Go ogle isn’t the best search engine anymore. I’ve noticed political censorship in Google search results lately. Things that gave zero hits at go ogle I was able to find with duckduckgo.com.

I hear drug dealers mix hard drugs with soft drugs without the user’s knowledge in an attempt to get them addicted, and that harm comes from lack of regulation due to prohibition.

That’s what you get with copyright, too. With the malware and viruses going on.

Dealers also don’t have to check for I.D., just like pirate websites with 18-rated movies.

Dealers also get filthy rich due to not paying tax, just like Google.

Dealers are prone to gang fights, and Kim Dotcom was found armed with a shotgun.

And as with Al Capone, the state sure seem to have a hard time netting Kim Dotcom, considering how both pay money for everyone to turn a blind eye. Perhaps they ought to get him on tax mistakes.

You see how prohibiting a majority black market makes things worse?

Imagine if, hypothetically, the United States were to abolish its currency and replace everybody’s money with money made out of JPEG image files, in some deluded attempt to “ease the flow of transactions”. Run with this thought experiment – it will be worth it.

The state would effectively have the “copyright” to this JPEG currency in order to control interest rates and inflation and so on – as well as making the thing fucking work. According to the theory of artificial scarcity put forward by most economists, this should work. After all, when you add artificial scarcity to anything its value should go up… right?

Well imagine this actually being put into practice (assuming it makes it past the first day without crashing the country). Imagine all the cheating that would inevitably take place. The ordinary layman would hit CTRL-C and CTRL-V on his keyboard and send many of these pirated JPEGs to anyone he can meet on Skype, Facebook, Twitter. Pirated JPEGs would flood the internet, just, well, in general. Huge corporations would be able to get away with more and manipulate the total value of the currency. Pirated JPEGs would be stored and traded overseas under the hands of crooked traders. International states would pull all the strings of the US. The working class would be investing their labour for worthless gain.

Now imagine that, in the face of total fury from the citizens, the state were to deny that the system itself is the problem – rather, lack of enforcement of the system is the problem.

They would then proceed to demand national malware packages to watch over computers to make sure unauthorised copies were not created (Digital Rights Management). They would, in the face of such nonsense failing to stop a single thing, insist that it was still necessary to protect the property rights of all the state’s citizens, regardless of the contradictory evidence. They would insist “websites have just got to be blocked…” “channels just need to be monitored…” “other countries just need to sign treaties with us THEN they’ll give a damn and stop!” “all we got to do is negotiate with China better!” They would send police officers to take down domains hosting counterfeit JPEGs regardless of how many times they will pop back up (which, give them credit, is still much better than having lawyers running around the planet).

They would cite evidence of such reproducibility being unheard of in the 1700s to support their claim that it should likewise be the case in this day and age. They would cite studies saying how “at least our GDP went up”. They would rant “how ELSE are you gonna protect the property rights of workers?” “What about defamation and libel – surely that’s relevant somehow?” “Don’t you realise that terrorists support some of these cartels?” As they also likewise show how the Taliban profit from the prohibited black market heroin crop.

This is my new example of why I am a copyright abolitionist, because I cannot imagine how it could be refuted (along with the pro-assurance-contract theory to protect artists). Though I am of course, open to rebuttals that I cannot anticipate. Everything the pro-copyright side complain about with regards to piracy can pretty much resemble the above scenario: all the corruption, all the futility, all the lost labour, all the international black markets. If there is piracy corruption with Google, they’ve only got themselves to blame, because it is exactly what you would expect if you were to take seriously a commodity with the same de facto protection as JPEG dollars. Corporations would screw it up for everybody else, and pull law enforcement into corruption. Maybe that explains why Google gets let off the hook so often…

“Artificial scarcity” requires law. When it requires law, it better work. Otherwise it is merely a “deterrent” (a conservative concept that is not something to be proud of even if you could prove it to work – a society that says “because the law says so” doesn’t make that society more moral and only buries something more sinister in the sand) and/or a ridiculous prohibition system that is laughably stupid in the eyes of any sensible criminal.

Everybody knows what the implications would have been had 2D printers been able to print genuine-looking money. All currencies across the planet would have crashed. But, thankfully, the technology did not get that far and currency organisations stayed ahead of the game.

One of the uncomfortable truths about laws is that they are only as good as you can realistically enforce them.