You Want Pirates ? Umair Will Show You Where To Find Them

Set up a torrent tracker, get fined, go to jail.

Join a bank, destroy the economy, profit.

Let’s draw out the distinction.

The Pirate Bay guys were criminally prosecuted for….violating (largely obsolete) copyright. Almost no one in finance has been held even civilly liable for vastly more economically damaging actions.

On the one hand, we have damages worth maybe (maybe) a few million. On the other, a few trillion.

On the one hand, innovation and better music is stifled — benefits are foregone. On the other, reform of a broken banking system is stifled — losses are incurred.

That’s everything that’s wrong with the economy in two sentences: the ongoing inability of today’s leaders to deal with 21st century economics.

Read the 41-and-counting comments here … 

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Update:  Because the comments got somewhat snarky, Umair Haque wrote a subsequent posts taking on the arguments and counter-arguments .. and it makes for some additional interesting reading.

And I note the conclusion to “Why the War on File-Sharing Is Unwinnable”

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Here’s a final, “strategic” point: every time the music industry kills an underground distribution channel, a more efficient one arises in its place. Goodbye mixtapes, hello www. Bye www, hello Napster. Bye Napster, hi BitTorrent. Bye BitTorrent, hi anonymous, ciphered, totally decentralized p2p nets.

Why? By limiting the supply of interaction, the music industry is only ensuring that each interaction becomes more and more efficient. The endgame is a distribution system where every song in the world in the world can be zapped invisibly and anonymously from me to you in a nanosecond.

The point? 21st century economics are radically decentralized. Wars against networks are unwinnable — when orthodox organizations are the ones fighting them.

Only networks (or markets and communities, if you’re a long-time reader) can fight other networks.

Want a better music/media/etc. “business model”?  The understanding that hierarchies are dominated by networks is the key — and the failure to understand it is exactly why the media industry is so deeply in decay.

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