Pirate's Dilemma slideshow video -- pirates will save the world

Matt Mason sez, "I've just posted a video of a cut down version of my stump speech on my new book The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, explaining why it's often better to compete with pirates in the market place rather than fight them in the courts, and why we as a society need to reevaluate the ways we think about sharing information."

My copy of this book has been near the top of must-read pile for a couple weeks (unfortunately, it's a big pile) and I can't wait to get to it -- especially after watching Matt's video. Link to video, Link to source files, Link to The Pirate's Dilemma on Amazon (Thanks, Matt!)

• [Downpressor]

  @Brit #11

  So often I think I’m the only one who smells bullshit around the whole copyfight meme. Glad its not just me.

• [mediajudocharlie]

  I just bought this book yesterday – very good, so far. Mason knows what he’s talking about, and he does it with a kinetic style that avoids being a) dry and b) just sounding like some tosser talking at you for hundreds of pages.

  Makes you want to go out there and produce some of your own content nice and hard.

• [Antinous]

  Downpressor,

  If I may kick in again. You know from my other posts that I completely believe that people should get paid for their work, and I’ve never downloaded a song in my life. Somebody, maybe Cory, pointed out somewhere along the line that record companies tried to keep radio stations from playing their songs because they thought that it was theft and would kill the industry, when it was, in fact, great free advertising. I think that the point is not to rip people off (although I agree that’s the point for a lot of people) but to discard a no longer functional business model and find one that works. Whatever you or I think about it, the battle is lost. Completely, irrevocably lost. So how do you pull it out of the fire? Every industry reinvents or dies as time goes on. There just isn’t any way around it. History vaporizes personal opinions. The question becomes : Do you do it elegantly, or kicking and screaming? If the record companies had cut a deal with Napster, it would likely have sidestepped the piracy showdown and everybody would have made money. Their inflexibility brought this to where it’s at today and continues to exacerbate the problem. 13 year olds are not going to invent a working business model (probably), so the industry has to do it or die. In the natural world, organisms adapt or die. Between the two, I’m going with adaptation.

• [Warren Camishen]

  Prsnlly, fl tht n f “th mst mprtnt cnmc nd cltrl cnndrms f th 21st Cntry” s hw t gt vry Tm, Dck nd Hrry t sht p bt cltrl chng nd tchnlgy vrld (nd cpy prtctn prdgms) nd smply brng thngs t mr dwn-t-rth lvl.

  Trly ths gy s strtchng thngs bt whn h lmps Nzs n wth Smrfs – sr t’s ct, rnc cmprsn, bt wht th hck s ths gy tlkng (nd typng) bt? H snds lk kk. Thy lt ths srt f ppl wrt ctl bks?

  S-clld “cttng dg thnkrs” mst sn rlz tht thr Str-Trk lvl thrs nd ntrnt dssrttns (nd wcky mbddd vds) mn nthng t th vst pplc, wh wld rthr mcrwv sm ppcrn nd wtch “mrcn dl” thn srsly pndr (r rd bt) glbl tchnlgcl chngs, prcy nd/r DRM.

  Th vst mss f ppl s wht mttrs, nd s slf-ppntd spksprsn fr th vst msss fl tht “th prt’s dlmm” s n dlmm t ll.

• [NickD]

  Warren, you are part of the Andrew Keen fan club, I take it?

• [Nick D]

  Just thought I’d mention that NickD and I are two seperate entities.

  Thank you, please drive through.

  Nick D.

• [Crux Mondrian]

  Youth culture killed my capitalism
  And i don’t think it’s fair.

• [Downpressor]

  Antinous,

  Its not like I’m trying to hold back the tides with a bucket, but a sea change in business models does not change right from wrong. Sure the old model is corrupt, but its still the guys & gals doing the actual work who get the shaft, only now even more so.

  I’m not fool enough to expect to make a living only by putting out niche records but I do want to loose as little as possible on them. One thing thats worked reasonably well is to have records for sale at clubs & shows where one of us is DJ’ing or playing. We give a nicely printed CD-R of the tunes with the purchase of the record so even people without turntables can enjoy the music. They wouldn’t buy a CD-R with only a few songs, but if it comes with a physical thing that they can enjoy looking at or touching which evokes the spirit of the music, it does seem to increase sales. Its not practical to extend this idea to distributors and retail, but every little bit helps. We also do bonus mixes for tunes which go to online digital sales. Not sure if thats helping or not, but the time required to make one more mix is not going to kill me.

  My comment before in this thread is just to support the original poster’s point that too much of Cory’s “copyfight” stuff involves a lot of handwaving which amounts to quasi-justification of theft. The good points about fair use & CC get lost amongst all the screechy anti-DRM and outright celebrations of piracy.

• [catcubed]

  Interesting slideshow, style is kinda like what Zero Puncuation would sound like if he took some valium and got all serious and political.

  Oh and anyone care to enlighten me about the “Nun who invented dance music?”

• [Brit]

  Yawn. More pro-piracy propaganda from Cory. I hate how these pro-piracy monologues conflate a bunch of different things together so that they can justify stealing stuff. The video confuses re-mixing information into new and unique forms with the flat-out stealing of an unaltered movie, music, or software. Of course, the video mixes these two things together so they can point to the first one (see the great things remixing adds to the world), and justify the latter (and that’s why pirates are doing the world a favor by being freeloaders on society and the entire creative community). Why does the pro-piracy crowd always conflate a bunch of completely different situations together – unless they don’t really want an honest discussion? It’s because piracy – stealing the hard work of real artists, real producers, real workers – and sharing it with your closest ten-thousand friends – is indefensible from any kind of objective standpoint, so they have to muddle the issue, thereby justifying their own desire to get free shit and pretend like they aren’t crossing any kind of moral boundary.

• [travelina]

  The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has long believed that the rise of global temperatures is directly related to the decline of pirates, as presented in this Pastafarian graph:
  http://www.venganza.org/2007/10/23/national-geographic-promotes-fsm.htm

• [zuzu]

  The vast mass of people is what matters, and as a self-appointed spokesperson for the vast masses I feel that “the pirate’s dilemma” is no dilemma at all.

  Did you instead just finish reading Propaganda by Edward Bernays?

  Forms of youth culture are and probably always will be repeatedly killed by capitalism.

  Please let’s not continue to conflate capitalism with corporatism. and yes, “big business” relying on government for monopolies to impose artificial limitations on reuse and reproduction of knowledge qualifies as corporatism.

• [Matt Mason]

  Forms of youth culture are and probably always will be repeatedly killed by capitalism.

  Also for the self-appointed spokesperson for the vast masses – the link between Nazis and Smurfs is a video game called Castle Smurfenstein. Castle Smurfenstein was a hacked version of the original Castle Wolfenstein (a game about Nazis); it used the same game engine, but replaced the graphics and sound assets with cartoon characters from The Smurfs TV series. It appeared in 1981, and was the first ever mod of a computer game, an initially illegal practice which has created a great deal of innovation in the gaming industry because it is now accepted and encouraged.

  You can read the first ever interview with the kids who made it, and find some cold, hard numbers and facts to back the story up, in The Pirate’s Dilemma.

• [Bonnie]

  Whoops! Wrong kind of pirate –
  http://flickr.com/photos/bonniegrrl/2188808950/in/set-72157603707126253/