I read with interest an article on NEWS.com.au, “Vic Police fire shot in DVD ‘arms race’” from November 26, 2004 “At the factory of Recall Secure Destruction Services today more than 90,000 DVDs, DVDRs and CD-Rs worth more than $1.3 million were piled onto a conveyor belt and then crushed in a huge grinder.”

According to Adrianne Pecotic of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) “the trade in illegal DVDs cost the Australian industry more than $150 million a year and the size of the problem (is) increasing.”

At the same time: “DVD makers were constantly working to find new technologies to prevent the copying of their films but, because of the large amount of money to be made, criminals were working just as hard to find ways around them.”

When I lived in Perú I saw so many people who made their living selling pirated DVDs and CDs. In fact, it is a major part of the economy there. Of a population of 26 million people around 12 million compose the Economically Active Population (EAP). 60% of those people are in retail - that means 7.2 million people, most of them in Lima (pop. 10 million), engaged in anything and everything from hocking vegetables on the footpath of a side street, to standing at traffic lights as a human display stand with everything from batteries to inflatable globes hanging off them. 85% of the economy is black, outside the taxation system. Original CDs are hard to come by and cost up to thirty times the cost of an audio-equivalent copy. Stalls selling every title imaginable abound. CDs and DVDs are commodity items, costing US$1 each.

The same thing is going on here in Australia, albeit in a less brazen way. “The Australian industry” is losing millions of dollars, and “criminals” are making a large amount of money. Net effect: zero. Nothing is created or destroyed, although the music industry loves to talk about “losses”. The distribution amongst different groups of people of pieces of plastic is changed. In the case of Peru, a lot of people get to eat, rotating the same worn old coins as they sell a CD, buy something to eat, and watch the coin come back around again.

One group is claiming that only they should be allowed to copy and sell the disks, because they invested money in making them, or because they have alliances with others who did. Those ones are called “industry”. THey should be allowed to extort “profits” from “consumers” in order to pay out dividends to “shareholders” and reinvest in further production. Another group of people realize that they can copy and sell these disks, and do so. Those ones are called “criminals”.

Actually, in a sense they are both criminals. The people who have produced the disks and the material on them have used raw materials and energy that have been illegally expropiated. In America at the moment they are celebrating Thanksgiving. This is where the American people thank God for having given them America, and not having given it to any other Godless people, like those Indians who were living there previously.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, other cultures have a different conception of property from the current dominant Western mindset. They see themselves as belonging to the land, not as the owners of the land. They see themselves as custodians of the Earth and its inhabitants, as described in the Bhagavad-gita, the Bible and other scriptures.

The modern idea of man as the exploiter of the Earth arises from a Darwinian concept of evolution and survival of the fittest. Economic, legal, and social arrangements are constructed with this underlying ethos. “Dominion over the Earth” has gone from meaning responsibility for looking after it to an open license for rape and pillage. A King has dominion over the subjects in his kingdom. That means he is responsible for their welfare, not that he is allowed to exploit and eat them. “Markets” do not exist to be exploited. People are there to be served. This world is here to be served.

I’m not in favor of DVD pirating, nor am I in favour of insipid, mindless cultural degradation under the guise of mass entertainment. I’m against a system that supports one group of criminals against another. As Richard M Stallman says: “There’s only one thing worse than an unauthorized copy of proprietary software - an authorized copy, because with the authorized copy the developer has been rewarded for the evil he has inflicted on the world.”

And as the Sri Isopanishad famously says: “Everything animate or inanimate that is within the universe is controlled and owned by the Lord. One should therefore accept only those things necessary for himself, which are set aside as his quota, and one should not accept other things, knowing well to whom they belong.”

We should ask ourselves: “Where did this world come from, and to whom does it belong? To whom do we owe our bodies? To whom is everything beholden? Do we have any responsibilities in this world, or is it really anything goes?”

Because if it’s just anything goes, then what makes those who “illegally” copy the DVDs anything more or less than simply fitter to survive, assuming they can get away with it? Where’s the moral high ground for the corporations, other than: “We have more money and can buy laws.”?