Quote:
Originally Posted by zerospinboson
Don't be silly. You're from the country with the highest per capita debt in the world, both when looking at personal and when looking at government debt.
The irrational need to have whatever you desire - which really is just another manifestation of the once-in-vogue this-is-what-makes-america-great consumerism - is utterly ingrained in the way you are raised, and what you are taught through watching TV, "success stories" in the papers or in book form, etc.
|
I don't think that's all of it. America was also founded on "nobody's using it, so it's yours if you can make something productive of it"--the homesteading acts were a way to encourage people to develop land and explore new territory. (And they were horrifically abusive to the people already living in those lands, but the justification wasn't "I want it and the price is too high so I'll take it;" that's a different meme.)
The pioneer heritage in the US gives us an aversion to waste, and a desire to find new ways to use what we have. This means if I scan a book to make it searchable for research purposes (which I've done), why shouldn't I hand it to someone else for the same reason, instead of requiring them to go to the additional effort of scanning and OCR'ing and correcting and formatting the same book? The work's already been done; why is it more moral to make it be repeated?
Scarcity economics no longer make sense when applied to digital works. And while I agree that authors need to get paid, and to some extent publishers who find them, edit their works and promote them need to get paid, the eventual method for that payment isn't going to be "let's make digital works even harder to share than physical ones."
Quoting Doctorow: "Just as the industrial economy wasn't based on making it harder to get access to machines, the information economy won't be based on making it harder to get access to information."
It's not a matter of "we grew up thinking that if you want it, you should have it." We grew up thinking that what is desirable and easy to distribute, should be spread as widely as possible so it can do the most good. And this isn't a perfect philosophy for all situations, but it does explain why so many people are offended by DRM and are perfectly willing to distribute digital content of all sorts on P2P networks.