Anarchists?
I seems as if one of the major issues Siva Vaidhyanathan wants to bring up is the pervasive ethnocentrism of the United States in the exchange of information. SV implies that many of the restrictions that Americans are trying to impose upon the world are very imperialistic in nature.
It is fairly ridiculous when Western companies demand first world prices for their merchandise to the rest of the world. This kind of rhetoric is dangerous and damaging in that it demonizes the poor as 'pirates' while simultaneously keeping prices too high for them to integrate into the information community.
Comments
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: April 16, 2007 08:34 AM
Well, India has enough computer engineers that it can start selling cut-rate software to the rest of the world, if it wants to. If that's not happening, it's because there's no such thing as a "first world price"; there is only the price set by the market. And that's not "ridiculous"; if it were, it wouldn't be the price, because there would be no sales. If you want to be a philanthropist and buy a copy of Vista for some guy in Zimbabwe, be my guest, but let's not destroy the world's economy so that the masses in Mumbai can have an American CD collection.
As for IP piracy, the quest to end it is pretty futile, and in many cases is hurting the copyright holders. IP is a big deep subject, and deserves to be analyzed separately from Marxist rhetoric about what prices "should" be.