6 - The Immorality Option: Stealing More Than A Politician

In the movie To Catch A Thief with Cary Grant, there is a scene where Cary Grant (as a reformed jewel thief) is lunching with an insurance investigator, trying to get information from the agent to enable Cary Grant to catch the person who is using his Modus Operandi to steal jewels.

Cary Grant: I've treated you to a nice meal at my villa. Are you going to expense a meal with you insurance company?

Investigator: I suppose so.

Cary Grant: You're a thief!

Investigator: Now really. Companies expect some padding of agent's expense account. They budget for it.

Cary Grant: You're still a thief! The difference between you and me is that you can get away with it. I can't. As part of my release during the war to join the resistance was that if I ever stole again I would go straight back to jail, no questions asked. I have to prove my honesty every day. You don't.

So let me ask you.....Are you a thief?
By the way, what is a thief in the Digital World?
Good question!

It's not a trivial question.
It's easy to explain what a thief is in the old analog world. I have an apple. You take it from me without my permission. Now I don't have it, and you do. That's what thought of as stealing in analog days.
The first problem with this cropped up with mass production. Why should I invent a better way of building things when somebody else will use it without having to do all the work of inventing it? That started the beginning of patent law. At about the same time, you could write a book, but not be able to profit from it because somebody else could just copy the words and print their own copy of the book. In order to get more books and inventions, laws were created, patent laws and copyright laws, to give a limited monopoly (more about this later) to creators to encourage more inventions and books. Even so, it was acknowledged that the world would be richer if these inventions and books weren't protected by a monopoly. So the monopoly was set to expire in a few decades. Then anybody could use the ideas for free. The creators got paid for a while and the public got it later. A balancing act.
And an enforceable one. It took a factory to make things, so if you stole patents or copyright, the factory could be seized. That made it not worth the economic risk to steal patents or copyrights. So few people violated them. Besides, you had to make a thing to copy "intellectual property".
But that wasn't good enough for some powerful corporations. They wanted to get to use inventions as soon as possible. So they lobbied to have patent laws shortened. They also wanted to keep copyright as long as possible, so they could keep getting royalties off the copyright. So they lobbied to extend and extend copyright laws. 
This is easily understandable from an economic sense. When a patent expires, everybody who then uses it gets an economic gain out of the expired patent, while only the person/corporation holding it loses revenue. And that corporation may figure it will gain more from using other expired patents than it would gain from extending it's own patent. With more gainers that losers from expiration, the trend was to shorten patent length. 
When a copyright expires, just the opposite happens. The owner of the copyright loses any further revenue from the copyright, but nobody gains revenue from the use of the copyright. So they only voice heard is extend, extend. The public good of expired copyrights is cheerfully ignored.

The Digital World has shattered this cozy worldview. The physical husk has been stripped away from the information that truly is "intellectual property". Every computer is also a universal digital duplicating machine. You can make a digital copy of anything that starts out digital, for pennies, whether it in the public domain or not. And you can make a perfect copy of a copy of a copy....
And this kicks the economics out from under "intellectual property". Suddenly, people don't have to pay for "intellectual property". They just take a copy and make a copy. Punch a few buttons and you're done. The "limited monopoly" now becomes nearly worthless. But don't worry, it gets worse.
Connect this up with the internet, and you can copy not just information you already have purchased. You can copy any information that's available on-line around the world. All for free, once you've tracked it down. Sort of like an individual "age of exploration", when new worlds were being discovered. Aye matey, and booty to be had for the risk of a broadside...

So what is stealing in the Digital World? What did you buy when you bought a piece of copyrighted material? Did you buy the right to back up your purchase? Can you morally copy it to a different machine so you can use it on the go? Are you more of a thief buying a used book or a used audio CD, or making an unauthorized download? Does the first purchase doctrine have meaning, even in the US? What is ownership of intellectual property? Do I own a book, or just the paper it's printed on?
I could list a dozen more questions. The continual extend and extend of major copyright holders has undercut the morality of their position, even if not the legality of their position. So I ask you, from a moral standpoint, when are you a thief?

1. When you make a copy of a digital work, no matter even if you have just bought it?
2. When you make a permitted copy of a digital work you've bought, because the copyright owner says you can make a particular copy.
3. You make a copy of any non-encrypted digital file you've already bought. Converting analog information to digital tends to fall here. 
4. You make a copy of any digital file, encrypted or non-encrypted, that you've already bought.
5. You make a copy of any digital file you can get your hand on, whether you've bought it or not.

Sony's CEO say #1 is stealing. Your current classic pirate says #5 isn't. Most people fall in the middle.

Of course, there's the practical problem of being sued by the copyright holders. For levels 1, 2, and 3, the odds pretty poor. If your computer is not attached to any other computers, it becomes virtually impossible to detect copying. For #4, your detection risks go up, because you have to get the decryption software from somewhere, and if it came from an Internet site, you've left a trail. So far, nobody has followed these trails, but they're there. As for #5, ye'll need to be wearin' your cast-iron underwear, matey, 'cause the government fleets will get you sooner or later...

What can copyright owner do?
Sue for stealing? Go ahead. Most of the people you sue will be poor. You lose even if you win.
Harden the target? That's the job of Digital Rights Management (DRM). That's a fancy term for encryption of a file, so that only the people you want to read the file can read it. Sooner or later, it always gets broken. It discourages casual copying, at the cost of losing sales. Losing sales? Some people won't buy an encrypted file, but they would have bought an unencrypted one. That's a lost sale. Serious copiers with break the DRM and pass along the software to do so, DRM won't stop them.
Refuse to Digitize? There are analog to digital converters everywhere, so really all you are doing is abandoning the claim to your property.  
And that's about it. These are all holding actions anyway. Losses through piracy are part of the Digital scenery. The trick is to make money despite them. 
Yes Virginia, it can be done. Just not at the fat levels of monopoly pricing. People make money selling milk, wine, and chips (both potato and computer). They control their costs and do the dead-level best to make their customers happy. Novel thought for I.P. providers. (Stop laughing, peanut gallery!). Provide a cheap product, with easy purchase convenience, and you'll keep selling. Happy customers come back and buy more. This is customer service 101. But if you keep the attitude, "you'll take what we give you, when we give it to you, and you'll take it! See!", a million Jolly Rogers will be blasting at your profit margins until you economically sink. The Digital World has changed the picture for good, and the good old days aren't ever going to come back.

7 - Boiling The Frog Slowly: Content Versus Container

Question: How do you boil a live frog without it jumping out of the pot?
Answer: Put the frog in cold water and slooowly raise the temperature until the water starts boiling. If you put the frog straight into boiling water, it'll hop right out. But as long as the water starts out cold and is the temperature is raised more slowing that the frog's nervous system can keep track of, it'll stay there until it boils.

A nasty piece of trivia, yes? Fine, let's look at a different question, one that involves YOU....
Question: Which costs more - $6 or $400? 
The answer that question is what this chapter is all about. (By the by, feeling warmer by any chance?)

In this day and age, most people base their gadget purchases on the cost of the gadget. If it cost's too much, people don't buy it. This is a fine idea, when all you buy is the gadget. It starts falling apart when you buy things to use in the gadget.
I'll uses the world of DVD's for an example. (You could use audio CD's or the IPod for an example.) As an early adopter, I paid big bucks for my first player. I thought long and hard over the expense. I was afraid I would end up scrapping it in a few years. And guess what? I did end up scrapping it in less than two years. A hugh waste of money? Well maybe....
By the time I scrapped the first generation DVD player for one that would play anamorphic widescreen discs properly, I had accumulated over 100 discs. At around $20 a disc, that was more than both players cost. I didn't worry and dither over buying the discs, I bought them at a rate of a couple a week, and cut out eating out lunches at work to pay for them. The gap kept widening. I kept buy more and more discs, and spending more and more money in total on the discs. Now I have over 1500 discs. I estimate I've spent nearly $20,000 in DVD discs over the last 12 years. A hugh number! How much have I spent on DVD hardware, total for the same 12 years. Maybe $2,000. But I only spent a little over $30 a week over that time. If I had held off buying the first player, I probably would have bought VHS tapes, which I would have later scrapped and replaced with the better DVD. $30 a week for 6 months would have paid for the first player. So which is worse, overpaying for the hardware or wasting money on software you'll later scrap? My observation it that over time, wasting money on hardware is better that wasting money on software, even though the cost of the individual software units is cheaper.
And so it is in the brave new world of e-books. If you plan to spend money buying e-books, versus strictly living in the public domain world, you will end up paying far more for e-books over time than you will pay for your reader. There's one big gotcha in the e-book world. With DVD's, the encryption was on the individual disc, which meant the disc could be played in any player. You could swap out players and keep you investment in software untouched and unchanged. If you download DRM'ed e-books, your investment is tied to the hardware you have, limiting the scope for moving on to better hardware, or even being able to read the e-books in 20 years. (The same holds true for DRM'ed music downloads.)
It's the software that drives your need for hardware, nowadays. When you do you budgeting, plan accordingly....