The balance of power

BEIJING – Every time I go to the convenience store on campus, I pass a treasure trove of bootleg DVDs. They sit in stacks on a cart, in irregular packaging with poorly translated titles, but the price you can’t beat – about $1.10 per disc.

For the longest time, I made a habit of refusing to buy these movies, simply because I knew the DVDs were illegitimate copies that, although functional, were technically illegal. But it didn’t help that virtually every other international student I saw passing the cart would, upon realization, turn around and gaze, lost in opportunity, like marooned sailors looking at a coconut tree.

I boycotted it at first, but when I saw people I knew saving more money than me on purchases that were more or less identical, I had a revelation. Since then I haven’t lost a wink of sleep over the issue: Society works better if I buy pirated goods as well.

Boycotting seemed like a good idea until I thought of the situation in larger terms. I suppose I was hoping that if enough people joined, bootlegging would disappear. But then I thought about all the money buyers save on bootleg goods – not just DVDs – and realized that if I were to continue following this philosophy, eventually all I’d have to show for it was relative poverty compared to those who have no qualms about copyright infringement.

Money is power, a basic form of influence. And considering that a dollar you save is a dollar you can spend on something else, people who indulge in pirated goods will have many more dollars than people who refuse. With that money comes more say in how things operate.

It’s like renouncing violence – if everyone did it, the first guy willing to throw punches would rule the world. And if people who buy pirated goods had more influence in the world, what sort of reforms would they lobby for? What would be their stances on other criminal issues?

There’s another problem: Hoping everyone else will boycott pirated goods with me is an unreliable strategy. Ultimately boycotters have to trust each other to deny what’s in their immediate best interest because of faith in a moral philosophy.

Considering that we live in a country where many people blame oil companies for the high price of gas or think of the corporate tax as a just punishment, defending the profits of multinational companies isn’t likely to be this year’s trendy charity.

But what if everyone bought pirated goods? Out of self-interest, companies would lobby governments to more strictly enforce property rights. When pirated goods would eventually go away, it would happen without any one group getting richer than the other.

The beauty of the latter solution is that it relies only on people pursuing what’s in their immediate best interest. When was the last time that assumption failed you?
Sometimes the best way to show society its weak points is to give it a little jab between the armor. I’m sure Tony Soprano would agree.