Music. Porn. Entering Nightclubs - Things I Refuse to Pay For

Let me focus on the music aspect of this, since I think refusing to pay for porn and clubbing is pretty straightforward.

Is it wrong to steal music? See, my position is, it's an irrelevant question. Technology has brought us to the cusp of the point where the protection of music is utterly unenforceable. If a law cannot be enforced, it simply ceases to be a law. If the government really made some sort of concerted effort to punish music file-sharers, in the style of Singapore littering punishments, then maybe I'd have to revise that opinion. But that's not going to happen.

I know that the opposing argument is "wrong is wrong, and getting away with it doesn't make it right." But there's a limit to that logic. If I patented the formula for coke, or I got a nickel for every coke sold, and then for some strange reason the sky started to regularly rain coke, then that's it. The ballgame is over. And that's what digitized music is. If your "product" is something that can easily be converted into ones and zeros and copied infinitely by anyone, then we are approaching the point where that product simply cannot be protected.

And if everybody wants something, and that something is free and easily accessible, and there's no way to curb the accessibility, and no way to enforce a law prohibiting it, then like I said, the ballgame is over. It's time to move on.

I do have a conscience that tells me that if something is simply "wrong" I shouldn't do it, but stealing music has not, so far, triggered that mechanism in me. I acknowledge that there is a long chain of hardworking people that brought the music from conception all the way to MP3 format, and that I am screwing them out of well-earned profit, but again, I turn to the fact that the sky is raining coke. It is not reasonable to expect that people will voluntarily refrain from listening to free music. Instead, it is the hardworking chain of people who will have to adapt to the new reality.

I anticipate something like the following happening in the near-to-mid future: music recording outfits will all teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, because everyone will be stealing their product. The government will have to intervene. Music making will have to be supported by tax dollars, with the expectation that the end product will be free for everyone.

In a way, this would restore a nice supply and demand balance. Music artists would have to settle for very normal wages (unless they make a fortune by touring, which they could always do) and the public, in the end, would resume paying for the music.

What's the alternative? "Enforcement"? Enforcement costs money. Someone has to pay for enforcement. It's our tax dollars that pay for it. Why not spend the enforcement dollars on subsidizing the musicians? What are the artists going to do? Boycott? They can't - they have no other skills. How would we decide who gets paid? Well, musicians would have to make music on their own coin; then they'd be paid on the basis of downloads or listens. The bigger the piece of the download pie you have, the more the govt. forks out to you. It's all nice and Darwinian.

Again, I don't really see much alternative to this future. You can't enforce a ban on file-sharing, and Kid Rock holding out his begging tin doesn't earn anyone's sympathy. Whether or not sharing files is still somehow "wrong" is going to have to become a question for armchair philosophers, since it's clearly not "wrong enough" to make people care at a sufficient level to actually enforce a ban. Technology has changed the rules of the game. Our old conceptions of how to protect intellectual property are going to have to adjust.

And yes. After music, movies are next.