torture of viewing one band of Adsense at the footer of each page, and one in the sidebar.
If I don't run ads, I don't eat. As a result, if my websites are shit, and none of the content is of any value, no-one will visit, or click on any ads: and I won't eat. My writing improves, and becomes better out of a desire to gain more readers, and hence, make some money so that I CAN eat.
November 9th, 2007 at 1:22 am
First off, I appreciate the comment - this is exactly what I was looking for. It gets so boring being right, it's nice to be wrong sometimes.
Obviously FireFox is bankrolled by someone, otherwise they wouldn't continue to exist. However, in this situation, the debt still doesn't have to be passed on to the consumer.
As for Adblock and your blog, I can sympathize with you in the sense that this is what you do for a "job", but you also have to admit that the people who compare Adblock to blatantly stealing are over exaggerating just a little bit. I didn't steal your content from you, and if I felt that reading it benefited me or I just liked it, I wouldn't be opposed to clicking a link for it. But the idea that some bloggers have that the internet is only here to serve as a pocketbook for them when they just don't have any real skills is ridiculous.