Time for a Revolution

With the going on of the current Pirate Bay trial an important question comes to mind, how do people classify what is legal? Well there are laws for that right? So thats brings us to the more important question... Who makes the laws, and who are these laws made for?

So now the music industry claims that all this sharing of files is a breach of copyright and therefore illegal. But lets just for a second have a look into the past. How did the musicians work, earn and survive before technology made distribution of music as easy as it is today? Well from what I can tell they used to play their music and earn from only those performances.

With the introduction of technology that made distribution much simpler (such as tapes, CDs and now the internet digital downloads), the big content industries apparently 'crafted' laws of copyright so that they could make profit from them, and that is how society has apparently come to accept it.

But do the laws really seem fair? Sure the companies put time and effort into recording the music. But this is more of a one time cost. The cost of distribution, especially in this digital age is almost non existent. For the big content making digital copies available to sell to the public, would bear hardly any cost. Yet the amount of money they charge for something millions of times that had only a one-off cost to them to make seems absurd! Once they have covered this one-off cost of recording, they are literally making "Pure Profit".

That surely seems a little unfair when most people with standard jobs only earn for their work at that time. Why should the music industry be any different. Why should they carry on earning for a one-off effort. The distribution is practically free for them, and hence thanks to the technology that exists today they can carry on making money doing nothing. It just feels like a get rich quick scheme, put in a little effort and reap rewards for the rest of your life. Well that doesn't work for the rest of the public. Most people have have to constantly work and earn money based on that.

Now that the tides are changing, and people are using the available technology to distribute the music themselves which is cutting into the music industries' "Pure Profits" they aren't too pleased. And well they already have crafted copyright laws to make such activity illegal. But these laws seem only to benefit them and have no benefit to the general public.

Isn't it time these Draconian laws were changed. People should be able to freely distribute music. Digital distribution should just be a form of sharing and marketing, since there are hardly that many costs associated with it, it seems unfair that people unjustly profit from it. Music artists can always still earn as they used to before the technology for distribution came into existent. They could perform live acts. And with digital copies of music freely available, the public would be much more inclined to go see the real live performances.

This may negatively affect some of the artists who actually can't play music or sing, and are just over hyped by the music industries. Which from a personal point of view would actually be as the public would get much better quality of music over quantity, and artists who can't really play music or sing would find a career in something else in which they may actually be good at.

It has been long enough that we have been oppressed by the laws crafted by the big content just for their personal profit. It is time for a revolution.

Contentment

Right so recently I had this sort of debate with a friend whether one can really be truly content. Sure ideological contentment would lead to happiness, as you would be happy with everything.

But in reality we see that nobody is ever truly content. People always want striving for something more or trying to achieve something. This is just the way humans function. All these years of progress would be non-existent had everyone just been content with what they had. People would almost lose their desire to live if there was nothing more to actually attain. Existance would seem pretty pointless. What would be our purpose if there was nothing more left for us to do and we were content with everything.

Yet this very desire to always want more and improve things does tend to cause unhappiness. We seem to at times create need for things which are really unnecessary, for example the megapixel race (people tend to want cameras with the largest amount of megapixels, even though for most people having anything more than 5 megapixels is utterly pointless as they would never notice the difference). People never seem to have enough, and always want more. They always have high expectations from things, and when this happens it just leads to disappointment.

So does this mean that we have just doomed ourselves to unhappiness. Well this is not entirely true. We just have to learn to be content with the fact that we will never be truly content (bit of a paradox there...LOL). Oh well...I guess in reality we just need to be find the right balance between wanting more and being content. (Its all about the right balance...as my first post states http://kewsvnet.blogspot.com/2009/01/balance.html)

Smile

Well I was walking back after working on my project the other day, remembering something funny that had happened that day (My supervisor whom I had considered to be a serious person, talking about - saving the world from the bad guys in Gears of War...as though it was the most important thing he had to do all weekend..LOL). Well anyways having this thought in my mind I was already having a hard time not laughing out...and it seemed impossible to refrain from having a massive smile on my face. As I was walking, I saw a lady walking towards me. I was starting to feel a little embarassed not being able to contain my smile, I was certain the lady would think I had gone nuts. But as she walked I got a rather unexpected reaction. She smiled back at me.

A complete stranger in my life whom I had never spoken to, and there she was all of a sudden smiling because of me. That just made me realise what a wonderful thing a smile is, and just how contagious it could get. I would like to believe that the lady carried on walking with a smile on her face, and hopefully made some other stranger smile. I was actually glad that I wasn't able to contain my smile.

And to be perfectly honest, the worlds troubles did seem a lot lighter while I was smiling. Thinking about the kind of reciprocating effect that one smile can have, it is that one smile that could make the whole world a much happier place. If only people would try and stop worrying for a second and see the little positive things in life everyone would be walking around smiling. When smiling people tend to be in a good mood. They would therefore be more inclined to help other people, and much less inclined to fight and argue. Half of the world's problems would automatically be solved.

So go on....SMILE...and make someone else smile as well!!

Balance

This happens to be one of my favorite pictures. Not only because it has got a dragon there (yes this does look cool), but it also has the Yin Yang at the heart of the picture. Now I probably don't know the exact meaning of the Yin Yang (could always looks wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang), but to me this sign represnts the balance of everything in life. I quite agree with it, for example with good comes bad. You cannot appreciate one without the other. If there was only happiness in this world without any sadness we would never really appreciate the happiness.

I feel it even applies in physics (yes I am a geek, and I do like physics but more on that some other time), the Third Law of Physics pretty much says "To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." There are also tons of things in phycis that seem to balance out, such natural frequencies, pendulums and much more which behave in a sinusoidal manner. When some thing is sinusoidal it oscillates about a certain point, but it always balances out to the mean point.

So balance exists in so many natural things, but could it be that we are all striving to achieve balance in our lives? We tend to be civilised and try to live by a certain set of rules, yet there is always a part in us (should I say animal instinct) that wants to be free and spontaneous. I believe we havent quite found the perfect balance as yet, and in finding this balance lies the key to happiness!