I have this friend with a libertarian bent who hasn’t paid for a movie or a TV channel in years. He basically spends his life downloading movies from The Pirate Bay and premium sports from either Youtube or Rojadirecta.
Now, I find this legally and morally repugnant and I’ve told him many times. He won’t listen. Now I’m worried he may come across this blog post and find ethical backing for his dark ways.
If everyone did as my friend does, the system would be destroyed and no more movies would be made, Scott Alexander argued in this fascinating 2018 essay:
The reason I don’t pirate Black Panther is because, if everyone pirated movies, it would destroy the movie industry, and we would never get Lego Black Panther IV: Lego Black Panther Vs. The Frowny Emoji, and that would make people sad.
But if everyone pirated scientific papers, it would destroy Elsevier et al, and that would be frickin’ fantastic.
Would I be sad if Hollywood, the world’s biggest propaganda machine, ever stopped making movies (particularly shit movies exported overseas) and I was forced to live the rest of my life relying on excellent, subsidized European, Latin American and Asian movies, now free to flourish without the heavy-handed, gangster-style pressures other movie industries and governments receive from Hollywood? Would you?
The biggest question is: can small-time malfeasance helps make the system more honest? We shall see. In the meantime, this friend whose name I will not cite is saving a lot of money!
Universalized it would destroy the system – but the system is bad and needs to be destroyed. And although this would break the law, a very slight amount of law-breaking might be a beneficial solution to inadequate equilibria that could be endorsed even when universalized.
So, when they price movies correctly, I shall stop pirating, my friend says.
Neotenianos 