eBook Excerpt: Takers Economy – An Inquiry into Illegal File Sharing
Christopher Stewart, an indie musician from Quebec City, has self-published this look at illegal file-sharing. Here are a couple of quotes:
The mysterious powers of attention are such that what one focuses their attention on, they bring more of in their reality. When one experiences works of art, it is precisely because they want to bring more of the intelligence the creations convey into their world. In essence, this is how personal development is realized. With this generally come an heightening of the senses and a feeling of well-being that constitute incentives to repeat the operation, in this manner addressing the necessity of spiritual growth. So, understandably, the urge to obtain more material of this nature is strong. Yet, if this is accomplished through disrespect of the underlying unity of all things, then the cost is displaced, and instead of shelling out the price of the experience, one will have to expend the efforts required to once again attract the light that has become obscured, and is needed for further evolution.
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Through virtual environments, all sorts of restrictions become readily circumventable, and the temptation to access everything immediately is all the more harder to resist. In those contexts, it seems natural to rationalize the entire ecosystem into a paradigm where creators are providers of media files that have little incremental production cost, and thus where, as long as bandwidth is paid for, infringements are victimless crimes. In commodifying what are essentially perceptual, aesthetical, and spiritual experiences, their meaning and purpose are potentially obscured.
Interested? See more here.
