The Social Aims

The advent of technology enabling the illegal appropriation of content on-line, obviously undermines existing copyright laws. However, it has been argued that the decentralization of content (music, literature, ‘intellectual property’ etc), though antithetical to the economic aims of society, is conducive to it’s social aims (Yglesias, 2010). Yglesias (2010) in response to those critical of an increasingly global community of ‘pirates’, refutes complaints that such conduct, allegedly undermining not just distributors but also weakening  the incentives for authors themselves  to create new content, cites Harvard scholar Kolen Strumpf in his observation of a sixty-percent increase in the productivity of those ‘creative industries’ said to be suffering, surprising in view of a corresponding (and substantial) loss of profit.  The above alludes to  a totality of ‘creative’ output, the ‘culture industry’ so to speak, and states the unlawful appropriation of content has stimulated an expansion of output,  which would suggest it is distributors rather than artists suffering from the trend, artist’s incentives inexplicably transcending conventional consumer models and leaving the drudgery of ‘analogue-distribution’ behind. Bill Rosenblatt ( Dykstra,2003) similarly observed the divergence of a new ‘digital’ consumer model from the existing ‘analogue’ one, noting the former expressed changing consumer wants and needs (“ ...consumers get what they want even if it’s illegal”) that were improvising a model which industries should duly take note of if they expect to continue making profit, rather than stress it’s illegality.