Тег: Piracy

If buying is not owning, then copying is not stealing

When someone talks about piracy, images from pirate movies usually spring to mind—a wooden leg, a bottle of rum, and a parrot. But in the digital world, things are a bit different. There, a pirate isn’t some guy stealing “riches” from poor authors. It’s more like a guy or a girl who keeps the doors of a massive digital library open for everyone.

Imagine Nintendo. The legendary company has released over 1,500 games over the last 40 years. Many of them are now lying in dusty boxes in attics or have long since rotted in landfills because it’s not profitable for the corporation to maintain old content. But who saved these games for history? Exactly, those same “pirates.” In the digital age, they are a kind of volunteer guarding cultural heritage. Piracy today is a guarantee that we won’t lose priceless culture tomorrow.

But isn’t this theft? This is where it gets interesting. Theft is when you take something from someone, and that person no longer has it. By downloading a movie, a song, or a book, you aren’t taking it away from the author. The file remains exactly where it was, in its original form. No real loss—except, perhaps, the copyright holder’s illusions about their hypothetical income.

Fine, but shouldn’t authors be paid for their work? Of course they should. But for the first copy of the product that buyers voluntarily purchased, the money was indeed paid. Everything else is an artificial monopoly imposed by the state (i.e., a privilege from a stationary bandit, which is what patents were openly called in the past).

It’s also important to understand that the modern copyright system (let’s call it “copyrism” for convenience) doesn’t allow us to fully own even the things we’ve already paid for. You bought a game? Great, but it’s tied to a dozen DRM protections that vet you like a border guard at an airport. Bought a Netflix subscription? You aren’t the owner of the movies, just a temporary tenant. Subscription ends—goodbye, favorite series. Copyrism is a cult of control where the user is always under suspicion. We have become tenants rather than owners of our own culture. Admit it, that’s not very market-like at all.

Lost sales are a myth. Companies love to calculate virtual losses: claiming that since you downloaded 10,000 copies of our album, we lost 10,000 sales! No, folks, you lost at most the chance to sell it to a few dozen people. The other 9,950 would most likely never have bought your product if they couldn’t download it for free. And you know what’s funny? The most active pirates spend more on music and movies than the average consumer! Because piracy is more like a sampler than a robbery.

Piracy also helps in cases where the copyright holder doesn’t want to or cannot help. Remember how HBO ruthlessly deleted favorite series from its servers when closing HBO Max? They were saved specifically by pirates. When a book is banned by censorship, the only hope of reading it is again through pirate sites. They literally support the freedom of information.

Free does not equal immoral! Libertarian ethics are simple: violence is bad. And when you make a copy of a digital file, you aren’t taking anything from anyone. But government raids on servers, million-dollar fines for students, and criminal cases against “pirates”—that is real violence. If an author is talented, grateful listeners, readers, and viewers will support them voluntarily. This is fair and free, and most importantly—non-violent.

What can we do? Advocate for the abolition of copyrism. Don’t be afraid to say out loud: copying is cooperation and the dissemination of knowledge, not theft. We are not obliged to feel guilty for simply wanting to freely manage our files and the culture that has long since become part of a common heritage. And one last thing: keep your torrent client handy. Because while corporations are playing Monopoly, pirates are the only ones truly ensuring the preservation of culture!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Yet another monstrous piracy

Not long ago, the audience of my Telegram chat watched in real time as I tried to crack an audio file in Amazon’s proprietary aaxc format and convert it into a human-readable mp3. Thanks to the help of readers and a bit of luck, I managed to do it in one evening.

Now, each chapter of the original text of David Friedman’s book The Machinery of Freedom is accompanied by audio where the author himself reads the corresponding chapter. Actually, I was cracking the audiobook for slightly different reasons, but I’ll get to that later; for now, I’ve put the intermediate result to use.

A translation of the first of three appendices to the book has also been published, but that’s a minor detail, needed only to change the number on the progress bar. For the most part, I am currently occupied with the final editing and layout of the translation into epub format.

By the way, regarding the audio. If anyone is interested in voicing the translation of the book, let’s collaborate. Record the poems from the epigraphs of all parts of the book and send the recording to me in a private message. Then, if the selection is representative enough, we will hold a vote on whose version to post on my site and, accordingly, suggest it to Friedman himself for his site. He has already prepared a section for his poems in Russian, but it’s empty for now, and this injustice should be corrected. And if the contest winner has the strength to voice the entire book (which is over twelve hours), that would be simply mega-cool, and it will almost certainly be rewarded by a grateful public.

Among the left, there is a certain prevalence of the idea that rights to the so-called means of production should belong to the workers

Imagine an economy where the property of all or most enterprises producing goods and providing services is under the shared ownership of the workers, who gain and lose it upon joining or leaving the collective, decisions are made through the expression of the workers’ will,
and the net profit of the enterprise is divided equally among everyone.

Please provide a critique of such a model. How should one respond to opponents proposing this model? What points should be highlighted? Thank you.

анонимный вопрос

Before imagining an economy consisting entirely of such enterprises, it makes sense to look at how they might form within a regular economy where ownership of the means of production exists.

So, there is a group of people who want to implement a certain idea and intend to start a business. They need a set of competent workers for several different positions, as well as startup capital. Presumably, the workers are there—they are the founders themselves. Where do they get the capital? In a modern economy, they can chip in in certain proportions, and each will receive a share in the founding enterprise corresponding to the amount contributed. Within the proposed model, shares are strictly equal, meaning they must contribute strictly equal amounts, which reduces the system’s flexibility, as a potentially valuable worker might not have enough savings to join the enterprise, or may not be willing to risk them. When the functions of capitalist and worker are separated, this is not a problem. When they are forcibly combined, not everyone can handle it.

What are the alternatives to chipping in equally? One could take a loan from a credit institution. But for a bare idea, a loan will only be granted at serious interest rates. These could be lowered by providing collateral, but the conditions of the problem assume no collateral, and it is impossible to pledge the shares of the future enterprise, because the enterprise must remain in equal shared ownership of the workers, not some capitalists.

But fine, let’s assume a group of people chipped in a very small amount, opened a micro-business, and gradually grew it by investing most of the profits into expanding production—and now they start lacking manpower. They need to hire someone else and allocate an equal share to them, proportionally reducing the shares of each founder. The larger the starting contribution was, the longer they had to deny themselves the basics to get the enterprise running—the harder it will be to make the decision to simply give away an equal share for free. If they intend to hire a highly valuable specialist, the founders will think it over and decide it’s worth it. But with equal probability, it could be about hiring someone with low qualifications. For example, production has grown, delivering to customers independently is no longer convenient, and a courier is needed. And this courier, a position that literally any random person could handle, becomes an equal shareholder in a successful startup? It is not hard to see that old workers will face such psychological problems every time a new vacancy opens.

Similar difficulties await the person who was there at the start, invested a lot of effort into the enterprise, and now, for one reason or another, would like to leave. They realize that they have no way to monetize their share, and all their merits toward the company are wiped out the second they quit. They must now look for a new place and persuade a new collective to take them as a shareholder. Obviously, under the conditions of a well-functioning institution of reputation, a person who was in good standing in one company will be able to find a place in another without problems, but still, relying on the hope of obtaining a share in a more productive enterprise instead of the individual value of one’s labor is not such a flexible scheme.

The real nightmare begins if, due to changes in market conditions or other reasons, it becomes necessary to reduce staff; otherwise, the company will start incurring losses. That’s it, a scandal is guaranteed. Everyone accuses everyone else of causing the company’s situation to worsen, no one is ready to jump overboard and lose their share, but without this, instead of a regular share of profit, all shareholders must instead regularly contribute to a loss-making enterprise in equal shares. It remains unclear exactly how to decide who to throw out. In a regular company, the management makes the decision based on production necessity. But here, everyone is a shareholder, and everyone has a vote. That is, it will have to be decided democratically at a general meeting, and it may very well turn out that it is not the least necessary employees who have to leave, but the least eloquent.

Thus, such enterprises lose to companies without socialist burdens on labor relations in terms of flexibility, and therefore, they will likely fall behind in the competitive race. In essence, nothing prevents anyone from opening enterprises of this type right now in countries without labor codes, like Georgia. But practice shows that few people need this. Even if people unite in an artel or cooperative, they still prefer to retain the right to a share in the company, and upon leaving, they demand their share in money or equipment, and when accepting a new member, they find it justified to require an entrance fee—again, in monetary or in-kind form.

In essence, the entire toolkit of market manipulations with shares is precisely an additional expansion of possibilities over the limited functionality of equal shared conditional ownership, and if it was evolutionarily developed in the course of humanity’s economic progress, it would be very strange to abandon it on a mass scale. But to each their own; anyone who wishes can start working according to this scheme as early as tomorrow.

So, is it a completely unviable scheme? Not at all. Caribbean pirates operated on almost these very principles. You can read more about this in the recently translated chapter of David Friedman’s book on legal systems that differ greatly from ours. In essence, the only difference between the pirate scheme and the proposed socialist one was that the pirates did choose leadership for themselves and paid them not an equal share of the loot, but an increased one. Pirates were also helped by the fact that the problem of startup capital was not so acute for them: they did not build ships, they captured them. But socialists, in fact, can quite well envision their system as the expropriation of existing enterprises from owners in favor of workers, so they can be just as successful as sea robbers.

Thus, it can be stated that within the framework of relatively simple economic activity, and especially in resource economies with low capital intensity, the socialist scheme can quite well take root, but the more serious the division of labor, the more difficult it will be to adapt it to the needs of the collective members, and the closer it will in fact resemble a regular market scheme with private ownership of the means of production.