April 18, 2009
Moral intuitions are the pirates' best friends
Being a Swedish blogger, I of course have to blog about the Pirate Bay trial, or lose my blogging licence: Practical Ethics: Intuitive pirates: why do we accept file sharing so much?
My basic claim is that the non-intuitive nature of intellectual property makes it extremely hard to enforce morally and socially. Attempts to control it legally or technologically will tend to overshoot the target. I think the best way to get around the problem is either to make access to content cheaper and easier (the Spotify approach) or to reconsider the structure of content production (the long causal and legal chains from creator to consumer). I doubt the later will occur voluntarily from the content side, so they better start streaming music, books, films, games, statistics etc. quickly.
Or we could try to re-engineer our territoriality system in the brain to handle intangible rights. But I wouldn't bet on that for the next few years.
Posted by Anders3 at April 18, 2009 07:06 PM