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(And damn if I can't get the embed code to work for the tweet.) For a little context, Kim Dotcom (née Schmitz) has himself been harassed by the FBI although
he is a German living in New Zealand. His filesharing site megaupload.com (now defunct) was the source of the ire because they believed (correctly) that his
site was facilitating piracy of digitally encoded material. He fought the attempted extradition in court and the GCSB (New Zealand's version of the FBI)
handled the arrest and seizure of his property so poorly that Dotcom is now suing them in court.
Dotcom's tweet points to the fact that there are so many
barriers to getting copyrighted digital material that sometimes piracy is the ONLY way for a consumer to consume digital media. What he misses is the central
argument against ownership of a infinitely reproducible like digital media - there is no loss in copying it. If you have a honeycrisp apple in your hand and
I take it, you no longer have an apple. Clearly, this is stealing. If you have Apple software on your computer and I copy it to mine, you still have Apple
software on your computer. How is this stealing? Because someone else owns the software, the ideas on your computer? When the barriers to copying media were
high, a high price could naturally be charged because getting it another way cost more. Economics naturally funneled people to buy the Pink Floyd record in the
store because buying equipment to make even a poor analog copy was costly and making your own record with that copy was totally out of the question. Of course,
Pink Floyd grew up with those high natural barriers to media transfer so they
believe their music was itself that intrinsically valuable,
rather than realizing most of the price of their record was in the value of that data transference. To maintain the high prices, creators like Pink Floyd are
joining with power hungry governments to create unnatural legal barriers.
Nevertheless, Kim Dotcom's list is full of insight into why people make copies of digital media rather than paying for the creator or their agents to copy it
for them:
1 Create great stuff - Obviously this will always be in the consumer's eye, but if the cost of copying or purchasing a copy is less than the value of the
digital content to people then they're not going to go for it.
2 Make it easy to buy - This seems like a duh, but think about movies for example. If I live in the desert 100 miles from the nearest movie theater
and I want to watch Man of Steel today I can make that 200 mile round trip and spend 3-4 hours of my time plus over $100 between the gas, vehicle wear
and ticket price, or I can bit torrent a copy and run an infinitesimal risk of being prosecuted for piracy. Creators want you to believe that prosecution
probably is high and governments want to make it high so that you'll factor that into your mental calculations at a greater cost, but rather than throwing up
unnatural legal barriers wouldn't it make more sense to monetize the way I want to consume the digital content you've created?
3 Same day worldwide release - If you lived in New Zealand, today would be the first day you could go see Man of Steel in the theaters there. As
readers of this blog will note, I saw it a couple weekends ago. So Kim Dotcom had 3 choices: a) wait for the release
date in his country and try to avoid spoilers from the rest of the world (fat chance), b) travel to another country to visit a theater and run the risk of
extradition to the US, or c) download a copy. That third last option is only available via piracy today. What Kim Dotcom is saying is that he lives not far
from a perfectly good theater where he might have gone to watch Man of Steel two weekends ago if you'd just let him, Warner Brothers.
4 Fair price - I do hate the word "fair" because of it's often sinister use in common American parlance today. Fair trade, the Fair Tax, the Fair Credit
Reporting Act, etc. all attempt to falsely imbue the concept they represent with some sort of righteousness. Word choice aside, Dotcom is making the very
real point that in choosing a price for a product you can't ignore the economic space in which it exists. A consumer is only willing to pay so much of a
premium for your legal copy over a pirated copy they could get for less.
5 Works on any device - If your digital media doesn't work on my device, I can either forgo it, buy a new device, or get a pirated copy. For example,
I have DVDs from Deutschland. They do not work in American DVD players. Furthermore, I cannot legally purchase a DVD player in the US that will play these
DVDs. So what are my options? Hack an illegal solution or move to Europe. How is that any option at all?
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