70% oppose internet ban for filesharers | I read in the The Guardian, and it got me thinking…

I love the idea of getting free stuff from the internet, I think we probably all do, and there is so much free stuff out there. And all this free stuff, whether promotional or open source is in the form of files.

It’s probably become the dominant paradigm. 70% oppose internet ban for filesharers | The Guardian

You want an office application, you Google up a free one like Open Office; you want an operating system, you Google up a free one like Linux; you want to watch some animation, Big Buck Bunny can be downloaded for free; you want to make a cutting edge 3d animation, the Blender 3d image and animation creation suite is free to download; want to make 2d images, download Gimp; want to play a role-playing game, the only question is table top or online because there are great free options for both… and the list goes on and on. I once discovered a forum where people were lurking and writing free open source drivers for unsupported stuff you might want to plug into your computer like cameras, scanners and toasters (I might have made that last one up).

The idea that I might have to whip out my credit card and pay for any of this cool software and entertainment is almost alien. I can have the best, produced by helpful people who are fun to talk to (no salesmen involved, only honest developers thank goodness) and I can hit download straight away with no thought about strange creepy malware, or programs that want to take over my system.

Now some people take this idea a lot further than me. I’m just talking about the legal open source and promotional stuff that’s out there, but some people get used to this type of computing and swap copyrighted files with as little thought as the rest. By files we could of course be talking about a file with a program, an mp3, a game, a movie, a book, a role-playing game pdf etc. That small list right there covers the output of just about every creative industry producing content.

Against this background it is no surprise that the companies producing this content and asking for money for every copy of it are starting to lose money. I’ve got to say that I’m not 100% happy about that because I watch TV shows, and the TV networks seem to be light years away from working out how they are going to survive and make money in a world of file-sharing consumers (the dominant paradigm remember, the TV companies aren’t going to be able to stop it).

I haven’t a clue what that solution would look like – perhaps a download site, with advertising but no creepy malware or up-front charges, a site that didn’t try to snoop out what country you live in – but I do know that trying to stop file sharing just isn’t going to work. Even if you limit yourself to trying to stop only illegal sharing.

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Chicago School economics 'a disaster and a disgrace', says leading analyst | you bet it is

I’m reading the Guardian again and today and I ended up on the business pages. I never used to read the business pages, because I thought they were all about which companies had bought which other companies and how much each currency is fluctuating against each other - and there is a lot of that – but there is also some very interesting stuff that crosses the line into politics.

This article, about Chicago School economics, I read today for example is the sort of thing that gives a real insight into what politicians of the Tory and Republican parties (boo, hiss) are thinking. The article is a short summary of some of the ideas of an economist called Roger Bootle.

"A year ago we came perilously close to utter catastrophe," Roger Bootle says. "But the neoliberal, free-market people are already on the warpath. They remind me of some mythical creature – cut off one head and it sprouts more."

Of course this Roger Bootle guy has a new book out and that’s why he’s in the paper, but it does seem to me that he really cares about the economy – and if you ask me the economy is part of society, not something outside it. It is something we have to try to understand and get right, and not just on a national scale, but internationally.

People talk about economies under a few different overarching headings, such as feudal, communist, barter and capitalist, but I don’t think they are particularly helpful. Animals can be talked about under the same overarching headings, such as mammal, fish, marsupial and arachnid, but a whale is a mammal that swims in the sea and a mudskipper is a fish that walks on the land.

In the same way a capitalist economy can develop to be very centrally controlled and limit the availability of wealth, and a communist economy can develop towards the free movement of wealth, ideas and people. In this way it is the direction the economy is moving in that defines it, and gives a clue about whether it is a positive influence on society and people’s overall happiness or not.

I spend most of my time in the UK and Austria, two very similar economies – mostly capitalist, but with healthy doses of socialism thrown in – and there are a lot of good things about these economies, but they are not perfect, and more worrying they seem to be developing in the wrong direction. The movement of wealth, ideas and people is slowing. Wealth is becoming less evenly distributed (the even distribution of wealth is the key) and peoples happiness is plummeting.

I also read – in the Guardian of course – about similar negative stuff happening across the rest of the world, and the suggestion at the end of the article about going towards a single world currency seems to be one tiny piece in the puzzle of getting the world economy right.

>you can read about the beautiful Dragonbat with his nose in the paper illustration and how it was done at Starbright Illustrations.

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