If every user who had a cracked copy of Windows had a legitimate version of Linux instead, what would the percentage of computers running Linux be? More than there are now, that’s for sure.
That’s also true for music.
Unauthorized distribution is bad for open media.
This whole technological revolution is useless if all it will amount to is the enhanced ability to misappropriate mainstream culture. It is as if everyone suddenly got the ability to play guitar like Hendrix, but only wanted to play covers of “Purple Haze” in shows at the Holiday Inn.
This drives me bananas.
We get to live though a major transition. Huge changes are happening at an artistic level, bigger than any in our lifetimes so far. Much bigger than the change from swing to rock, or from rockabilly to electronica.
Personally, I want to be right there in the middle of the new thing, not over on the lagging edge with Pirate Bay. Why would anybody want different? I don’t get it.
From ten days that shook the world:
NEXT morning, Sunday the 11th, the Cossacks entered Tsarskoye Selo, Kerensky (See App. VIII, Sect. 1) himself riding a white horse and all the church-bells clamouring. From the top of a little hill outside the town could be seen the golden spires and many-coloured cupolas, the sprawling grey immensity of the capital spread along the dreary plain, and beyond, the steely Gulf of Finland.
There was no battle. But Kerensky made a fatal blunder. At seven in the morning he sent word to the Second Tsarskoye Selo Rifles to lay down their arms. The soldiers replied that they would remain neutral, but would not disarm. Kerensky gave them ten minutes in which to obey. This angered the soldiers; for eight months they had been governing themselves by committee, and this smacked of the old régime….
I agree. This whole technological revolution is useless if all it will amount to is the enhanced ability to misappropriate mainstream culture.
It is as if everyone suddenly got the ability to play guitar like Hendrix, but only wanted to play covers of “Purple Haze” in shows at the Holiday Inn. The sharing culture “must” mean more than merely enhanced ability to pirate Britney Spears, if a really visionary new way to experience music is going to arise.
To follow on your edit–the challenge now is to move from “cracking” culture to “creative” culture and “sharing” culture. Instead of trying to figure out how to copy someone else’s fish, the chance arises for people to become creative participants as artists and as listeners in their own right. The challenge remains, I believe, getting people to put down the nets hauling away the old culture and become fishers of this new culture.