The Pirate’s Life is the Life for Me

File: The Pirate’s Life is the Life For Me (PDF)

Copying digital information is easy and with virtually no marginal cost. Copy protection is hard and antithetical to the intrinsic qualities of the technology it operates in. It is/will become generally more efficient to cover the cost of producing the first copy of digital works through sponsorship, rather than inflating the price of copies and trying to control their creation.

Sharing increases awareness of an artist. Sharing creative works is easier now than at any other time in history. A system, like sponsorship, that can compensate artists in a way that doesn’t need to restrict copies to function, but indeed capitalizes on the attention that sharing produces will be stronger by virtue that it works with the technology instead of against it.

This paper was part of my COMM 411 course in final semester of my undergraduate. The assignment was to response to ideas expressed in one book of our choosing from a selection of books provided by the professor. I chose Lessig Lawrence’s, Remix.

I included a number of ideas I got from Eben Moglen1.

1

I have a big huge man-crush on him.