Since Napster piracy has been looked at as a horrible act and the people pirating have been coupled with crack heads that will break into your house to steal your jewelry and your husband’s power tools for drug money. I’m not going to deny that we aren’t making duplicates of media and sharing them with our world wide web of friends, cause we are. I would only hope that the negative media© that we “evil pirates” are getting would tone down and that people will start to question how piracy affects humans as a whole. In all fairness I agree you could label us as addicted to knowledge and willing to reject corporate laws to obtain that knowledge, I’m just not sure we need to be criminalized because of that. Also keeping in mind that it is very important that we all continue going to those “certain lengths” to stand up for what’s best  for all of us, instead of just blindly abiding the trivial, outdated and skewed laws that a small group of people make because of their lobbyist sponsors. People have been gaining free knowledge from public libraries for centuries, “Illegal” downloading is the future and the epitome of the public library!

Torrent web sites and other file hosting services have quickly been replacing the role of public libraries. In case you forgot a public library is the place in your neighborhood that you frequent to rent the latest: book, movie, CD, magazine, manga, TV show, etcetera for free. You pay no sign up or monthly fee, you just show up with two pieces of mail, they give you a membership and even a library card that grants access to all of these different types of media for the low price of free ninety nine. Since the earliest libraries with clay tablets discovered in Sumer dating back to 2600 BC civilization has agreed that openly sharing the latest information is the fastest way to fertilize the brains of the community and to essentially evolve humans in the quickest way possible. I believe most of us can agree that a library has served a very important role in our lives during childhood and also furthering our education as we grow, whether it be at school or going to the public library on your own in adulthood to continue your knowledge on any given subject.

For years libraries have been handing out, or “seeding” literature for free to the masses, which is arguably the most important intellectual property in human existence.  Literature is the meat of any lyrical song and the brain of almost all movies, even visual artists strive to tell a story through their illustrations. Literature is found in almost all creative mediums, almost all educational and non fictional works and we have just been giving it out to the masses for centuries… FOR FREE! What have we been thinking? All sarcasm aside we the people have always recognized and insisted that intelligence and data be released to the people for free to assure we don’t play an active role in holding ourselves down. Things have gotten so progressive for us that we have recently become accustom to requesting any information from our local library and if they didn’t have it we could come back in a week and the library would have ordered the desired media for us. I am also sure that all of us remember that if our Grandmas couldn’t receive the data that they wanted exactly when they wanted it, they would simply pirate seasons of Matlock on VHS and immediately after they enjoyed and learned from it (because yes Matlock too is educational…see below) they would also share those seasons with their world wide web of friends at the nursing home.

Although it is not nearly the main point in this discussion it really does need attention…. the money. Obviously “pirates” created Netflix, Red Box, Hulu, etcetera because there has been an absence of money coming into the creative and educational billionaire media distribution companies since Napster started. So yes you can thank the people willing to follow their “thirst for knowledge” instinct’s while pirating media for creating those reasonably priced vendors of information like Red Box. What we can learn from  habit is that companies like Walmart and Red Box sell more products and make more money because they sell everything as low as they can to still make a profit for themselves. Companies that follow this important rule will create an extremely large and loyal base of customers who will also religiously advertise to their friends and family for those companies that sell their products with a dirt cheap price tag. That being said, a truly good product at an expensive price will be fairly popular throughout only the people that can afford it and in contrast a similar or even a slightly less comparable product sold as cheap as can be while still making some sort of profit will blow every other similar product out of the water when it comes to popularity. Reaching the masses with a truly good product sold cheap will sell many more units and make mounds more money than can ever be thought of with an expensive price tag.

From observations it seems that a good product sold at an expensive price seems to almost have the same results as a poor product quickly pushed out with an average or even low price tag. The real people with a “passion” to make any product whether it be creative property or a product that is more practical in everyday life need to settle down and understand that if they put their love and effort into their product the money will come. Forcing the money with an obscene price right out of the gate will immediately isolate your product to a small (although it might seem large at the time) group of people. Obviously any time you push a product out to a wealthier crowd it will seem like large money, but it will be short lasting and fractions of what a truly good product could earn. If you cannot create a mind stimulating book that people actually want to read they will never check it out from the library or World Wide Web of Books. No one will ever purchase the book or borrow it to  friends and family who would essentially purchase the book simply because they enjoyed it so much they actually wanted a copy to read multiple times, or purchase a copy simply to support the artist, or show it off to others to let them know how trendy, sophisticated, etcetera they are. I don’t claim to be an economist and know how writers (directors, producers, actresses, actors, programmers, artists, musicians, etc.) have continued to earn money after centuries of their works being in public libraries for free. Although we know libraries have definitely worked and provided every “top notch” writer with plenty of money, while simultaneously able to educate the public with the newest and most innovative works of literature to ensure the public thrives and continues to move forward with the subject of literature. Which in my humble opinion, subjecting everyone within the community to as much knowledge as they freely search out is the most important obligation for humankind to uphold if we are going to have  any hopes of evolving as fast as we can. Subsequently when any product is mainly created in attempts to quickly and even scarier “only” maintain profit and not created out of passion and a thirst for improving, is when the product seems mostly like a cheesy movie, book or worthless product on a TV commercial that comes and goes extremely quick and irregularly advances the community’s forward intellectual momentum. Moral of the story is that if you are an artist in any medium; are good at what you do, always doing work as well as practicing your passion and constantly trying to improve you will always get work and money. Handing out all of your work for free is more of a marketing tool used for the best exposure that no amount of money can buy through advertising. Some of the top artists in their fields are slowly recognizing that. If you can’t bring something to the table money will never come anyways. I feel like this is something that writers have known for years, even though their book is in a library that people can read for free, if that writer is good at what he or she does the money flows in. If you are a good writer, people that read your book from the library free will create a much larger fan base than could ever be imagined if you were to strictly sell it upon release date. As long as you write well and have something that interests people you will have a endless fountain of followers that will generate mounds of money through all of the other business opportunities that will follow. Just like an internship, if you work for little to no pay and create good work success through the means of money will obviously and always follow.

The masses can afford an extremely limited amount of education (media) when they are at the prices that they have been in recent decades (obviously disregarding the public library). The average person is then going to select one or two educational products to buy, rather than purchasing or renting hundreds of educational products (movies, music, programs, audiobooks, games, TV shows, manga, etc.) at a cheap price. While I’m on the subject, quality computer programs usually have an astronomical price which the average person can rarely afford for the purpose of a simple hobby to learn from or potential career. Let alone being able to purchase multiple quality programs to learn from.  Allowing people to have open access to this information and have no regard for choosing the “wrong” educational product and in return subjecting themselves to an endless “library” of knowledge which will raise the bar for any and every human being. Raising the bar for every single human being will continue fueling the constant evolution of the human race. In my opinion we should start phasing out libraries as fast as we can and just replace them with public file hosting websites. Those public online libraries could sign contracts with all of the artists so they keep getting paid (just like our current libraries) while simultaneously feeding the brains of the world.

When we start talking about the general economy and money (again, remembering I never claim to be anything close to an economist and only use common sense and observations) in concern to digital media, reason says that we also have to talk about obvious things like the price of DVDs. It seems like the late 90′s is when the upper middle class (one of my acquaintances) started to see the capability of burning a music or Dreamcast game to a CD. Years later when I finally received the capabilities to burn a CD or a DVD, immediately, I like many other people, understood that a CD or DVD cost from 22 cents to 55 cents a piece. While at the time a Movie on DVD cost 22 dollars to 32 dollars for Blue Ray. Pirating was in full effect at that time and the community called the billion dollar industry’s bluff and drove the prices of DVDs down to 1 dollar for Red Box and about 8 dollars for a Netflix subscription, not to mention Hulu which is free. The masses understood the low price of a CD or DVD and demanded their own price. The world would never had demanded their own prices if the larger corporations would just sell their educational goods at 2 to 5 dollars a pop maybe 100 to 200 dollars for extremely cool programs, which is far more reasonable for the average person. The thirst for evolution through knowledge led the masses to exclusively use their World Wide Electronic Library Web of peers where everyone received education for free, exactly like their public library.

Why does a DVD cost 22 to 32 dollars? I have no clue, I don’t work for the distribution companies of major movie studios. Sound judgment would say that everyone might be getting paid a little too much for their services. I think it’s very safe to start asking questions like “does Tom Cruise make too much money for acting”? I’m guessing he makes 5 to 8 million per movie although I read on the internet hey usually gets paid 25 million per movie! I hope those web sites were horribly wrong and that I was filling my head with obscenely incorrect information. So I don’t have to fact check let’s just say Tom Cruise makes 5 million dollars for every movie. We really have to start asking ourselves if our hard earned, back breaking dollars are really worth funding that atrociously large price of 5 million dollars for the main actor in a 2 hour movie that we generally only watch once. Are there thousands of budding actors that have had years of professional training and the same six pack that can do the exact same job and possibly even better considering they are still trying to prove themselves? Would those new actors be satisfied earning a large six figure paycheck (which would provide for an extremely comfortable life) for the rest of their lives practicing their passion everyday? I think their would be an gigantic line outside of Mission Impossible 5 Zombie Island‘s audition door with very talented people in it.

All I hear about is the actor and actress’s pay but we should also be curious as to who else is getting paid way too much money for jobs that others would die to do for a small fraction of the pay. Obviously understanding that these studios get the hugest chunk of all proceeds from the movie but I couldn’t stop from thinking, why do the directors and producers get so much attention? Since I was a kid I would always wonder, when I saw a trailer for a movie, “who wrote the movie”? I was never concerned with the director or producer (although I now know they do have important roles in the making of a movie) I always wanted to know who the writer was and if he or she was the same writer from other movies that I enjoyed.  The writing is like the brain of a movie, making the writer the most vital role in any movie (in my humble opinion) who never got the attention in the trailer that I feel they deserved. If I was interested in the camera angles of a movie I would have cared that Steven Spielberg directed it (obviously understanding that directors do many other things while making a movie). To me a good movie would never exist without good writing, which brings me back to the library. Writing is how we as humans pass on knowledge and stories and for centuries we as a community have decided that literature should be shared for free to only speed up the intelligence of the whole community.

Learning is how amoebas crawled out of the ocean and how monkeys made rockets that reach the stars. We watch diseases like Gonorrhea and many others learn and evolve to fight our man made antibodies and related treatments right before our eyes. In that same manner we learn excessively faster when  everybody is up to date with the current and breakthrough piece of knowledge on any given subject. That concept definitely applies to movies, music, etcetera, even though we view them as only “entertainment”. We might not view “entertainment” as educational although up and coming: actors, writers, directors, cameramen, music producers, etcetera look at the newest movies, music, books and so on as the most vital source of information for them to grow and evolve. When everyone is up to date on the most innovative thoughts on any given subject each and every person is able to use those new innovative thoughts, all of their previous thoughts related to that subject, and all of their other random unrelated thoughts and experiences together to build on that initial innovative idea concerning the specific subject. After the individual chews up and spits out that innovative idea with their own thoughts and opinions and turn it into an even more advanced idea they then return it to the community so we can do the same process with it again and continue the ongoing cycle of learning and evolution.

Which, on another big side note, is why: Yahoo (OG), Ask.com, Dogpile, StartPage, Bing, Google, etcetera are glorious tools for humans to connect with other humans that happen to be experts on whatever subject you would like to learn about. Sometimes it hurts my heart to hear old people wanting to cling to tradition in attempts to “keep it real” by not keeping an open mind and understanding that technology will and always has created a more productive and increasingly intelligent community of people. So it saddens me a little bit to see people actively turn down technology understanding that they simply aren’t keeping an open mind. Although those same people would hate to chop their own wood to heat their house and rather choose to use a furnace, wouldn’t want to start a fire to toast their bread as opposed to using a toaster, eat the rooster that wakes them and just use their alarm clock, won’t write the letter to send their verbal message when the phone is instant, etcetera. After getting used to the strangeness of new technologies we would all rather lean on technology, innovation and change to better our lives and leave more time to more progressive and less trivial activities. Which is also why Republican or: conservative, traditional, never changing, stagnant, never evolving; sometimes scares me (Oh Hell No!… He did NOT just go there?!?). If you stubbornly just stand in a stagnant pool of never changing and always scared of evolving GOO I worry much more than if you “flip flop”, which I actually find much smarter and adaptive for our astonishing species. Sorry, it seemed relative. I think Bob Dylan said “Learn how to swim or sink like a stone, cause the times they are a changing”; wait, I think Walt Disney and many other people have agreed “Keep moving forward”.

I think we should be very cautious and understand that the MPAA, MAFIAA, RIAA, etcetera have tons of highly intelligent employees that understand that “pirating” is not stealing and also know that we can freely receive all of this digital media for no cost at any public library. They obviously have a biased role that centers around a small group of extremely wealthy people. Those organizations attempt to criminalize our World Wide Library by controlling it (which they’re scrambling to do because they have no clue how to control it) so they can continue to contain their precious, selective, billion dollar cash cow industries not caring whether humankind gets an honest price, evolves or learns. They are concentrating on turning the little people that are striving to feed their brains into evil felons and hardened criminals while simultaneously cutting the average person off from that huge wealth of knowledge. Not thinking of how to use the newly uncontrollable internet as an asset for a new marketing and distributing tool (never changing, staying stagnant), but accusing the little people, that have been exploited and kept back from the ever occurring wealth of knowledge, for cheating and robbing society.

Attacking the average person and attempting to cut them off from accessing the knowledge that is out there will hold every single human back. Even the rich movie studios’ and record labels’ kids and grand kids will be held back from progressing and learning whether the studios understand it or not. Like stated above humankind feeds off each others’ ideas. One out of hundreds of examples is  when an “evil” person “pirates” a movie from the internet, learns something that is a innovative thought or tool in the directing community, feeds off of it, and turns it into something that is even more progressive than that original directing tool that was learned in the “pirated” movie, then returns that even more progressive directing tool or thought back into the directing community. All directors then learn even more from the “pirate” that thought of that evolved directing tool that was originally based on the director from the “pirated” movie. We then all learn from that hybrid directing tool or thought that was created from the “pirate”, even the billionaire movie or music studios’ aspiring director child or grand child.

So yes I will agree that artists do deserve to get paid a handsome fee, although I question if A-list movie stars and athletes really deserve seven figures for doing their so called passion everyday. I guess I won’t lose much sleep over it, especially when I hear that generally 6 percent of what musicians make is CD sales, which makes me even more annoyed with these distribution companies that pretty much screw most of their artists over anyways. So even while the billionaires are scrambling to all the wrong places (only thinking with their stagnant minds) to get their money back. They are also  attempting to control the internet by creating new laws and in some cases blatantly breaking laws (DDoS attacks!) while only damaging and holding back their families, community and even humankind from evolving and literally becoming all that we can be. Simply so they can rip the average person off on a 50 cent DVD and live an even more unnecessary lifestyle. Hopefully more often than not the small group of people that are in control of our laws will really be moved and almost forced to abide by what the actual masses can and have proved that they want and need by the simple numbers of people that demand free or low cost knowledge (or really anything else that the masses get together and decide is extremely important in their lives). Demand any and everything that is truly healthy for the masses.

Don’t let them censor the internet and cripple the age of information! Write a letter to your congressman or woman if and when they start their six strike rule. After you get your first strike backup all of your important stuff and take the password off of your wireless and keep it unprotected, deny any and everything . If they regulate your bandwidth and you don’t live in an area where one internet provider has a monopoly change internet providers. Or you could just go the VPN route, either way keep fighting that shit till the end!