Freudianisms

With the recent events of Swedish police raiding The Pirate Bay, I suddenly felt it was time to deal with this issue once and for all. I will try to dissect the phenomena of piracy, it’s legality and first and foremost – what I think about it, because I’m not so sure. Let’s see what I can conclude a few paragraphs down…

First, a short intro to the problem for those less technologically inclined: copyrighted material is distributed on the internet as digital files. The technology used most of the time is called BitTorrent. It’s a technique where you download files in many small parts from other people all over the world. For example, when you download a movie, you might connect to 100 people in the world having this movie on their computer and then download pieces of it until you can assemble the full movie.

The Pirate Bay is a Swedish web site that keeps track of these movies. It contains the information needed to find people with movies – but it does not contain any copyrighted material in itself. It’s just like an address book to people with data, most of it being copyrighted, but not all of it. So in any case, TPB (The Pirate Bay) cannot be accused of hosting copyrighted material, which is a common misconception. However, they are clearly giving some kind of aid to people wanting to download illegal material. However, to what extent can you blame TPB for providing a service that can be misused (and mainly is being misused)?

A typical comparison here: Google searches the web for content. It doesn’t make any difference between legal content or illegal. It makes it very easy to find for example movies, music or just texts and even links to these. However, nobody is blaming Google for making it possible to download illegal material. The difference with TPB is of course that Google is mainly used for legal purposes, while TPB is mainly used for illegal ones. This is not built into their systems, this is just how users prefer to use the different services. It will be interesting to see how the legal matters turn out with TPB. There have been cases about linking to illegal material in Sweden (that is, not providing the material itself, just the links to it) and in that case it was judged as legal. If that still holds, TPB is not doing anything illegal.

This is all part of a much bigger issue. Thanks to digital technology, anything that can be digitized (music, text, images, etc) can be copied with almost no cost at all (while traditionally, copying books would cost money for paper and printing). However, it’s not free – copying and distributing data requires certain capacity of networks and computers which people gladly pay for, such as broad band and large storage capacity.

So my point of view about this? My basic political and philosophical guide line is to be cynical. And this tells me that no matter what, humans in general mostly cares about money. That’s why economies keeps going around. Downloading material is not an act of morality or immorality. It’s an economical act. People recognize that you with a few clicks (and the previously mentioned computer capacities) can get stuff for “free”, instead of walking away to a store and pay lots of money for it. I say “free”, because a typical user would pay like 20 Euros or more per month for broadband and storage. It’s not free, just cheaper.

So what’s the difference to stealing the CD:s from the store? That’s cheap too, right? Well, people can value risks too. And generally, stealing physical objects from stores are considered risky. The cost is too high, so it’s not a viable option. However, the risks of downloading are very small, and therefore people can accept this. To put it differently – people steal when it’s affordable. You might bring morals into this now, saying that people prefer not stealing because it’s immoral. Although this might be true, I am sure that humans in general are more concerned about the risks of stealing rather than being immoral. The immorality is just a way to perveive the risks – the risk of being seen as a criminal and treated as a criminal by society.

Let me present a short scenario. If all you knew stole CD:s from the store, and there had never been a case of anyone getting caught, wouldn’t you steal one too? I’m sure you would. I definately would. It’s like driving too fast – most people do it because they think the risk is managable – they perceive the win (getting there faster) as larger than the loss (the risk of crashing or getting caught by police). I’m not saying people measure risks correctly, but what’s interesting is what people think, not the facts.

The Industry, that is, the recording labels and the copyright holders might be complaining about this. They have two basic economical approaches to this – make piracy more expensive by adding risks to it, or make their product (legal material) a more viable alternative. This is just basic competition. Make your own product look better, or the competitors product look worse. Or both. And that’s exactly what happens today, but the Industry has so far not fully recognized the potential of making their product look better. They keep harassing file sharing people to raise the risk – to make people afraid of getting caught. Unless they manage to drastically change the law, this will not be enough. Too many people are downloading to actually prosecute them all, however, if they make it look dangerous to download, they will make their legal product look better in the competition.

What they have to do to survive is, however, to make their product better. They have to do what Apple already did – make it as easy as file sharing to get music, and make it cheaper. And people put value in downloading legal music, both because of lesser risks and better morality (it’s after all, the same thing). So people can accept paying a little more for legal alternatives. But the gap is still big – paying 99 cents per song or 0 cents per song?

So, how about my opinion? I download copyrighted material all the time. I have not bought one legal song or CD the last 6 years, if not more. Still I have thousands of songs on my computer. It has been about economics for me all the time. When I first came to HK, suddenly all my file sharing activites stopped, because the network here uses technology to stop it. I had to look for alternatives. I started buying movies – both pirated ones for 1 Euro a piece or the real deal for a few Euros more in the DVD stores. Of course I prefer legal stuff, but only to a certain extent. I wont pay more than 10 Euros for a movie, but I can pay a few Euros for a DVD, which offers me less risk, better quality and a nice cover compared to downloading.

I predict, which is not a very difficult predicion, that piracy is here to stay, because it’s simple economy. The technology makes it so cheap that traditional methods of distribution (CDs, DVDs, etc) won’t hold for much longer. It’s like comparing traveling by car to riding a horse – and I’m sure the horse salesmen didn’t like the cars when they arrived. The record labels just have to accept the fact and move on to new technology, as well as accepting the fact that piracy can’t be fought with force alone – the Industry need to make their own product worth the money. I for one will keep “stealing” as long as it’s economical, and to be honest, I’m not the least sad for the copyright holders that I’m “stealing” from – because they too have to adapt to new technology. Using new technology, they can bypass the whole record label industry and make good money. If not, they can at least put some pressure on their labels to stop losing their money, because you can’t blame the consumers for a bad business policy…

Now I’m almost back from the dead. After three weeks of constant work, basically 12 hours a day and now with only one deadline left things are clearing up. So is the Hong Kong weather – yesterday a typhoon passed (also noted here by my friend Rich), but today the sky is as clear and blue as never before – a great photo opportunity. And I realized, I haven’t written much about Hong Kong lately. So I might just do a little dissecting of the weather, now when I consider myself being almost free of more important duties.

Before coming to Hong Kong, I did a thorough checkup of the expected weather. The climate tables told med that it would be hot and very humid almost all the time. For some reason, I got the idea that it would rain every second day or so – small but heavy showers. Unfortunately, I mixed up HK weather with tropical weather, like that of Singapore.

Now I am wiser, and have adapted to Hong Kong weather pretty well. I have not yet been here a full four seasons, but from August to May I span most of it. When arriving at Hong Kong in the end of August last year, everything was nice and cool. Thanks to heavy air conditioning at the airport. When me and Claes first stepped out in the real thing, we were struck by a wave of heat and humidity. We were pretty amazed, it felt literally like going into a sauna or a tropical room in a zoo. Walking 10 meters is enough to get sweaty. But the weeks following our arrival, with the same weather, I quickly got used to it. Around 30 degree Celcius and very humid is quite acceptable if not wearing too much clothes.

After August and September came the best time of Hong Kong – the autumn. From September to December you have around 25 degree Celcius, clear blue sky, some soothing winds and generally just good weather. It’s like a perfect Swedish summer (not that we have too many of those) for a full four months. I counted around five days with rain in all that time. So much for “rain every second day”. But then came the shock, in the end of december. Cold. Freezingly cold. After having adapted to an eternal life in t-shirt, the temperature dropped to less than 15 degrees, even 10. This is the Siberian air coming down. Windy, sometimes rainy.

Let me just break something to you. Hong Kong winters are sometimes colder than Swedish. I am not talking about outdoor temperature (while I was suffering in 13 degrees Celcius, my fellow Swedes back home had a nice few weeks with up to -20 degree Celcius. Yes, that’s a minus.). I’m talking about indoor temperature – Hong Kong homes has single layered windows, no isolation, no heaters. That means, outdoor temperature and indoor temperature tends to be the same… I found myself sleeping in full clothes the worst nights. We all went and bought heaters – something I never expected. However, the worst part of the winter was going to Shanghai in the end of February. It was a freezing 5 to 10 degrees outside, and I really suffered. And then I even used the winter jacket I brought from Sweden. At that moment, I realized adapting to HK weather means that Swedish weather suddenly seems like torture. Will I ever survive a Swedish winter?

I was told before going here that HK spring wasn’t a very nice time (in Sweden, it is always spoken of fondly, except in April). And yes, spring here isn’t a great time. There is a lot of rain – not showers, but constant, heavy rain. It gets very, very humid. And still, windy and not very warm – t-shirt was not an option. Let me once more make a sidetrack: humidity. Hong Kong is very humid. What is very humid, you might ask? Very humid is when the paper in your books start crumbling, even though the window is closed. Humid is when all windows get foggy and covered with water droplets (air conditioner inside, steaming humidity outside). Humidity is when you walk outdoor with glasses on, they actually fog up and you can’t see! I am completely serious with these observation – the outdoor life of Hong Kong is like being in a sauna at some times.

And finally, the typhoons. They occur from May to September – so far I have missed the typhoon prime time, but I managed to experience one level 3 warning yesterday, and one in September (if I remember correctly). The typhoons are just powerful tropical storms (they are not tornadoes). They bring very heavy winds (last one had 180 km/h winds) and lots of rain. When a few hundred kilometers away, we get a T1 signal, then T3. Higher signals are when the typhoon is actually hitting Hong Kong, something I haven’t experienced yet. When this happens, people get killed, landslides occur, trees break and containers fly around. If really lucky, one might see the eye of the typhoon, the centre, where the sky supposedly is clear. This would be a great photo opportunity, and even though I don’t support people getting killed by nature, I would really want to see a typhoon right on. Hong Kong is in the end, quite prepared for heavy typhoons.

And now? It’s almost summer. Going around 30 degrees, getting more humid. The same weather will stay until September. Most of that time, I will be in Sweden though. I sure hope Sweden can bring me a decent summer, or is that too much to ask? 😉

As major news sources around the world have been mentioning, a big typhoon is coming towards Hong Kong. Unfortunately for me the typhoon will never hit Hong Kong – it will just pass by and cause seriously bad weather, but nothing really exciting. Yes, I’d prefer the tyhpoon hit straight on so I could be the witness of such powerful forces of nature, and grab some photos. Check the typhoon path here.

The title is cantonese and translates to: “Very busy!”. So this post act as my farewell letter before descending into the deep, murky underground filled with distributed systems, Java, sound envelopes and similarity metrics. I have a project due April 30, a mid-term and a project presentation in May 4, a paper presentation in May 9, a big project presentation May 10, two project deadlines May 17 and possibly a term paper due sometime after that. In addition, I have to write a topic proposal for my master thesis and apply for housing and Hong Kong visa as soon as possible.

So farewell to you all. I will hopefully re-emerge towards end of May, maybe only tired and caffeinated, in worst case with severe post-traumatic stress syndromes and heightened risk of heart failure. And yes, the situation is due to some seriously bad planning for my part (as usual), but no point in crying about that now. Have a nice day!