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In giggleton's first post he goes through a rough history of the preservation of written and recorded culture. He notes that the centralization of knowledge made recorded culture vulnerable to warfare and pillaging. He argues that the better way to preserve recorded culture is through decentralization of it, I.E., allowing anyone with the means to copy and share. He is correct in asserting that historically those in power wanted to withhold information and knowledge from the populace. The aphorism that knowledge is power is no canard. He says
“The word in an electronic format, no linger hindered by the weight of stone, the word can be written by anyone, and shared with everyone. Because it can be, so it will be.”
Note that he is not issuing a moral imperative about copying. He's saying that without physical constraints people will share culture. He goes on to say
“ The magnitude of this shift will be severe. Systems that hold onto the past will crumble under the pressure of billions of minds that wish for unfettered access to knowledge. New modes of being will arise spontaneously from this massive thought experiment, be discussed at length and abandoned just as quickly until one ideal is realized that will be the harbinger of the new day.”
Note here that he is not issuing any moral imperatives. He is simply making an observation. Old modes of thinking about copying are outdated. People can either adapt or they will be swept away by the tides of history. The RIAA has tried to use the courts to quash music downloading with little success and great cost. When he talks about the “billions of minds that wish for unfettered access to knowledge” he is not talking about teenagers in western countries. His view is much broader than a Eurocentric viewpoint. He's talking about the vast majority of the world population, which lives outside Europe and the United States. It is foolhardy to think that the western world can use their might, no matter how great it is, to stop the rest of the world from sharing information. Those who adapt and evolve will persist and thrive. Those who try to force the future to follow some ideal will crumble and fall. It's hard to see, because every successful culture trains its children that its culture is the best culture, the final culture, the true culture. But time has other ideas.
For the vast majority of history Asian civilizations were more advanced than western civilizations. Up until the seventeenth century the world economy was centered around the Indian Ocean. Up until the mid-nineteenth century the average Indian and Chinese person had a higher standard of living than the average person living in Great Britain. The west has enjoyed only two centuries of economic prominence; the nineteenth century belonged to Great Britain, and the twentieth century belonged to the United States. Already the strings of power are shifting back towards Asian countries. But note this situation is the historical norm; the rise of the west was an aberration in world history.
Asia is simply too vast, its population is too large, its resources too immense, its culture and tradition to o proud and long to allow it to remain a secondary player in world affairs for long. And guess what. Sharing is central to Asian culture. The following quote is from Peter K. Yu's “Causes of Piracy and Counterfeiting in China”:
“In China people would learn art or writing by simply creating copies of some master. By encountering the past, one could understand the “Way of Heaven,” obtain guidance to future behavior, and find out the ultimate meaning of human existence. One also could transform oneself and build moral character through self-cultivation. Because intellectual property rights allow a significant few to monopolize important materials about the past, they prevent the vast majority from understanding their life, culture, and society and are therefore contradictory to traditional Chinese moral standards.
Unlike today's Westerners, the Chinese in the imperial past did not consider copying or imitation a moral offense. Rather, they considered it “a noble art,” a “time-honored learning process” through which people manifested respect for their ancestors. At a very young age, Chinese children were taught to memorize and copy the classics and histories. As they grew up, they became by training compilers, as compared to composers, and the classics and histories generally constituted their universal language. Although the practice of unacknowledged quotation is likely to be considered plagiarism today, such a practice was an acceptable, legitimate, or even necessary, component of the creative process in the imperial past. Indeed, early Chinese writers saw themselves more as preservers of historical record and cultural heritage than as creators...”
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