The recently announced anti-piracy plans certainly will help those U.S. companies that lose huge amounts of money as mentioned. But I’m not sure it will do much good for the rest of us.
It is a fact that people do not want to pay for music, software and other things they can get free on the Internet. On one hand, the authors and creators behind those materials deserve payment for the use of their work. On the other hand, the free use of artwork, scientific results and other useful things seems to me to foster a kind of cultural democracy. When your income regulates what you can enjoy, the needy won’t have as much as those who are better off.
As a writer, I want the highest possible readership for my work. If the condition to get that is that I don’t get paid, I would sadly accept that. Thus, in my mind Myshkin and Rogozhin (the angel-hero and the devil-hero of Dostoevsky) fight. There’s another name for U.S. businesses losing a lot of money to piracy, and it’s called theft. But when the public cannot use freely what art and science has gathered for them, that can create larger problems from the point of view of education and progress.
There are two solutions here, and it is hard to decide which one is gloomier. Good luck to the U.S. government with the anti-piracy plan – although I won’t be sorry if it fails.
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