For those who were alarmed that Pirate Bay, the embattled BitTorrent site, would somehow sell out so bad after some of their founders and administrators are going to serve jail time for the mantra “information wants to be free,” I say do not worry. The company that bought it out is introducing a new price structure….and it’s not what you are thinking. Visitors to the sites will not be charged.
As BBC reports, Global Gaming Factory, who is buying out the Pirate Bay, will introduce quite a radical pricing schema. Those who share files will be paid! Now for GGF, there is a reason why they decided to take this route. For one, they realized (unlike many of us Americans) that price incentives should be pro-sharing, not against it. This is not a small thing here. It is of major consequence as it highlights the rather large void we have in the States, besides folks like Larry Lessig, who are flag-waiving pro-sharers. Second, other for-pay content sites were spoiling the pot. In other words, with the rise of iTunes Store-model which Amazon, among others, uses and also the services like Rhapsody which is not per-download but rather per-monthly charges, it is rather difficult to not have no pricing structure, or else the company will look like it is pro-piracy. And we all know what kind of bad rap pirates, as of late, are getting.
But as I just hinted to above, the more important thing here is the utter lack of any mainstream figure who vehemently argues for file-sharing. Now, there are too many factors that go into why, but one obvious one that I think deserves repeated mention is what Max Weber called “this-worldly asceticism,” a concept he uses to describe the work-ethic of all people–capitalists and wage-workers alike in capitalism. What I believe we can add to do that for the American context is that this ethiciziation of work (if you work, you are a moral being) translates on the consumption-side in a kind of hyper-private property protectionism that is pervasive throughout American culture, but especially all over the place in American policy debate. It boils down to the fact that we all feel entitled to whatever we have, that is, we feel that we somehow earned it, in spite of the realities of the capitalist mode of production, which is based not on compensation but on profit. It is for this reason why it is completley normal for us to see the retail price of a product more than 5x the wholesale price. We Americans accept that brutal fact unquestioningly because we have some false sense of “fariness” projected onto that commodity. It is truly queer.*
Maybe this decision by GGF will convince the newest file-sharing upstart to reconsider the whole thing. Or, we can just wait until we get Lessig on TV. I say the former is a better bet.
*This is a joke on Marx’s famous dictum in the first volume of Das Kapital, in which he calls the commodity-form, “a very queer thing.” Had to let you all in on the nerd-moment.
Google and Mozilla had quite a fling, by any standard. They were together for a while and their love was real. But it seems that the honeymoon period has ended. What happened you ask? Well, it’s what happens in many flings: someone cheated. Let me stop the metaphorism here and explain.
