Intellectual Property Thought Experiment #1

Tim has been out of school for several several years. When Tim was in school, he hated the high prices of textbooks. So Tim decides that he wants to hurt the textbook industry, and he decides to do so by pirating as many textbooks as he can find.

Tim goes to a BitTorrent tracker, and he downloads 10,000 textbooks. Neither the authors nor the publishers get a cent of Tim’s money, and now Tim has an extensive, interdisciplinary library at his disposal.

But Tim has the sinking feeling that he hasn’t struck much of a blow against the textbook industry.

As we’ve said, Tim isn’t in school anymore, so there’s a fairly slim chance that he would have bought many (if any) of these books. And if Tim does go back to school, he just might get charged for books upfront, regardless of whether he already has the texts he needs. And by the time Tim does go back to school, if Tim does indeed end up going back to school, there will very likely be new editions of the books he needs, and his professors will very likely require those new editions, which may or may not be available to pirate.

So in other words, what Tim has done is acquire for free a bunch of things that he would probably never have paid for, and that he just might end up purchasing anyway, in the end. In short, Tim has failed completely in his attempt to hurt the textbook industry.

Tim has succeeded, however, in disproving the ridiculous notion that an instance of piracy necessarily represents a lost sale. Is there any rational way to argue that, by pirating 10,000 textbooks, Tim has cost someone 10,000 sales? or 5,000? or 1,000? or 10?

Without ignoring the ethical dimension of piracy, we can recognize that what Tim has done here is quite different from, say, stealing crates of textbooks and then hoarding or reselling them. We can recognize the significant differences between piracy and theft, and further, we can recognize that having one’s work pirated 10,000 times does not mean that one has lost 10,000 sales, or even 10,000 potential sales.

Next time, I’ll go into more detail about that last point.

Come to Think of It, I Don’t Particularly Want to Play on Roger Ebert’s Lawn

I respect Roger Ebert for admitting that his argument about video games was profoundly stupid. There are two major reasons why Ebert’s original argument was invalid. He now freely admits the first and most important one–namely, that he was discussing a medium about which he knew next-to-nothing. “I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen,” he says. Amen.

His ignorance of the medium leads him to some truly bizarre conclusions. For example, consider this excerpt from his faux-debate with Clive Barker (who, incidentally, is an expert on video games like a a grizzly bear is an expert on veganism):

Barker: “Let’s invent a world where the player gets to go through every emotional journey available. That is art. Offering that to people is art.”

Ebert: “If you can go through ‘every emotional journey available,’ doesn’t that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. If next time I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what?”

The bit about doing Romeo and Juliet naked and upside down–simply put, that is not what games do. It’s more like what movies sometimes do. Interactivity does not allow the player to do whatever he wants. It allows the player to act in a very limited number of ways, within a closed system that is designed to lead him to a certain preconceived conclusion. Sometimes player-action is really no more based in choice than the act of turning a book’s pages: You can either turn the page and see what’s next, or you can put down the book and do something else.

Think of it this way: If you could do anything you wanted in Grand Theft Auto, then the ability to kill prostitutes would not be an ethical issue. Sure, you could kill prostitutes, but you could also drive them to the nearest community college and enroll them at your own expense, and on the way over, you could have a frank discussion with them about class privilege, gender inequality, and safe sex. You cannot discourse with prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto, but you can kill them. The ethical problem in Grand Theft Auto is not that you can do anything, and that given that freedom, lots of people choose to kill prostitutes. The problem is that you can do relatively few things, and one of those few things that you can choose to do is kill prostitutes. The option is there because the designers put it there, and the alternative is absent because the designers didn’t put it there.

Even when games have branching narratives (and many do not), there are rarely more than two or three possible paths. And even the hundred-or-so important decisions in the Mass Effect games do not constitute anything approaching free choice. The experience still has an author.

To use Ebert’s own example, Braid:

You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game.

If he had played the game, which of course he has not, Ebert would know that Braid is specifically about the impossibility of taking back our mistakes. As the game builds toward its famous final level, time manipulation ceases to be an amusing superpower and becomes instead a tragic distortion of perspective: What if you thought, mistakenly, that you could bend the laws of nature to your will? What sorts of mistakes might you make as a result? You would probably make some pretty horrible ones, as the game intends to show you through an interactive–but fundamentally linear–narrative.

Similarly, what if you thought that video games were a space wherein you could do whatever you want, without limitation or consequence? What important things might you miss? You would probably miss the point entirely, as Barker and Ebert both do.

Reason Number Two:

My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art.

If you have to reject something on “purely theoretical grounds,” even when that conclusion runs contrary to observation or common sense, then you’re either (a) working with a bad theory, or (b) being a sophist. The point of theory is to systematically explain real objects and actual experiences, not to trap us in snooty technicalities.

A simple example: Around the turn of the 20th Century, the general consensus was that photography and filming were technical operations rather than creative pursuits, and that photographs and films therefore did not count as art. Eventually, that theory was revised–specifically because people began to understand the medium, and the skill required to work in it, and the many subjective choices it involves–and it suddenly seemed silly and pointless to exclude photography and film from aesthetic discourse. The problem was the theory, not the thing being theorized.

“I concluded without a definition [of art] that satisfied me,” Ebert says, ending this discussion about what art is the only way that any discussion about what art is ever ends.

Do You Support the Homosexual Agenda, Whatever the Fuck That Is?

A few weeks ago, I received a mass email from Eugene Delgaudio, who is apparently the president of some very important organization or something. “Dear fellow American,” Delgaudio began,

The Radical Homosexuals claim you and other pro-family Americans actually now support same-sex marriage, special job preferences for homosexuals and promotion of the homosexual lifestyle in schools.

Is it true? What do you say?

As one might guess, these lines serve as a the preamble to a tirade against Radical Homosexuals, The Homosexual Lobby, and Leftist Thought Control. And as one might also guess, all of these frightening terms go tantalizingly undefined throughout the proceedings, as does their comforting, besieged antithesis, Pro-Family values.

Putting aside that spooky, enigmatic language, the argument at hand seems to be that an organized cadre of gay people, relying on the indulgence of an increasingly secular United States, wants to (1) create anti-discrimination laws (possibly modeled after Affirmative Action) for gay employees and job applicants, (2) secure marriage and adoption rights for gay couples nationwide, and (3) include gay sex in public schools’ sexual education programs. As one might assume, these nefarious goals threaten to undermine Pro-Family values, or something.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I disagree strongly with the idea that gay marriage somehow undermines traditional marriage, or that gay adoption is somehow bad for children. There is very little reliable, empirical evidence to suggest (much less prove) the innate superiority of heterosexual coupling when it comes to raising children, and there is in fact some recent and well-publicized evidence to the contrary.

Further, the whole idea of “teaching gay sex” is a bit confusing. We can reasonably and usefully say that vaginal intercourse (of the sort that involves a penis rather than a sex toy) is a straight sex-act, insofar as gay couples are physically incapable of performing it. There are, however, no gay sex-acts–no sex-acts that only gay couples can perform, or that are intrinsically different when performed by gay couples (or by dozens of people at once, for that matter). There is no significant physiological difference, for example, between a man performing oral sex on a man, and a woman performing oral sex on a man. If children and adolescents are to understand the mechanics of sex, then they will inevitably have to understand that, with one notable exception, no sex-act is inherently any gayer than any other.

And as for affirmative action, I would argue that discriminatory hiring practices are bad, and that frivolous lawsuits are also bad, and that we need to work to eliminate both. None of which has the slightest thing to do with family values, sexual orientation, or political affiliation.

All of that being said, I’m not going to brush off the so-called Pro-Family values argument just because it feels a tad antique and silly. Immediately dismissing something because it’s traditional is exactly as absurd as immediately accepting something because it’s traditional. I’m not interested in doing away with the wisdom of previous generations, any more than I’m interested in assuming that everything previous generations thought or did was wise. (The Sermon on the Mount? Exceptionally wise. The Children’s Crusade? Surreally unwise).

So, what is the actual argument against gay marriage, and so on?

I’m sure you’ve been wondering just what the American Morality Survey contains. In short, the American Morality Survey is a perfect example of why polls are, generally speaking, bullshit–and further, of how concepts like family and morality can become buzz-words, devoid of descriptive and ethical content. It is a Rosetta Stone of disingenuous, fear-mongering misinformation. It is an immensely instructive object lesson in the mass production of useless data, and wherever one stands on the issue of gay rights, one has a vested interest in recognizing this sort of demagoguery when one sees it.

Here are the poll’s five questions, with some comments on each. Keep in mind that, on the survey form, “No” is selected by default for each of these.

1. Should homosexuals receive special job rights and force businesses, schools, churches and even daycares to hire and advance homosexuals or face prosecution and multimillion-dollar lawsuits?

As I have said earlier, the goal of Affirmative Action is to eliminate discrimination, not to promote it. If the latter happens, then the specific policy in question has failed, but that does not invalidate the idea itself. In its strange phrasing, this question disavows the fact that straight people currently receive “special job rights,” in the same way that so many arguments against Affirmative Action disavow white male privilege.

2. Do you support the use of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to fund homosexual “art”, so called AIDS-awareness programs and homosexual research grants that are frequently funneled to political advocacy?

Buried deep in that diatribe is the kernel of a half-decent point: Some AIDS charities do still frame AIDS as a gay disease, and that is a grave mistake. But if the government is going to fund any art (a separate issue), then it is more or less inevitable that some of the artists will be gay, and that some of the art will be activist in nature. And as for research grants being used to advocate a particular political ideology, that problem is hardly limited to any one branch of research, or to any one political project. Any research grant that says “Prove that heterosexual marriage is the best thing for children,” or “prove that heterosexual marriage is not the best thing for children,” rather than “let’s figure out the actual effect of heterosexual marriage on children” is bad research, plain and simple.

3. Should homosexuality be promoted in school as a healthy lifestyle choice, while information about the life threatening consequences are ignored?

Are there really sex education course that do not mention sexually transmitted infections? And for that matter, are there sexually transmitted infections that are transmitted through homosexual sex-acts, but not through heterosexual sex-acts? And for that matter, is there even such a thing as a homosexual sex-act?

4. Do you support same-sex “marriage” for homosexuals or “marriage-like” rights, like homosexuals being able to adopt children and raise them in their “lifestyle”?

The main issue here is the “condescending tone” and “seething, prejudicial contempt” implied by the “frivolous quotation marks.” No one is actually being quoted here, you’ll note.

5. Should the U.S. Supreme Court overturn traditional marriage between one man and one woman?

Again, this language is biased in the extreme: We’re overturning traditional marriage, not granting equal rights. And since the Supreme Court has never ruled on this issue, to grant queer Americans the right to marry would not be to “overturn” anything, legally speaking.

So, fellow American, my answer to all of these questions is: That’s a really stupid question, designed to flatter me if I agree with the person who wrote the question, and trap me into a compromising position if I do not. Which is really the answer to almost every question in almost every poll, if we’re being honest.

I’ve Learned Something Today (3 of 3)

Do South Park’s last two episodes constitute an insult to Muslims? In the opinion of Revolution Muslim, it all comes down to a rather simple question: “Is there a purpose, other than evil, in insulting something someone holds sacred?” I would answer that question with an unqualified yes.

A simple example: The Catholic Church holds its hierarchy sacred, but we can and must insult the craven hypocrisy of Pope Benedict II, who continues to protect the child molesters in his employ. Here the purpose of insulting the Pope–who is supposed to be infallible, remember–is to stop trusted authority figures from raping children. The purpose is to stop evil, because sacred institutions are perfectly capable of the most horrific evil.

One must believe that sacred institutions can do evil, unless one wants to say that everything every religion does is good–which would be paradoxical, since the world’s myriad religions openly (and often productively) contradict one another. And if religions can do evil, then we have to be able to call them out on it. In the case of Catholic priests raping children, the evil would be in not attacking the sacred institution in question.

Since this point is such an important one, let us examine Revolution Muslim‘s argument in a little more detail. I would like to speak directly to Revolution Muslim.

While insulting Jesus, Moses, or any other prophet would remove someone from Islam, we Muslims are also forbidden to insult the deities that other religions hold in high esteem. Allah says in the Qur’an:

وَلاَ تَسُبُّواْ الَّذِينَ يَدْعُونَ مِن دُونِ اللّهِ فَيَسُبُّواْ اللّهَ عَدْوًا بِغَيْرِ عِلْمٍ

Revile not those unto whom they pray beside Allah lest they wrongfully revile Allah through ignorance.

Therefore, as Muslims we do not define speech which has no place in a moral society as “free speech.”

Because I cannot read Arabic, I am utterly at the mercy of the translator as far as the wording of that Koranic quotation goes. But it seems to me that “reviling” is quite different from satirizing. Satires do not hate everything they mock. I believe that your assertion–that “speech which has no place in a moral society” is not “free speech”–confuses a moral society with a society in which everyone agrees about everything.

The entire point of free speech is that speech must be allowed to occur even if it offends people. That is precisely what makes free speech necessary. Without that safeguard, sacred institutions could do unlimited evil without being questioned or stopped. No individual, no group, and no religion should have the privilege of going unquestioned or uninsulted. A free society cannot afford to grant anyone that privilege.

We would also like Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone to understand the tastelessness of their portrayal, apologize and reflect on the words that follow. An apology or at least recognition of bad taste might not remedy the situation, but it would go a long way toward turning this situation from a gaping wound into an ugly scar.

No one denies that South Park is tasteless. Few satires retain good taste, for the simple reason that good taste is often incompatible with truth. But how has the show’s tastelessness wounded you? Where is the wound?

I do not mean that as a rhetorical question. I honestly want to understand. What gives Muslims the exclusive right not to be satirized, or even to be included in a satire of something else entirely? That is the question that Matt Stone and Trey Parker have asked, and they are still waiting for a satisfactory answer.

If the answer is simply that whoever threatens violence gets whatever he wants, then I resolutely reject that answer as unethical, arrogant, and incredibly dangerous.

I’ve Learned Something Today (2 of 3)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has this to say about the South Park episode entitled “200.”

The “South Park” episode “was not just funny, it wasn’t just witty” she said, but it also addressed what she called the essential issue that “one group of people, one religion, that is claiming to be above criticism, and I hope that in the aftermath of this, that we discuss that.”

The central premise of South Park is that no one is above criticism. It is one thing to abstain from depicting the Prophet Muhammad because of one’s own faith. It is quite another thing to abstain from depicting the Prophet Muhammad because the topic is off limits to everyone. That latter resolution is not the result of faith, but of fear–namely, the fear that radical Muslims will commit acts of physical violence in “response.” As I explained in my last post, it is irrational to blame the violence on the insult. Even if the violence is a response to the insult, the one does not follow inevitably from the other as a matter of cause-and-effect. There is at every step the vital element of free and rational choice.

Enter Revolution Muslim, the Internet community that got some attention for warning (and according to some, implicitly threatening) Matt Stone and Trey Parker against depicting the Prophet. In a recent post, Revolution Muslim called for “a deeper and more productive dialogue” on this matter. If they mean that earnestly, then I would like to contribute to the project of open, productive dialogue. So let’s go through their argument.

Revolution Muslim cites as its antithesis “the cloud of American debauchery.” Revolution Muslim refers to “American imperialism and its coincident culture of pagan hedonistic barbarism” as “a cancer which bites at the root of global injustice.” (Wouldn’t “biting at the root of global injustice” be good for global justice?) In other words, Revolution Muslim has no trouble handing out insults even as they declare their own faith gravely insulted. And after having said all of this, Revolution Muslim goes on to say:

This past week South Park aired an episode which insulted three of our beloved prophets: Musa (Moses), ‘Isa (Jesus), and Muhammad, peace be upon them all. Not only did they do this, but within the episode the makers of South Park made it very clear that they knew how the Muslims would feel and potentially respond to their show. In an effort to cover their actual intention to incite, the creators of South Park carefully contrived a plotline that they believed could only stump those Muslim extremists that may arise to defend the honor of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). They wished to degrade and mock a man who is held in highest regard by Muslims and many Non-Muslims alike, and indeed many have categorized Muhammad (peace be upon him) as the most influential human being that ever walked on Earth.

It is curious that this paragraph claims offense against Moses and Jesus as well as Muhammad, but sees that offense as being directed exclusively at Muslims. Indeed, the point of the episode was not to “mock” Muhammad, but to point out that we freely allow any religion but Islam, and any religious figure but Muhammad, to be publicly mocked. In this two-part episode of South Park, Siddhartha Buddha does lines of cocaine in front of children; Jesus Christ watches Internet pornography; Moses acts as a befuddled supercomputer; Joseph Smith breathes ice; Krishna transforms into Niel Diamond; and Lao Tzu reads minds and speaks in an outrageously stereotyped Chinese accent. And how is Muhammad “mocked?”

By placing the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in a bear suit, the creators of South Park sought to insult the sacred, and show their blatant and general disregard for religion. By insulting our beloved Prophet (peace be upon him) without the outright depicting of his image, the creators of South Park thought that they had found some loophole in the Muslim faith for them to mock.

The “loophole” in question is this one: After much deliberation, the people of South Park decide that the Prophet Muhammad can walk about in the open, so long as he is covered from head to toe. The only suitable and available costume, it seems, is a bear costume. This is (for some reason) the most offensive loophole, but it is not the only one that the show’s creators employ: Earlier in the episode, Randy Marsh shows his own rendering of Muhammad, which takes the form of an unrecognizable stick figure; just before the bear costume sequence, the Prophet is concealed inside a U-Haul, unseen and barely heard. Each time one of these workarounds is tried, the townspeople wince, expecting a violent attack at any moment and asking, “Was that… OK?”

Muhammad, then, is the only religious figure who is quite conspicuously not mocked in this episode. That’s the point. This is a satire of militant extremism, and of the cowardice of the Western media, not a gesture of American imperialism or some sort of attack against Islam.

The people of South Park spend the whole of this episode in a desperate attempt to appease whichever group is currently threatening them with physical violence. The satire, then, is not directed at any particular religious group, or even at religion generally, but at the self-congratulatory faux-morality of folding to terrorist threats. For indeed, anyone who threatens violence if such-and-such a thing is said, who inflicts his will and ideology on others by force and intimidation (i.e., terror), is by definition a terrorist.

To put it simply: Revolution Muslim, these recent South Park episodes are not an insult to you specifically, and in fact are not directed toward you at all–unless you are threatening violence against Matt Stone and Trey Parker, in which case the episodes are speaking directly to you, and in which case you should be utterly ashamed of yourselves.

I’ve Learned Something Today (1 of 3)

You’re sitting in a bar. You’re drinking. Everyone is drinking. Some guy runs into the barroom and says, loudly, “If I hear anyone sneeze, then I’m going to kill everyone in this room.” He has an automatic rifle. There is a moment of silence, and then someone–someone with a cold, say–sneezes. The man with the gun kills everyone in the room, including you, and including himself.

Would anyone like to argue that the person who sneezed is a murderer? It would be completely absurd to suggest that the person who sneezed–and not the person who did the killing–is responsible for the deaths in question, right? The sneeze didn’t cause the violence.

OK, new scenario. A blogger named Bilal el-Houri, who was raised in a Muslim household but now considers himself an agnostic, is watching last week’s episode of South Park, which is organized around the impossibility of showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad on television. According to CNN,

He said, “My first thoughts on the episode were “haha!”, but then I realized how deep and complicated this issue is.”

El-Houri said he was quickly reminded of tragedies that ensued from other infamous depictions of Prophet Mohammed. In particular he recalls the Muslim outrage in 2005 following publications of Cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper. He said he witnessed in Beirut, Lebanon, crowds take to the streets and burn the building housing the Danish embassy.”

“I remember seeing people crashing and burning police cars and ambulances that had nothing to do with Denmark or their cause.” He also recalled how “al Qaeda issued a call to murder Dutch politician Geert Wilders” for his film “Fitna” which was critical of Islam.

Now, people are arguing that Danish cartoonists (for example) are somehow responsible for the violent responses to their work. I think that such equivocations are downright insane, and El-Houri seems to agree:

El-Houri observed that the “South Park” episode highlighted the fear from “barbaric Muslim retaliation” when a Muslim symbol is featured in the media. He said Muslims should focus on convincing others not to show iconic figure out of “respect to Islam” instead.

El-Houri’s advice to Muslims is to “appreciate free speech” and use its tools to debunk the misconceptions that exist around the world about Islam and showcase the peaceful side of their religion instead of reacting to what others publish or broadcast. “The media makes fun of Jesus, The Pope, politicians and so on, all the time, but you don’t see Catholics burning tires outside Comedy Central’s studios.

In other words: No insult, real or imagined, gives any group or individual free reign to commit extralegal violence. There is no moral difference between a violent outburst against blasphemy and a violent outburst against something as arbitrarily chosen as a sneeze. The person who commits the violence is responsible for the violence.

Or to put it another way: Theo van Gogh is dead because a murder murdered him, not because he made a film.