Vaguely Disreputable

most of the pro­grams on my com­put­er have been obtained through vague­ly dis­rep­utable means. its not that i stole any­thing, no prod­uct or ser­vice was lit­er­al­ly tak­en from any­one. yet when i am tool­ing around the intranet here at ND and i hap­pen to find a fold­er that has no pass­word pro­tec­tion on it and sev­er­al thou­sand dol­lars worth of pro­gram installers on it, what am i to do? duh, i copy the files onto my hard dri­ve. grant­ed, the pro­grams have now been replaced on the mar­ket by new­er ver­sions but i am con­tent with mine. Dreamweaver, Fire­works, Free­hand, Sound­Forge, Pho­to­shop, Page­mak­er, and Direc­tor. its like the need a pen­ny take a pen­ny tray, except we’re doing it from a much larg­er tray and a cou­ple mil­lion times. excuse the Office Space quote please.

i’ve got a great idea: Inter­net Com­mu­nism. was­n’t that the ini­tial moral­i­ty of the inter­net any­way? if every­body has access to every­thing, then its all good. But ADAM, no one will make mon­ey that way. My answer is, why does every­thing always have to be about mak­ing mon­ey? Peo­ple made mon­ey before the inter­net. it is just the nature of cap­i­tal­ism to exploit any new mar­ket for a prof­it motive instead of mak­ing it avail­able to all. of course, with­out said exploita­tion many peo­ple that have the inter­net would­n’t.

the prob­lem aris­es from any attempt to make a phys­i­cal com­mod­i­ty an unalien­able right. It’s like this Mon­ty Python skit from Life of Bri­an. Some­one can have the right to the inter­net, but not have the means to the right. Ensur­ing that every­one has the same means to the right is one of fatal flaws in the premise of com­mu­nism.