No. I feel like a loner howling at the moon on this one.
I would look up a series of talks on YouTube called "free is a lie" by Aral Balkan. They deal more with the free service bait and switch than piracy, but I found them influential in getting me to question "free."
Free is not a lie, it's the simple physics of copying bits.
DRM and the old record companies are the lie you're selling. If they were fighting for their lives, they wouldn't have Washington DC, Apple, Google, Microsoft, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, ... in their pockets.
The 100%-to-the-artists stores exist. I love 'em.
I'm not the man, I'm just another guy looking for a job. The interview process for computer jobs should make it obvious that I'm not the super-elite like Chris Dodd.
I just don't think people will ever stop freely sharing culture... long after the MPAA, DMCA, RIAA, and all DRM schemes are forgotten.
Culture is free. Air is free (if not clean). Communicating with the people around me is free. My Open Source code is in fact free. The knowledge I have I am willing to freely share.
I think there's two sides to this, the people who want and think that everything has a price, and the people who recognize that the digital age brings with it advances that mean this idea no longer applies to everything the way it once did.
I'll end on a point I think we can agree on: duplicating a CD or CDs is not an indication that one has the financial means to buy it/them.
I guess if you want nothing but ad supported culture and skill-less rage comics and stupid blob cartoons maybe, but the kind of culture that really inspires, challenges, and uplifts takes real effort to create.
Culture is a byproduct of civilization, we produce culture merely by existing and interacting with each other. Music, media and cartoons are but one [current] aspect of our culture, they do not comprise all of it.
I would be quite interested in what a world would look like where artists created things for the sake of creation and innovation, instead of merely for a paycheck. That doesn't mean you couldn't get paid from producing hit music, it just means if you're not a popular artist you better have supplementary income.
Speaking only for myself, what I find inspiring is generally the work of other impassioned people working on topics I'm interested in. I like watching the videos that come out of DefCon for that reason, I find them inspiring. Those videos are feely available and IMO they're part of our culture too.
I was once a true believer in all this "free everything!" stuff too, but once I saw what it was really all about -- the sacrifice of the artist to the passive consumer and the content aggregators -- I couldn't un-see it. Now I'm an atheist at a tent revival. I've lost the faith.
That's never popular, but I really think I'm right about this and I think with time other people are going to see it too.
I'm not intending to insult artists, but I am insulting the Internet's popular trash culture of memes and throwaway junk. I see "free" as being partly responsible for that. There's no money in creating online culture, therefore nobody can spend any real time or effort on it. As a result you get a lot of totally disposable superficial noise and ad-driven marketing gimmickry.
I am supporting your right to have control over your work -- not only a right to earn something from it or to give it away if you so choose, but also to have some say over how it's used.
If "information is free," what right would these guys have to protest their music being used in torture chambers? None, of course.
That's an extreme example but it illustrates my point. Copyrights aren't just about money. They're also about creators having some kind of say about what can be done with their work.
I believe that the creators of things should have more rights over their creations -- yes more -- than those that just "consume" them. Anything else strikes me as a grotesque value inversion. Disempowering the creator in favor of the consumer de-funds culture creation, impoverishes creators, and encourages a society of utterly passive consumption and triviality.
It's the ultimate in passive consumerism. Value flows one way -- downhill -- until the snow's all melted and the streams run dry.
That's not what free culture was supposed to do, either. Free culture was supposed to lead to a gift culture, not a culture of take-take-take. Part of why I've lost the faith is that the promised land hasn't come. Taking is all I see... take, take, take, gimme, gimme, gimme...
I would look up a series of talks on YouTube called "free is a lie" by Aral Balkan. They deal more with the free service bait and switch than piracy, but I found them influential in getting me to question "free."