What I think is funniest of all, though, is that all of this stuff is completely inconsistent with what happened in earlier times. When machines took away farm labor, nobody said it was criminal: people said it was just that the times were changing and technology was making life simpler. When machines took away assembly line positions, again there was no one who claimed to be a criminal victim. People claimed to be victims of circumstance, sure, but nobody said they were going to sue the manufacturer of the robots that took away their old jobs. Now, we come to the modern era, where digital technology has made it all but impossible for a man to make more than $50,000 a year if he's a musician, painter, or writer. Music is pirated. Art is pirated. Stories are pirated. Before you could tell people, "If you don't pay to read my book, then you don't get to read it." And people had to listen to you even if they didn't like you. Nowadays, nobody has to listen to you. Some people choose to listen to you, but it's more a pity-vote with their money than it is an act of compliance. They feel they're doing you a favor, not the other way around, when they go to the bookstore and buy your book rather than downloading it for free off of the internet and reading it on their Apple iPhone or their Nintendo DS or their Amazon Kindle.
And yet the argument is not at all like it was with the farm hands or the machine laborers from times past. Now, the musicians, artists, and writers are raising holy hell that their occupations are being transformed into mere hobbies, activities which can maybe make some charity-money but certainly can't make you enough money to live lavishly.
You know what this tells us about our society? It tells us that this issue is much bigger than media piracy. Fundamentally, this boils down to the question of technology supplanting labor. Who needs a surgeon when you can have Surg-o-Bot? Who needs a conductor or an orchestra when you can have Conduct-o-Bot conducting Orchestra-bots? Who needs carpenters when you have carpenterbots? Who needs lawyers when you have lawbots? Who needs police officers when you have policebots?
I'm not saying that robots are bad -- fuck, 180º opposite man, I LOVE robots! I wish I could invent real-live robots. I'd love to be skilled enough to be on Team Asimo (Honda) or on similar robotics projects done by Sony and other firms. But what I am trying to say is this: humanity needs to figure out FAST how we're going to adapt to life in a world without work. Because we're getting there pretty fucking fast. We're getting awfully close to the time when no man, woman, or child will depend upon you for their survival, only for their amusement, and that means that you can no longer blackmail them into keeping you alive (with their money) in exchange for your services. Needs are blackmail material; desires, not so much. A doctor tells a patient to cough up $400K or else no surgery. Robo-Surgeon says he needs $10 for oil and parts-replacement and that's it. Gee, I wonder. ;p How will humanity get on in the world once we can no longer justify our individual worth by our professions? How will we justify to ourselves and to others that we deserve to live when every last one of us is an unemployed freeloader who is clothed, fed, and taken care of by technology?
In the meantime, I'll let them argue about their petty piracy of music and anime. It's a laughably trivial argument compared with the much larger matter at hand.
erfectplan: