I think ultimately that deep down, we all naturally share everything with everyone. I mean, really deep down. Sharing is our natural state. Sharing is love. Sharing *joins us together*. When we share, everything belongs to everyone and nobody is trying to corner-off a piece of the whole to claim for their exclusive access. Sharing produces peace.
As soon as someone claims to `own` part of everything, we all start competing and fighting with each other about who has possession of what. Like little kids we say `It’s mine, you can’t have it`. And yet, originally, the birthright of everyone is that everything belongs to everyone. So by saying someone can’t have a part of it is like saying they’re not allowed to have their natural inheritance. It’s like taking it away from them, stealing from them what is naturally theirs – everyone’s.
After this act of stealing, hoarding, isolating, separating, owning, possessing, greed and attachment, we then like to say `I am entitled to this`, for a whole bunch of *made up* reasons. No matter how well explained or justified those reasons are, they all attempt to justify the rightfulness or deservedness of the original act of stealing away a part of everyone’s shared ownership.
So we put together a game or product and we think we are its `source`, since the ideas that we experienced that resulted in its construction, and the work we put in to make it manifest, somehow is used as justification for why we own it. Then we even set up legal systems to tell us why this ownership is true and just, and why anyone going against this system is in error.
Essentially the system of exclusive ownership is a way to support business enterprise and people benefiting exclusively from each other. The only way to benefit exclusively is to take something away from someone else, by claiming you are its sole author, or that the work you put into it was not on behalf of others. The act of excluding others from some aspect of what you created ensures your identification with it as `your own`, deserving all rights to its use. This selfish act is a self-service to make ourselves famous, rich and successful, or rather, more famous rich and successful than others.
So we claim these rights as our own as if they are sacred, and we write important documents that enshrine these beliefs, and we use them to find each other wrong. And along comes this `pirate` who, in some way, believes that there is an element of sharing which has been denied them by the software author. Somehow the author’s act of exclusion has shut them out, cut them off from access, denied them and rejected them. They might well use this as justification for why they would seek to `liberate` the software from the clutches of the evil author, and make its freedom more widely acknowledged.
Indeed the pirates themselves may be unjustified in using the selfishness of the authors as reason to free the product from its imprisonment. After all, just because the authors have stolen from all of us by claiming ownership it doesn’t mean we are justified in stealing in return. But somewhere deep down, perhaps we can admit that none of this could have happened if, in the first place, the software author didn’t steal from everyone else. They stole when they claimed their creation as their exclusive possession. They stole when they isolated themselves and their product from access by others. They stole when they tried to use legal leverage to justify why others are not allowed freedom of access. And then they complained as to unfairness of being similarly `stolen from` by those who want to exercise their birthright to share freely.
We can’t just keep saying that pirates are bad and the authors of software are holier than thou. We like to make pirates out to be doing something wrong and bad, within an established manmade artificial framework of `social justice`, just so that we can justify our position as wanting to claim ownership and so that we can deflect everyone from looking at that. Because if we took a long hard look at the act of theft that the software author is perpetrating, stealing freedom from their brothers, it would make us have to rethink the secret sin that we’ve all been trying to cover up.
Sometimes this goes to such extremes that it turns into what we call capitalism. Every man for himself. Everyone separate. No sharing allowed. We have companies claiming exclusive ownership over ideas which are freely arrived upon by multiple individuals across the planet. We have companies filing patents for ridiculously small `inventions`, not because it’s right but because it allows them to gain an advantage over others. And this advantage is heralded and worshipped in modern society as normal and acceptable.
Dare you go up against one of these giants with their mighty hammers of justified ownership, and you’ll find yourself in prison. How did that happen? How is it that in any effort to establish freedom, sharing, and co-ownership, there is a system in place to not only keep those items enprisoned, but to then keep and extend that doctrine of imprisonment such that it now places us in a prison as well? And all in the name of self-promoting selfish competitive stealing, a stealing of freedom and true justice. True justice is that we are all equally responsible and we are all equally entitled to access everything, with absolutely no interruption to that policy for any fabricated reason, or to benefit any individual or group.
But we live in a world of pirates. Who is the real pirate here? Would individuals need to steal something back if what was originally their own was not taken from them? Would there be such a thing as a pirate, trying to reclaim their share, if it wasn’t for the real software pirates – the authors of software, stealing freedoms from us all in the first place? We can’t have a policy or belief system based on claiming exclusive ownership and at the same time expect our natural tendency to share to simply disappear. You cannot remove that tendency, you can only cover it up with lies about how entitled we are to individually gain at the expense of others. And when it comes down to it, that’s all that `business` is – a profiting from others.
We will continue to have these debates and these problems, and we’ll continue to have `pirates` out there trying to gain access to what they believe is their `right`, and we’ll continue to have their opponents – the original thieves of shared property – complaining about how such individuals are the scum of the earth and must be punished. By why don’t authors get punished for their efforts to make themselves special, separate, different, entitled and justified?
We will continue to have all of this until we all, equally, agree that to share everything with everyone, as that is the only just answer. That means that when we create our games, we don’t do so in an attitude of becoming better than others, or more renowned, or more worshipped, or more idolized, or more wealthy, or more important, or more entitled to legal protections, or more in possession of what has been created through us.
To undo this belief system requires a willingness to look at oneself honestly and openly to discover that the only thing that is truly important is our shared existence as a single unified community. To create for and with that community then becomes a service and an act of sharing, rather than an attempt to fragment. Because ultimately all of these pirating behaviors, on both sides of the coin, simply seek to fragment us all and keep us apart, when sharing is really what we all need.
So before we keep hitting pirates over the head, let’s take a closer look at exactly what is going on here in this crazy world, and lets re-examine our values and beliefs, because that is the origin of all our conflicts.
Pardon me!