and on a wholly different note
¿could someone explain to my Capitalistic, Luddite ass the morality behind file-sharing copywritten material? the three answers i've heard are: Corporations are evil and kick puppies, therefore i'm justified in ripping them off; copywriting "information" is ludicrous on its face, my actions aren't illegal they're progressive; i don't give a crap,
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when you interact with corps, you need to to conceive of who will be affected. though, it is maybe buying too much into propaganda, when profits drop (from whatever reason) it's the lowest workers who will be detrimentally affected. when GM closes five plants and fires 30k people, you best believe the top 3% of that company doesn't feel any pay-check pinch - it's the rest of us poor slobs what get mothwallets. so, when Corps start losing profits from file-sharing, the price of information (CDs, DVDs, what have you) isn't going to drop, it's the costs of business which are going to get reduced: that's jobs and that's wages
now, i understand what you're saying about Darwinian Economics, but ¿are you really comfortable with the fact that you're preyin off the minimum wage disc-press operator working in Podunk Bumsville?
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It's tricky isn't it? (well for me it is!) I absolutely do not want the worst off to suffer. So on that level I'm not comfortable with my own actions - hence perhaps my oever-eagerness to jump to my own defense. Flipping it around though, if you asked the CEOs whether they feel okay about firing the worst off in their organisation in order to shore up profits and keep the shareholders dividends healthy they will say "Hell yes!" They might trot out the excuse that their responsibility is to the shareholders (another way of saying "I'm was only following orders"), but their whole moral framework is based around the notion that an employee has no value except as a commodity.
So I suppose what we're saying is - are we prepared to be as amoral as the corporations are, or should we show a conscience?
I suppose we should show a conscience. But I still find it very hard to tie my individual actions to the loss of jobs. And I still always come back to those jobs that are shed every day from corporations making record profits because there's no such thing as "enough profit".
Hmmm. I'm coming back to my original position perhaps. It's a question of whether copyright theft affects profitablility that much and whether those profits, if they were attained, would actually safeguard any jobs.
But no, I'm twisting in the wind. You're right, regardless of how immoral the corporations might be, I know that reduced revenue means job cuts, and I am partly to blame.
What to do, what to do...?
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now, if you want to say Capitalism itself is immoral, that's another conversation. though, i'm not sure i could agree with that either. it seems to me, Capitalism is a tool, not an outcome or action
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i grant you, there are less than savory people who've made money. but i don't think that just because a person is rich they've been illicit in their activities. making money off a niche isn't, necessarily, immoral
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