Looking at the litigious tactics of the RIAA and MPAA, it’s becoming more and more apparent that this isn’t how a legitimate business model works. Scaring your consumers into buying your goods reeks of pre-Capitalist Monarchical tactics used to enrich themselves at the expense of their constituents, which is exactly what we see in these cases as well.

Economic theory states that the price of a good goes down in proportion to its availability: oil prices are rising as OPEC members restrict production, and the iPhone’s price dropped drastically as manufacturing capacity jumped soon after its introduction, for example. But what of information? By its nature intangible, its availability is limited only by the medium on which it is recorded. In the past, this allowed cartels such as the RIAA and MPAA to tie information to its medium, and inflate its value. But now that digital content and the internet have gone mainstream, the medium has been completely abstracted. Production costs only as much as bandwidth if you choose online distribution, and if you go the way of many Linux distros, peer-to-peer distribution costs you nothing at all. Looking at the supply and demand curves to the right should make it evident why this is: the demand curve looks relatively normal, but the supply curve is a horizontal line at p=0. The equilibrium point is then infinite production, with a price of zero (not shown, because infinity is pretty hard to graph).

Since the information itself is worth nothing from a purely economic standpoint, voluntarily paying for usage rights amounts to pure producer surplus, and mandating payment for it is simply price control and artificial scarcity. But, as copyright advocates are quick to point out, copyright acts as an incentive to create. After all, who would make a career out of musicianship if it weren’t profitable?

The advocates make a very good point here, but their prescription is misplaced. Problems of actual value cannot be solved by price controls, because in an era of mainstream digital technology and the internet, artificial scarcity cannot be maintained. People will be their own producers of the information, duplicating and distributing it on underground networks if they are pushed off the Web. The solution then is to place value not on the information itself, but the act of creating it: transferring incentive from the good to the service. In this way, people in information markets who could have previously have produced one popular item and then rested on their laurels, so to speak, continue to produce. They are commissioned and paid based on the work that they do rather than the people that use it.

As foreign as this concept may sound to ears trained to embrace intellectual property, it’s already in the embryonic stages in the Western world. In the software industry, IBM pours billions of dollars into Linux, an open source operating system: these Linux developers are being paid not on the number of licenses they sell, but solely for the work they do to bring forth a useful complement to IBM’s servers. Similarly, though Apple still charges for OS X, it is in a very good position to fund OS X development entirely by hardware sales, using OS X as another perk of the hardware. Google contributes large sums of money to the Mozilla foundation and many other open source projects, again not for direct return on investment from sales and royalties, but because it furthers their interests in non-monetary ways. In the music industry, we see that for all but the best-selling of artists, concerts and merchandise have long eclipsed recordings as the main moneymaker. The work of continually putting on concerts is the service for which they make money, rather than from selling rights to listen to their recordings, and people still go to theaters for the experience of the classic greasy popcorn bag, thunderous high-quality surround-sound, and a giant screen, things that aren’t feasible for mass consumer adoption (at least the giant screens and high-quality surround-sound).

Because this model adheres more closely to a market ideal by eschewing artificial scarcity and price controls, it eliminates the giant bubble that has formed around information industries - a still-growing bubble that will eventually burst when piracy reaches critical adoption mass. In addition, because the emphasis is on continued production rather than hitting it big and kicking back, we get a more productive economy, and a much higher sustainable GDP as information production continues to expand into the dominant economic sector.

For all the apologetics and reasonability Christians strive for, it seems that message is being heard less and less. Easily debunkable arguments are increasingly circulating among even America’s intellectual elite (I can’t speak for universities elsewhere, but I imagine the situation is similar if not worse) as irrefutable fact and signs of self-sophistication. The use of these arguments as fact (i.e., “this is so” as opposed to “but what about…”) is a sign both of intellectual laziness, and if unable to move past these arguments, deeper emotional objections not rooted in any sort of pure reason (though more sophisticated arguments do not necessarily preclude such a barrier).

I’m not the first to rebut these arguments and hopefully I will not be the last, but for the sake of establishing these arguments as clear smokescreens lacking any real substance, here are several.

1. The Bible contains lots of contradictions.
O RLY? Most people who say this can’t point to one. There are lists, however, of multitudes of apparent contradictions, most of which are easily rebuttable (see point 2), but occasionally a stumper will come along among the lists. Yet, with just as much effort as was taken to find such a list, one can find it documented and rebutted (listing each alleged contradiction would be beyond the scope of this article). If an entire faith were so easy to disprove as to point to two contradicting verses, then who would believe it? From whence would we get our theologians who apply an intellect as great as any found in other fields to the study of the Bible? A faith does not survive and multiply as greatly as the Christian faith by hanging on a thread of hope that no one will notice and point out two contradicting verses.

2. You can make the Bible say anything you want.
With enough rearranging and omission, I can make The Count of Monte Cristo say anything I want it to. Does that take away from its literary merit? The fact that one can take portions of the Bible out of context to seemingly justify anything removes nothing from the spiritual merit of the whole. Just as the end of Monte Cristo makes no sense without the preceding plot and events, so does a single piece of scripture stripped of its context have no meaning outside of the rest.

3. The English bible contains numerous mistranslations / Biblical translators had an agenda.
There are 96 different translations and derivatives of the entire Bible in modern English, falling under almost two dozen separate and independent translations, the vast majority of which were taken directly from the original manuscripts (as opposed to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament). It seems hardly likely that each of these groups throughout the centuries that English has existed in a form intelligible to us would have the same agendas, even less so that the teams of experts having devoted their lives to the study of Biblical languages working on single translations would have these same agendas. We have translations ranging from strictly literal (NASB, ESV) to complete paraphrases (NLT, The Message), and everything in between (NIV). With these completely different philosophies of translation all producing essentially the same text - translational controversies are extremely rare - there is no place for an agenda to be hidden.

4. The Canon was decided arbitrarily under Constantian influence to suppress other Christian sects.
This is perhaps the argument with the most semblance of reason to it. Espoused by popular authors like Dan Brown and Bart Ehrman, it paints the picture of early Christianity as a war among diverse sects with Orthodoxy eventually winning out. However this is a vastly distorted picture. Christianity like any other religion has always had heretics and purveyors of misdoctrine, but regarding these (and especially the Gnostic sects, as these authors are prone to do) as alternate Christianities has no basis in reality. The canon as we see it now was already established well before the Council of Nicea, being referenced by many early Church fathers. The council simply codified what was already in practice in order to curb heretical sects with new gospels (the Gnostic gospels, for example, are known to have been written centuries after Christ’s death). It was not at all a political move, rather, a self-preservation move.

There is no reason for anyone to believe these sorts of fallacies, and even less that anyone should become convinced of them and fall away from the faith. Unfortunately there remain enough people who refuse even to advance the sophistication of their arguments that these simplistic and fallacious objections become held by a vast number of people, simply because they are bite-sized, dismissive, and do not require further thought. I have no solution to propose to this problem; only that the Church and the members thereof should go to great lengths to avoid creating these deeper emotional barriers that masquerade in these cases as reasonable objections. Then again, people have been calling the Church to greater sensitivity since its inception and we are here no less.

More than logic, more than emotional appeal and more than fear of punishment, there’s nothing like ridicule to kill an idea. People fear looking stupid in many cases more than they fear consequences - after all, you could go down as a martyr. And where’s the fun in that for the status quo power? It looks like the RIAA has picked up on this concept with a new set of posters being put up in campus dorms claiming that copyright violations will make you look stupid (click on images for larger version).

And of course, if that doesn’t work, there’s always good old-fashioned scare tactics. Apparently the gallows await foolhardy filesharers.