A Victory for Piracy (the good kind)

With a few key pieces of internet legislation that have come up recently, mankind has shown of its awesome ability to keep doing what it wants to do, even if a segment of it thinks they shouldn't.

It can not be stated enough on this blog that coersion doesn't work. When one person tells another person to stop doing what they're doing, it doesn't matter how big of an institution the first person makes, or how much power they can pump into it, that person will always fail in the end. A vast majority of the time, failure starts the instant direct coersion is let up. Check out this article from cracked.com for some great examples.

One of the things that people want is to have access to things that entertain them, and they want it now, and they want it to be priced at the most on-the-house level possible. Of course, industry giants that became industry giants specifically because they offered people just enough of what they want, but not enough to stop making fistfuls of cash from them, hate this part of human nature. If only it happened to be true that what we all wanted was to be entertained and to give away as much of our GDP as we could in the process. The solution, of course, has been to offer their services, but then to tell people what they can and cannot do.

This, generally speaking, always fails. What intellectual-property-mongers of all media tried to do when people ignored them and started downloading songs and movies was, of course, to use coercion. Did suing teenagers for embarrassingly large piles of cash get people to do what they want? Does anyone wonder how effective coercion is?

Of course, futility has a frustrating inability to convince irrational people to stop doing that which has no utility. Unfortunately, it's this very same group of people who happen to have money and power. Take Sweden, for example. The statehouse there recently enacted tough new anti-internet-piracy laws. Because the police can now take down your computer's IP address, naturally all forms of internet piracy were going to come crashing to a halt. Because states can use coercion to get their way, remember?

While traffic on piracy sites did decline for about a day, they shot back up when piracy organizations offered a new service. Now, you can keep on doing exactly what you wanted to do, but your IP will be scrambled, and your actions will be untraceable. Not only was this an easy thing for pirating organizations to do (heck, I could set up a VPN if I wanted to), and not only did they likely have this new service up BEFORE the resolution actually got signed into law, but the best part is that the organizations are charging a nominal fee for their service. The end result of attempting to legislate morality? People are doing exactly what they were doing before, but now the people facilitating the same (now illegal) activity are making more money than ever before.

Sound familiar? There are countless examples from Prohibition to the Drug war. In fact, the state of Mexico is so devoted to legislating out drug use and trafficking that the state has nearly gone bankrupt and collapsed in on itself in an attempt to use a failed strategy for an end that they will never be able to achieve. If it takes the ultimate destruction of Mexico to prove that coercion has no utility, than I guess it will be worth it, but I have this sneaking suspicion that all lessons would immediately be lost.

Thankfully, SOMEONE has taken notice of this. Recently, France's parliament passed a law that said that if recording industry people broke into your computer and found at least three pieces of pirated anything they could permanently ban you, personally, from the internet. Somehow, a majority of French legislators actually thought that this would work. Thankfully, nearly 2 in 3 of people in the French National Assembly realized how absolutely retarded this idea was (not to mention the eggregious trampling on civil liberties), and voted it down.

Tragically, France's president has forced the legislative bodies to vote on it again after their spring break. I suppose the only ally of idiocy is persistence.