On Piracy and Intellectual Property

When considering any matter, it is always good to keep more than just one example in mind, as it leads to quicker rejection of wrong ideas. Also, the more distant the examples are, the better this approach works. For contemplating piracy and intellectual property, I will take music and science as examples, because they share the same basic structure, yet they are treated very differently in our society.

Let me draw a simple analogy first: musicians—scientists, songs—articles, labels—publishers. Both science and music are often done out of inner, not outer motivation. Their real products are ideas—reproducible at no cost, unlike goods or services. This leads to their scalability, meaning a single scientific or musical idea can have a negligible as well as immense impact. Also, most of the ideas are of the former, only few of the latter type. As disciplines, both have a great effect on society, arguably a positive one.

As with any analogy in real life, even this one has drawbacks. While songs are listened to by ordinary people, scientific articles are read by other scientists. While musical ideas are bought directly by people, scientific ideas are first converted to technology, which is then bought in the form of physical goods. While the problem of intellectual property is exposed publicly in case of music, it is hidden in case of science, as companies have to deal with patents, not the people.

Industrial revolution liberated people from investing their time at manufacturing and farming, while digital revolution brought us the ability to copy and share almost any form of an idea at no cost. On the field of science, it is celebrated, on the field of music, it is called piracy. This discrepancy is caused by the directness of music mentioned above, because that is the sole reason why music has been commercialized, while science was not.

Piracy is the problem of music industry mainly because it is industry in the first place, not because of music. If society recognized the value of music, as it did with science, it could begin to finance it in a similar manner. As in other cases, tearing anything from the hands of business and positioning it as public good brings its own sort of problems, with the question of actual value of music for society being one of the most difficult. But once again—remember where would have science been, if it had used similar practices as are common in music industry? Would it be beneficial for the society?