Re:Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB
by xp84 on Friday February 10, 2012 @07:51PM
(#3578175)
The real problem is that piracy is an attack on our capitalist society's framework for handling a new type of good--a non-scarce good. Copies of data are not scarce, yet society has decided to declare them to be scarce, by law, on pain of jail time.
Declaring copies of data to be scarce is a convenient convention (for capitalists), because it allows data itself to be sold exactly like the scarce vessels (records, cassettes, books) which used to be sold as a stand-in for the data itself, and like other scarce things (bread, oil).
Without scarcity, capitalism cannot function. You cannot sell air (yet, but see "Spaceballs") because there is air all around so you can't run out of it. You can't sell "fours" because you can create as many fours as you need with a pen and paper or keyboard. However, the capitalists have successfully legislated that certain sequences of data are scarce. If this fictional scarcity of data collapses many people would be unable to make money selling non-scarce "virtual" things like ideas and data, and would have to fall back to selling real things. And they'd be unable to "allocate" these goods to people because everybody could just have whatever they wanted. Very good for people, very bad for capitalists.
Much like the attempt to legislate Pi (a half-true half-myth btw), this 'fiat scarcity' (just coined that) is doomed to ultimate failure. If not in the law, in practice. Like the War on Drugs.
Declaring copies of data to be scarce is a convenient convention (for capitalists), because it allows data itself to be sold exactly like the scarce vessels (records, cassettes, books) which used to be sold as a stand-in for the data itself, and like other scarce things (bread, oil).
Without scarcity, capitalism cannot function. You cannot sell air (yet, but see "Spaceballs") because there is air all around so you can't run out of it. You can't sell "fours" because you can create as many fours as you need with a pen and paper or keyboard. However, the capitalists have successfully legislated that certain sequences of data are scarce. If this fictional scarcity of data collapses many people would be unable to make money selling non-scarce "virtual" things like ideas and data, and would have to fall back to selling real things. And they'd be unable to "allocate" these goods to people because everybody could just have whatever they wanted. Very good for people, very bad for capitalists.
Much like the attempt to legislate Pi (a half-true half-myth btw), this 'fiat scarcity' (just coined that) is doomed to ultimate failure. If not in the law, in practice. Like the War on Drugs.