Modern crimes that are mistaken for brilliance
I am not sure whether it is a good thing or not, but Iâm from the P.N. (pre-Napster) period. When I was in university and listening to Mp3s, you really needed a degree in patience and an existence fit for rocket science (oh wait, I think I got that mixed up… anyway…) to rip Mp3s. Back then, to rip a CD you had to go through an 8 to 12 step process using command line. To share a song on dial-up, you needed a few hours. My Mp3 player could hold up to 6 songs. It was a Diamond Rio . To any museum willing to pay good money, I still have this player and it is up for sale. I was so cool. Hey, relax… I did say âwasâ?.
Back to the point, before Napster I had volunteered to assist a webmaster (who ran TheMusicLover.net: it no longer exists) to rip and upload Mp3s. Back then, storage was expensive. So, it was a tedious process of ripping a hit single, creating multiple accounts on free-to-use sites like Geocities and then uploading it on dial-up. Zzzzzzzz.
In no time at all, TheMusicLover.net featured a comprehensive hit list which was frequently updated by the community (traces of Web 2.0 eh?). UK, American, Australian, Japanese and Korean charts were featured. It was quite a success before P2P programs were widely used. Of course, once I realised what I was doing, I stopped and repented. I did. Scouts honour. I even did one of my research papers on The Digital Media and The Impact on Modern Day Societal Norms. I opened my paper with two questions;
âWould you stop your nephew from stealing your favourite CDs for you from a music store?â? and âWould you stop your nephew from downloading your favourite Mp3s for you?â?
Why is the first related to negativity and evil and the latter associated with some form of brilliance and resourcefulness? Of course that is a rhetorical question. Now, I do not consider myself a Jerry Yang or Shawn Fanning but even before the millennium, I was screaming for updated syllabus in moral education and also for government bodies to invest in educating the community about these impacts.
Fast forward a few years. Look at where things are now. Technology has advanced so rapidly (and left traditional moral values paddling desperately behind) that there is an entire generation that does not know right from wrong or is indifferent to the repercussions of their actions. When my friend had denied his son extra pocket money to top-up his prepaid phone, the 15 year old grabbed his motherâs phone and âSMSâ?ed some credits over to himself. The parents shrugged and sighed with a smile on their faces and said, âWhat you gonna do… heâs so clever!â? I choked! He stole from his parents and they did not realise it.
I also have a story about a couple who are parents to a Black Hat developer. They proudly announce that their son is some kind of genius as he has written viruses and hacked multiple websites. Arrghhh! Seriously folks… what is going on here? All these modern crimes are being mistaken for brilliance!
We need change! Change in moral values and change in methods of dealing and communicating these values. We need bodies to push governments to be more proactive in developing awareness campaigns to educate the community. We need more involvement from industry experts to understand technology and the psyche of this generation in order to plan for the future. We need a lot of help and we needed it before Napster. We are very late but in my opinion, not too late to take on this beast. Just like the constitution that has been revisited and revised to remain relevant, we need to revisit moral education frequently to ensure that our future generations can still tell right from wrong and not mistake modern crimes for brilliance.
jeff_tan July 9, 2008 at 1:02 pm
I’ve always suspected the reason why people are so forgiving when it come to infringement of copyright laws, apart from the frequent convenience of being able to do it anonymously, is that they feel like there isn’t any harm.
For the most part, they see it as a win for the “little guy” against the bad bully. ie. “The record company makes so much money already, it wouldn’t hurt them if i download mp3s” or “Would buying a pirated Windows really matter to MS?”
Unfortunately by doing so, they have a huge impact on the economics of the way these companies do business. Producing songs/movies cost money. Coding software costs money. If intellectual property can be so readily copied, they need to make sure that they make a product that can still make a healthy profit even despite all these illegal activities. So what does this mean to the companies? They need to focus their efforts on producing “sure-winners”. For the music biz, this means that they’re going to choose to promote the popstar that sounds/acts/talks like Britney/HilaryDuff/MileyCyrus over a unique talent because it’s been proven to work. For the movie biz, it means funding more comic-book movies instead or truly original indie films because they know that even if a million DVD copies are made, they still have a fan base that will go see the movie in the cinema.
If I was to be completely pragmatic though, I don’t think there’s a way to stop it happening. It doesn’t mean the end to original content as we know it though.. If you look at sites like indiegogo.com and indie-music.com, good art has a way of surviving.