If life isn't fair, should we make laws to fix it?

My views on Intellectual Property have undergone some pretty drastic changes recently. Just a few years ago I was downloading MP3s because I wanted to listen to music, and I had a vague idea that the laws that made the downloading illegal were somehow flawed.

At this date, my ideas have a bit more form, though I can't promise that they won't be changing in the future. I invite those with opinions on the subject to help me form mine.

There seems to be a lot of argument going on over copyrights (giving an author exclusive rights to their work), trademarks (giving someone exclusive rights to a name or distinguishing feature), and patents (giving someone exclusive rights to an invention or process) recently.

This is important to me in part because I deal in intellectual property fairly often. I'm a programmer by day, and a musician by night (and often a programmer by night, as well).

I get paid to take ideas (often thought up by me) and implement them as software. For entertainment, I often take ideas (thought up by someone who is a better composer than me) and implement them as tasty drum beats in a song.

It is also worth noting that I am of the opinion that if a law or government function is not biblically supportable (based on Biblical case laws), it does not need to exist.

My statements here are based in the idea (which, to the best of my knowledge, is biblically based) that the best type of market is a free market, of the laissez-faire variety. The biblical basis for this statement is subject for other posts and books (and I'm open to more reading material!).

A free market means a general lack of government regulation of products and services. This would include products and services based on "intellectual property," or ideas and information.

Intellectual property laws are a government giving exclusive rights on a concept or piece of data to an individual or business. The traditional argument in favor of these laws is that without them, inventors and creators would be afraid to create anything for fear that their works might be plagiarized.

I do not think that this would be the case in a world where the government did not fight for some sort of special rights for creators or inventors. However, more relevantly, I do not know of any biblical basis for these sorts of laws.

The closest thing to biblical support for IP laws that I have seen is people making a shaky connection from the eighth commandment (do not steal) to the concept of "stealing ideas."

So if intellectual property laws are not biblically supportable, what are they doing? They are doing the same thing that every other man-conceived law is doing: enforcing someone's idea of fairness on others.

We all benefit from the creative works of others - we enjoy useful technology and entertaining media every day. We appreciate the advances that have come at the price of hard work from talented individuals. Our blood boils when we hear of some smart man getting cheated out of the fruits of his labors by others who use his ideas.

Why do we feel this way? Because we believe that somebody is getting less than they deserve, and that makes us righteously indignant. We believe that inventors deserve, at the very least, a comfortable life and the ability to keep inventing if they wish to. And we're willing to write laws that infringe on the rights of others (the right to create what you can with what you own) to try to make it happen.

God is the decider of what man deserves. At most, man should concern itself with enforcing the civil law given to us by God. When it comes to enforcing fairness, we tend to muck it up.

Numbers to make an optimist cry

I stumbled upon a random blog post today with some downright sobering truths on it.

The United States federal budget for 2009 is $3.1 Trillion ($3,100,000,000,000).

There are about 303,824,646 people living in the US right now.

The United States government is planning on spending around $10,200 for every person living in the country. Where do you think this money is coming from? (Hint: it's not from some place that actually exists.)

It seems like there should be some sort of insights I should share, but I'm still a bit staggered at the moment. Can anyone really think that this unchecked spending is justified?

Our government is out of control. All they can do is spend money they make up. Gold and guns, people - start investing.

What is software worth, eh?

A discussion rages (in many forums, at this moment in my hotel room) about What Software Is Worth and What You Are Paying For When You Buy It.

There are many philosophical arguments (going on in this hotel room, even) but I am going to give my opinion as a consumer here.

To me, as a person who buys software, I see it this way: I am paying someone to get software. Sometimes I pay the person who made the software. Sometimes I pay someone who happens to be publishing the software.

Once I pay someone to get the software, I should be able to do what I want with it. I am willing to pay for support of that software and other services (online play, ahoy).

A software producer may think they are selling me a license to use their software (on N number of computers, perhaps), but whenever they try to enforce that, I generally find myself inconvenienced.

If I find that the cost that the publisher/producer expects me to pay for the software is more then I am willing to pay, I will generally disregard what they want and get the software from someone else (or use the original software in a manner that the producer/publisher considers illegal).

This may include using one license on more computers then they expected. Or downloading their software using bittorrent.

Piracy and the consumer

I get most of my movies and music from other individuals on the internet using bit torrent technology.

I don't do this as a statement against "the man" (as much as I do loathe him), or because I am so poor that I have no other options. I choose piracy as my primary means of acquiring media because it gives me the best return for my input.

There are 2 things I consider when spending money on entertainment (mostly music, movies, video games). How much enjoyment I get out of it (or think I will get out of it) and how much investment it will take to get that enjoyment.

Using this formula combined with my own personal constants of what things I generally enjoy and what resources I have at hand, many of the regular options for media consumption don't make the cut - watching a movie in theaters costs around $8 in my city now, not to mention the investment of time spent finding parking. Plus I can only watch a movie when the theater feels like showing it, and I can't drape myself across a couch while enjoying it.

Television programming also falls short - I'm not willing to invest 1/3 of my media-viewing time watching advertisements (which aren't even being targeted to me personally!).

Purchasing DVDs is a reasonable option once in a while, but very rarely. It is not very often that I expect to get full retail price worth of enjoyment from any DVD movie.

Now when I talk about enjoying a movie, it's not always all selfish gratification (honest!). I am motivated, as a capitalist consumer, to support those who produce high-quality products with my hard-earned dollar. But in Duff-Land, the "media I support" budget is pretty low compared to the amount of media I consume.

At this point in my life, I would be willing to donate around $20 a month to those whose works I had enjoyed that month. If I was paying full retail for price for all the movies I enjoyed, I would probably be paying closer to $100 a month.

So what are my options? As far as movies go, Netflix is a great option. Excellent selection of movies, and for your convenience, many films are now becoming available to stream over the internet and watch within minutes. For less than $20 a month, you have some solid options for watching movies.

When it comes to music, I'm harder to please. I would be willing to pay about $5 for an album I enjoyed - and I don't mean a 5-track album. iTunes is a popular option, but (besides being more than I would like to pay), I would want to be able to download higher-quality tracks (most of their tracks are 128kbps), and I will not pay money for anything infected with DRM (Digital Rights Management, designed to limit your use of the file).

Thus, in most cases, I turn to piracy. I download my movies and music (and the occasional video game) because nobody is willing to take what I'm willing to pay for their goods. It's not that I don't want to pay the fine actors and writers of the television series House, it's just that I'm not going to pay $120 for the right to watch the first 3 seasons at my own convenience.

Not long ago, Nine Inch Nails released the Ghosts I-IV, four volumes comprising an album. Instead of releasing their album in a traditional way, the first volume was released for free on torrent tracking sites such as thepiratebay.org. The entire album was available to purchase from the official website in several different formats. One of the formats was digital download - for $5.

Now, a newly released 36-track album for $5 is a heckuva deal by most media standards. Plus, the tracks were available in several different high quality audio formats (including lossless) without any DRM attached.

I loved the idea, and purchased the digital version. The download servers were completely swamped, and I ended up downloading the entire album using bittorrent anyway - but that wasn't the point. I was given the option to pay the artist for his work, without having to worry about a record label skimming off the top.

The album was pretty good, and makes its way onto my playlist reasonably often. But since then, I've noticed a change in how I think of music. I still download albums without a second thought, but now when I find one I really appreciate, my first instinct is to go to the artists web site and PayPal them some money to show my support.

It's pretty annoying, really. I have daydreams about running into my favorite artists at some generic bar and buying them a round of drinks to show my appreciation. I can't afford to buy albums from all of the artists I support, so I'm stuck with my daydreams for now.

Until artists start breaking away from the record labels wholesale and releasing albums in a way that gives their fans better options, piracy will remain the best option for the regular consumer of media in most cases.