Bad example, Banj, in light of it's comparison to Monsanto, which we all know is, in actual fact, a nexus of evil so deep that Dante couldn't fathom how to get down to it, so twisted that they make North Korea seem like Eden, and so depraved that Satan forbids his demons to work there lest they give evil a bad name.
The "
real"
answer is close to what you wrote, but perhaps a little more fundamental. For all of human existence, creation has fallen under a simple model of "
making stuff"
which can be distributed and owned. The music, movie, and software industries have been trying desperately to make their products fit that model because
that's the only kind of economics our society is prepared to understand. You can't get a bank loan to start a business based on another model, you can't even get government recognition that what you're doing is fundamentally different than the prevailing model. As technology slowly eradicates the solutions which they put in place to try to keep their media "
protected"
(i.e. to keep their media stuck in the old model), they turn to the government to find solutions for them -- "
we give up. we can't make people treat these new things as old things, so just jail anyone who doesn't fit our straitjacket"
. and the government says, "
sure. we don't understand the new model, either. so those are probably dangerous subversives we're incarcerating."
Now it becomes very easy to understand. Piracy is breaking the model and offends all the established economic sensibilities enshrined in our corporations and governments and even religions since the beginning of human understanding. Used game stores, on the other hand, perpetuate the old model by treating the disc as a "
manufactured widget"
which can be "
owned."
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[Last edited by silver at 08-29-2008 09:35 AM]
