[Anthem]

Well the definition of all these words is all crapped up.

Piracy is a different activity from stealing (although it entails it!). Sharing should also be cordoned off and remain excluded from the definition of piracy even though the big media companies desperately hope they can convince us that they are the same thing.

A candy bar:

-The person who takes a candy bar from the store shelf and pockets it without paying is guilty of theft and therefore a thief.

-The person who takes a candy bar and replicates it a thousand times or acquires a thousand increments and sells the goods to suspecting and unsuspecting people is traditionally thought of as a pirate. <--Counterfeiting (thanks to Kali Yuga for pointing this out!)

-Copying illegally would be piracy. In the digital world incidental copying is an interesting operation and where much of the per-view per-instance difficulty comes in.

-The person who buys a candy bar and shares it with other people while also enjoying it for him/herself is the hard to categorize person that industry wants to be labeled as a pirate out of convenience to their flighty prosecutorial cause.

The re-defining of a person who wants to share cool S*it with people (which we have all done for our entire lives because it is a part of our nature as humans) as a bad person guilty of heinous criminal activity has been popularly accomplished or is proceeding with staggering efficiency. It is massive sleight of hand and legally treacherous to human nature.

And that is the digital problem: every person who owns a computer has been given capabilities that only the incredibly wealthy or the well entrenched/well-connected and amazingly technical have been able to have in the past. Now, a $300 notebook computer can do almost all of these things.

Big media freaks out because average people now have their capabilities and they fear for their absolute and sovereign control over their content empires. So what do they do? Introduce hardware and software gateways to content and watchdog solutions to guard the content. Second, redefine piracy in order to set every consumer up as not only a potential pirate, but literally sitting on the fence in a way that requires policing and guarding of content on a per-view per-instance basis because every consumer is now a threat and dangerous as a consequence, not to mention most probably a wanton criminal at heart.

My only comment on my own thoughts is that I do not advocate the sharing of copyrighted content even when you can. People can buy their own damn books as far as I'm concerned, and mine shall be jealously guarded whether they have DRM on them (in which case the guarding is out of my hands) or not (in which case the guarding is my task). I don't like feeling like I have been stolen from. On the other hand, it is within human nature to share and to share rampantly. Content producers will either figure this out and learn how to use it to their advantage or they will eternally be banging their drums against it and finding themselves in divine opposition to humanity in general.

I don't know the solution, but I hope someone figures it out soon because the digital revolution of the last 50 years has given the average person awesome powers and completely redefined our definition as the populace, cosmos, or mass. We have been given the power to not only consume with ease to be create and destroy with impunity in our digital lives. We are the masters now. We are less dependant on big people than ever in the history of our species.

What be your thoughts?