I keep hearing a lot of stuff on Y/A about Conservatives accusing Obama and his liberal friends of trying to introduce Communism by the back door.
Much of this is about social reforms an health care, with the primary complaint being that Obama and the Liberals are trying to introduce a “something for nothing” culture that is causing people to develop a sense of entitlement to goods and services. They want the government to give them everything and are not willing to work or to strive for it, which ruin America by turning it into a socialist state where nobody does any more than the bare minimum because they know that the state will provide for them and bail them out.
This got me to thinking, by far the biggest “something for nothing” culture in America today is P2P downloading of copyrighted material. People expect to be able to go on to the Internet and to download unlimited amounts of music, movies and software for free. A lot of the people who do this aren’t even willing to use ad supported services, or to pay. They just want to download for free, and feel that it is their right to do so.
It seems like every 4th or 5th entry on Y/A these days is “where can I download Twilight for free”, or “where can I stream Harry Potter for free”.
In its defense the creative industry has put up the exact same arguments as conservatives have about Obama’s reforms. They say that if everybody downloads stuff for free then the artists will stop working hard to produce it, quality will go down, our market based society will implode, and we will be left with a lot of freeloaders taking mediocre products for nothing nothing.
I know all about Communism, and its effects. I’ve spent enough of my life living under the Chinese Communist Party, and watching the Communist regime in Russia to know what communism is and isn’t, and illegal P2P downloading sounds a lot like it.
In the olden days the Chinese government automatically owned almost all intellectual property, and people could get it for free from the government. Books, music, scientific patents, if it was created by somebody even remotely affiliated with a state owned enterprise then the average man on the street could use it as much as they wanted provided that they paid for the material that it was made of (EG, the paper that the book was printed on). If Napster or lime wire had been invented/available back then pretty much all music in China (that was approved by the state censors, at least) would probably have been uploaded on it and be available for free to everybody. Just like it was in the 90s in the US, except it would have been legal.
So, what does everybody think? Is downloading music and movies for free from the Internet and feeling that you are entitled to do so a form of Communism by the back door? Are liberals using P2P downloads to undermine America’s capitalist system?
Are Liberals tying to force all American capitalist media companies to change their models into one that suits freeloaders rather than the free market system? And if they succeed will it spread to other areas of the US economy? Will the US economy be ruined by people demanding something for nothing, who are emboldened by P2P downloading.
Or is this a new way forward for America, the democratization of the music/film industry and the end of the record label’s monopoly on music?

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